Happy Halloween!

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 10/31 at 09:00 AM • Not About Blogs


How evil are you?

 
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Looking for a Blog Designer of Note

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 10/27 at 11:55 AM • A Little Design -- Blogs

I’m looking for someone who has made a name for themselves doing blog design (a la Moxie) to participate on a blog design best practices panel at SXSW Interactive. Ideally this would be someone who is making at least part of their living doing blog design. I’m not looking for blog strategy consultants—I’m looking for folks who are messing about in the guts of code, CSS, and graphics. I’d love to get your nominations and suggestions (leave a comment, please). I can’t take everyone, so I’m looking for the best!

 
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Reading Blogs at Work

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 10/25 at 11:12 AM • Blogs and Business

Get this—apparently sometimes blog readers are actually killing time at work, instead of being productive members of society. I, for one, am shocked.

AdAge put up a story this week with the headline “What Blogs Cost American Business: In 2005, Employees Will Waste 551,000 Years Reading Them” (free registration required).

About 35 million workers—one in four people in the labor force—visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis. Time spent in the office on non-work blogs this year will take up the equivalent of 2.3 million jobs. Forget lunch breaks—blog readers essentially take a daily 40-minute blog break.

The real kicker, I think, comes toward the second half of the piece. According to Jonathan Gibs, senior research manager at Nielsen/NetRatings, blog reading is happening in addition to other Web-surfing and Internet use. This seems shockingly significant to me. It would be one thing if blogs were taking the place of other forms of Web tomfoolery, but the that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is that workers are adding blog reading to their existing activities, taking time out from whatever else they are supposed to be doing to read blogs. The AdAge article goes directly to the conclusion that blog reading is actually decreasing productivity, taking hours that belong to the employee and replacing them with an activity that does not benefit the company.

But this seems wrong to me. In fact, we all know that we spend a certain amount of the work day engaged in non-work activities—getting coffee, chatting to colleagues, reading news, whatever. But my experience in the workforce tells me that most people have a little internal censor that keeps a cap on those activities. After all, we know we’re there to do a job, and there’s a finite amount of time you can spend goofing off and still accomplish enough not to get fired. Frankly, my fooling around schedule doesn’t have room for an additional 40 minutes of slacking every day. Which begs the question of why folks think they can get away with reading blogs instead of working. I think the answer just may be that a lot of that blog reading is seen by the employee as working, whether it’s reading blogs that pertain directly to your industry or job, or doing research, or figuring out what the competition is up to.

The Ad Age article acknowledges that some blog reading may actually be blog-related, putting a guess at around 25%. That’s pretty much speculation though, as is my own belief: that employees are reading blogs on work time because they feel that most of this activity is work-related.

UPDATE: Scott Adams has started a Dilbert blog!

 
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What Blogs Are Really About

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 10/18 at 09:10 AM • Blogs -- Blogging Tips

This from the Unvarnished blog recently:

I think we bloggers get b(l)ogged down in whether comments or trackbacks or categories or permalinks make a blog a blog.  I think it’s none of those things, and I think the defining characteristic of a blog is also the reason why people react so harshly to “fake” bloggers.

The thing about blogs, you see, is that there are people behind them, and you get to see those people, and connect with those people.  That’s something that is exceedingly rare in traditional media—it’s something that traditionally only columnists get to do, and even then, not every columnist develops the same openness that most bloggers seem to do intuitively.

You can go read the whole post.

It’s true, isn’t it? Blogs are unique and special in the Internet world because they let you make connections with people—and in the case of business blogs, with the people behind the corporate logo. It’s a great time to have a Web site!

 
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Jakob Nielsen’s Top Ten Blog Design Mistakes

Posted by Travis Smith on 10/17 at 11:45 AM •

Jakob Nielsen, called “perhaps the best-known design and usability guru on the Internet” by the Financial Times, has posted his list of Top Ten Weblog Design Mistakes.

Because I’m always up for a bit of introspection coupled with the occasional criticism, here’s the ones we sometimes mess up:

4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go

I think that’s fine most of the time, but sometimes you want a bit of whimsy in your link, or it’s something not critical to your piece, it’s more of a joke or even an Easter Egg for your readers.  Also sometimes, a call to action that emphasises the need to click is more important than using the words themselves as the click text.  You still want to make the destiniation of the link clear, but the link text itself could be a big “Go there now!”

7. Irregular Publishing Frequency

Guilty! Guilty!  Readers will make a habit of checking you.  Even more important than regular timing, however, is frequent posting.  If you post three times a day, your traffic will grow far more quickly than if you post three times a week, regardless of how precise you are with your posting times.  The other advantage to posting at regular times, by the way, is it builds your own habit and comfort—which is important to your blogging success.

10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

We’re not guilty of that, but it’s very much worth repeating—get your own domain, get a good name, and stick with it.

How does your blog do according to Jakob’s list?

 
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Guess What Arrived Today?

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 10/14 at 10:31 AM • BitTorrent

When a book is ready to go, the author is sent 10 copies to give away, or roll around on, or whatever… Today my box of 10 arrived!

The book looks great, if I do say so myself. It’s always a little nervewracking to open up a book, and there’s a certain amount of disbelief that it could actually be real, too.

What a great way to finish a pretty rough week.

Let me take this opportunity to refer you to the BitTorrent for Dummies blog, in case you’re interested in checking out the first chapter, etc.—and perhaps even buying the book.

 
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Yahoo to Include Blogs in Search Results

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 10/11 at 11:23 AM • Blogs -- Blogging News

Big news today from Yahoo News:

Yahoo News, the world’s most popular Internet media destination, is set to begin testing on Tuesday an expanded news search system that includes not only news stories and blogs but also user-contributed photos and related Web links.

Read more:

 

 
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What Do You Blog About on the Friday of a Long Weekend?

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 10/07 at 11:39 AM • Blogs -- Not About Blogs

Dilbert and knitting, of course!

In case you missed last Sunday’s Dilbert comic, you should check it out. Adams reveals the TRUTH about “getting fired for blogging.” Plus, you know, it’s funny.

And if that isn’t enough for you, you should also check the Yarn Harlot blog, written by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, knitter and author. It’s a personal blog, covering everything from the death of the family hamster (73 comments) to the fun of travelling with people frightened of knitting needles (293 comments) to—naturally—knitting disasters (119 comments). Pearl-McPhee’s hilarious self-deprecating style has earned her loyal blog readers, and loyal book buyers. In case you think I’m getting carried away by own enthusiasm for knitting, no, in fact, there is a sound “buzz marketing with blogs” reason to take a look at Yarn Harlot. Pearl-McPhee has parlayed POWER OF THE BLOGOSPHERE into SUCCESS IN THE GLOBAL MARKETPLACE (read all-caps text out loud very seriously). Her books, At Knit’s End and Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter, sell outstandingly, and knitters all over the U.S. and Canada turn out in droves when she does book talks. It’s all about the writing, baby. Oh, and the knitting. Check out this story about Pearl-McPhee’s blog in USAToday: “Knit-wits weave their way into the web.” And, apparently, I said this when talking about the Yarn Harlot blog with Paul Chaney earlier this week.

image

Final Friday fun: Are you looking for something to blog about today? Well, good news. It’s Blogacatmus, according to Accordion Guy. Check it out and then get blogging.

I leave you to a pleasant Columbus Day weekend (U.S.) and a happy Thanksgiving (Canada).

 
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Women in Red blog’s success surprises financial columnist

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 10/03 at 11:43 AM • Blogs

In a column today called “Blogging toward financial sanity,” MP Dunleavey reflects on here initial lack of enthusiasm for blogging, and how that has changed.

I have to admit, I was less than thrilled when my cigar-chomping editor told me last spring that I would have to add blogging to my writerly duties. ... Still, I had a job to do and I had to figure out a way to do it. So I posted a rant about expensive friends and how I was embarrassed about the fact that I sometimes wash and reuse my plastic baggies. ... I was practically knocked flat by the wave of sympathetic, been-there postings I got in response.

The Women in Red blog has surprised Dunleavey in a number of ways. It has become:

  • a discussion
  • a place for readers to share stories
  • a way for people to be honest and reach out to each other
  • a way for Dunleavey to get a sense of the similarities of people’s financial concerns
  • a source of support and advice for and from readers

imageDunleavey’s point in this column is that community is one of the most powerful weapons in dealing with problems in our lives—and blogs are a great way to find that community that can help you out.

You’ll be glad to know that Dunleavey posted a link to the column in the blog as well.

 
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Blog ad story: 0.5% of campaign budget, 29% of campaign traffic

Posted by Travis Smith on 10/01 at 11:31 PM • Blogs and Business -- Marketing

My ex-boss, Henry Copeland, runs BlogAds, and I saw this great tidbit in a recent MediaPost story mentioning him and his service that places ads on blogs.

Panelist Brian Clark, the CEO of GMD Studios, recounted a campaign that his agency ran for Audi, titled “The Art of the Heist.” Just one-half of one percent of the media buy budget, Clark said, was spent on BlogAds—a firm run by panel moderator Henry Copeland, which sells ad space on some of the highest-trafficked blogs. Those ads, Clark said, ended up accounting for 29 percent of the traffic sent to the campaign’s landing page.

Of course, it could be that they’re really bad at buying non-blog media wink  But I think it points out that blogs are now, and will remain for some time a great way to cut through the clutter of traditional marketing channels.

(Thanks, Davenetics)

 
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