Lee Gomes says in the Wall Street Journal that "we'll soon see the end of the social infrastructure that currently exists around trends" and the erosion of the "trend-anointing caste" as "trend-spotting [is] put in the hands of common folk" via blogs and sites like Technorati and Daypop. [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
3:41:14 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Ethnic clustering in blogging communities This report by Hat Nim Choi studied and compared the LiveJournal and Xanga web... [thomas n. burg | randgänge] 
2:53:39 PM      comment []   trackback []  



Paul Stacey
"Its been quite a while since a technology 'blew me away' but last Friday I had one of those Eureka moments while riding the bus from downtown Vancouver to White Rock where I live -- all because of RSS feeds & blogs." [Scripting News] 
2:48:02 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Weblogs: the Readers' Digest analogy
Joseph Hart: Blogs as Electronic Readers' Digests. "So what does it mean that modern blogs resemble the old Reader's Digest? I'm not sure, but readers of blogs and readers of the Digest seem to share some commonality of intent and purpose in their rapid absorption of quick, bite-sized information and entertainment."

Joseph lists similarities and differences between Readers' Digest periodicals and weblogs. One crucial difference he missed is that blogs have yet to send sweepstake junkmail packages to subscribers. (Thank goodness!).

[Seb's Open Research] 
2:43:23 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Globally positioned blogging
Roland Piquepaille summarizes a TechRepublic article on the merging of GPS systems and the web.

Suppose you're standing somewhere in the middle of a foreign city with a couple of friends. Everyone's getting hungry and you had better find a good place to eat. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to instantly look up, say, all restaurant reviews within a 1000-feet radius of where you are? And then intersect the results with your personal web of trust to increase your confidence in the info?
[Seb's Open Research] 
2:40:43 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Customer Service and K-Log
What customer activities have shifted to the Web (based on a Forrester study on the sales of complex goods):

1. Researching product information (90%)
2. Comparing product features and prices (58%)
3. Contacting customer service (56%)
4. Locating a store or distributor (42%)
5. Checking product availability (36%)

Which of these activities could be enhanced by corporate use of weblogging?

1. A weblog, built and maintained by a product manager, could provide customers with an active resource on the products they are deciding to buy. 
2. This could be accomplished by building a spreadsheet comparing (feature by feature) several different products, and publishing to a weblog as an additional page accessed by the navigation system.  Additional comparison info could be presented in a weblog format for easy consumption.
3. Contacting customer service on most sites is painful.  Additionally, the FAQs and resource databases seem put together by monkeys (albeit highly paid ones).  A simple way to generate an extremely valuable and organic customer service data is to have each rep publish a weblog.  The question, including keywords, is the title of the post.  The answer is the response. 
4. Not really applicable, but for many companies the local outlet doesn't have an effective Web presence (not even for coupons, specials, etc.).  A simple weblog with a corporate template would suffice.
5. New poducts should be hyped via a weblog.  Features, improvements, etc would all factor into the weblog's posts.  A simple countdown clock would track the days or hours to availability.

[John Robb's Weblog] 
2:34:47 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Salon Blogs birthday report
Mark Hoback and a couple of other people have asked that I take the one-year mark for Salon Blogs as a chance to offer some state-of-the-project notes, since I originally described it as an "experiment." "Experiments have results, positive, negative, or ambiguous...." [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] 
2:27:12 AM      comment []   trackback []  



TypePad's Template Builder... [Daypop Top 40] 
2:12:55 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Aggregator agendas
Tom Coates, in suggesting it's time to "balkanise our aggregators": "Blogdex, Daypop, Popdex, Technorati and the like are no longer simple reflectors of a community's activities - they are also one of our community's best mechanisms for news discovery... Unfortunately it also means that the country with the most weblogs sets the international community's agenda." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
1:56:25 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Blog service feature request
Matt Haughey: "With the advent of features like this at Technorati to tie multiple weblogs to a person, and tools like this to find similar weblogs, why can't these tools say 'you may also enjoy these 5 weblogs' whenever I check for updates?..." [Corante: Corante on Blogging] 
1:54:29 AM      comment []   trackback []  



Stress?
BBC.  Relatively random survey:  stress caused by a loss of e-mail worse than divorce.  What about the loss of a weblog? [John Robb's Weblog] 
1:48:32 AM      comment []   trackback []