Future of Blogs: Small Businesses.

Business market, particularly the small business market, is where most of the action and the money will be in the future, not personal blogs.  Benefits of blogging technologies, such as ease of update, content syndication, moblogging, audblogging, fotologging, and social networking, will allow small business owners to explode into the web like never before and propell blogging into a day-to-day necessity for survival. 

For proper perspective, think about how little hole-in-the-wall stores so common in Asia might use blogging technologies to improve their business.  Then scale it up and expand across the globe across language boundaries.

[Don Park's Daily Habit] 
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horsemen ride. Drifiting towards war - "I have held off public criticism to this point because I had hoped that the administration was going to act on this problem, and that public criticism might be counterproductive. But time is running out, and each month the problem gets more dangerous." - Fmr Defense Secretary William Perry [MetaFilter] 
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About.com reviews RSS News Aggregators. If you've been wondering what RSS is, or what a news aggregator is, this is a good place to start. [The Scobleizer Weblog] 
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Steve Gillmor: "Back to watching Scoble narrowly escape being fired..." [The Scobleizer Weblog] 
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Phil Wolff, in predicting the syndicated blogosphere will reach 300 million feeds over the next three years: "I assume AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Terra will turn on blogging tools in the next 18 months, and 10% of the online community (70 million people) become bloggers." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
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Stuart Henshall: "Corporate Blogging is just the edge of a revolution that will harness the collective intelligence of organizations in new ways." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
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"Not A Dollarshort: AOL Journals" [Daypop Top 40] 
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Non-profit blogs.

Nice story in Wired News by Katie Dean on the Advocacy Project's use of weblogs to support non-profit activities.  They are empowering Interns with blogs to tell stories of their field work. 

One of the challenges for a non-profit engaged in educational and technical aid is communicating the problem and how they are solving it in a way that resonates.  These very human stories of the experiences impassioned volunteers could only come out directly.

...Weblogs are an excellent tool for nonprofit organizations, according to Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, which makes Web publishing tools for groups.

"Weblogs are the cheapest way for an individual or organization to communicate," he says. "It's a more natural, human voice than what someone could generate with a press release."

Mayfield says blogs can also help nonprofits keep their donor base and supporters updated. Plus, "there's a wide body of fairly influential and growing body of (weblog) readers that pay attention on a regular basis."

[Ross Mayfield: On Blogging] 
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AOL to Introduce Moblogging, Too!.

'AOL Journals' To Bring Blogs To Millions

"Whatever you call them, the idea is a Web page that people can update frequently with commentary and links to material they find interesting online. Blog software automates posting the commentary, images and links.

AOL will give members three ways to update their blogs -- through an online template with blank boxes for text input, through AOL's instant-messaging system or by telephone. The phone option will be available only to subscribers to the extra-cost "AOL by Phone" service, who will be able to leave voice messages that will be posted as MP3 sound files.

To publish via instant messaging, AOL members will send a text message to an IM software 'bot' -- or automated script -- that will post the message to the user's blog. The IM posting will work only with AOL's internal messaging system, not its free AOL Instant Messenger program. Robinson said this would be a quicker way to publish than navigating to a Web page to type into a form: 'You might have a fleeting thought you want to capture, and you don't want to take the extra few seconds to go and open up the publishing interface.' " [The Washington Post]

More details about AOL's upcoming integration of blogging software into the company's software. I still think this is going to be big, as will the RSS trail that follows. I didn't realize that they are going to integrate pictures, but of course they are because it makes perfect sense. Mo' moblogging down the road.

That idea has me quite intrigued because I've been following Aaron Schmidt's photoblog of pictures sent from his cell phone. It's fascinating to watch his daily life through it. I like that I can see Aaron's friends (none of whom I know), his cute puppy, and snapshots of the places he goes, so I can't imagine how much more enticing it would be to find feeds of photos and blog posts in my aggregator daily. And audio files posted by phone? You mean I could hear my niece in my aggregator? I am so there!

[The Shifted Librarian] 
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Karl-Friedrich Lenz: What Does European Law Say About Blog Ownership?. [Der Schockwellenreiter] 
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Google Tricks & Tips - Stuff you Bloggers need to know. Steve Covell has a good post on how to use Google to search just blogs, or just law blogs.  Inspired by his love of Google (and his specific recommendation) I have purchased Google Hacks, which contains a wealth of information on how use Google productively. [Ernie the Attorney] 
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Glocalization and Virtual Social Networks. via Blogalization: Glocalization: That's when Asterix takes over for Ronald McDonald but the mystery meat remains the same. Implications for networked individualism and social software design. ... [Channel 'social_software'] 
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Parliament goes wireless for bloggers' summit... [Channel 'social_software'] 
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Announcing The Blog Cooperative. via Web Dawn - Rebirth of the Social Marketplace: I launched a new site today, The Blog Cooperative (www.BlogCoop.com). The idea was inspired by my previous post about liquid democracy in business and by an email conversation with Seyed Razavi, creator of BlogShares. Other inspirations and ideas are from... [Channel 'social_software'] 
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Kathleen Parker: Blogs breaking logjam of journalism [Daypop Top 40] 
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Terry Teachout on the launch of ArtsJournal's new blogs [Be sure to check them out - they just launched today]: "Here I am, finally. I've been talking about starting an arts blog for the past couple of years, but I never got up the nerve to do the dirty work... So when artsjournal.com kindly offered to do it for me, it took me about three seconds to say yes." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
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