Bloggers in Amsterdam

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 01/27 at 05:37 PM • Blogs -- Marketing

imageBlogAds and Holland.com are working together to offer 25 lucky bloggers a trip to Amsterdam with their Bloggers in Amsterdam program. Here's the details:

You Get:You Give:
  • Roundtrip airfare to Amsterdam
  • Five nights hotel stay in Amsterdam
  • Tourist card good for various museums and transportation
  • An interview with the Dutch Tourism Board
  • Premium adspace for Holland.com for one month on your blog
  • Space to the Bloggers in Amsterdam logo on your nav bar for one year and disclose why it is there

What I can't find on the Bloggers in Amsterdam site is anything about how they will choose the bloggers (page views? unique visitors? celebrity?)... or, come to think of it... how to apply, though there is an "email me" link on the site.

Also read: Henry Copeland's post about Bloggers in Amsterdam on the BlogAds blog.

UPDATE: Comments on the Bloggers in Amsterdam blog indicate some irritation on the part of those who have already blogged about Holland, bloggers who live in Holland who blog about Holland, and a reference to 25 bloggers having been chosen already but with no link to it.
 
Comments (2) • Permalink

Blogs Build Relationships (Not)

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 01/26 at 12:43 PM • Blogs

I was catching up on reading Jory Des Jardin’s blog, Pause, yesterday, when I started thinking about how few blogs cause me to want more contact with the writer than I get just through reading. Now, I really enjoy reading Jory’s blog. Her posts are frequent, invariably thoughtful, written with a deft hand, and she touches on a broad and unpredictable range of topics. Plus, they are loooong. This girl has got the essay-type blog post going on. And I like it. I enjoy seeing what the latest subject is, and the length of her posts gives her room to really explore her ideas. Plus, I met Jory briefly (among so many others at BlogHer), so it’s a pleasure to be able to put a face to words, so to speak. But what really got me thinking yesterday was the fact that reading Jory’s posts makes me want to get to know her better.

“I bet we could be friends,” I found myself thinking (perhaps presumptuously). “At any rate, it would be cool to get to know her better, because reading these blog posts is great, but it’s pretty one-sided.”

And that got me thinking about the other blogs I read, and how there are a very few that have ever prompted this response from me. Mostly, unless I read the blog because they are already an offline friend, I’m pretty content with simply reading blog posts, and—very occasionally—leaving a comment. It’s pretty darn rare for me to want more than I’m already getting. I have heard a lot of stories of people meeting up with the bloggers they read while traveling, and the occasional friendship, but most of those stories have been from hardcore bloggers and the extremely social.

Sure, I know a bit about Jory’s life from reading her blog, but she knows next to nothing about mine. I have as much a “relationship” with her as I do with any journalist, novelist, or columnist that I read.

So, really, I wonder about the phrase I’ve used a million times: “Blogs are about building relationships.” Are they really? Don’t most relationships grow, change, deepen? Is there really a chance for that with a blog, or does it just feel like it?

 
Comments (4) • Permalink

MarketingSherpa Study Shows Blogs and RSS as “Emerging Favorites”

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 01/23 at 05:15 PM • Blogs -- Marketing

The 2005 MarketingSherpa study of Internet marketing is worth taking a peek at. Here are a few key elements:

  • Email marketing is overtaken by search, though both have increased in effectiveness
  • More marketers are spending more money on online ads and marketing
  • Blogs and RSS look to be increasingly mainstream and accepted ways of spending online marketing dollars

Check out the study yourself, including some handy charts.

 
Comments (0) • Permalink

Movable Type on Yahoo! Small Business Web Hosting

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 01/19 at 11:28 AM • Blogging News -- Blogging Tools

Blogging company Six Apart announced today that the Movable Type blogging tool is now available pre-installed to Yahoo! Small Business Web shoting customers.

Costs start at a $8.01 a month (discounted from $11.95 for six months), and users are promised 24-hour toll-free support.

You can read all the details here.

 
Comments (0) • Permalink

Visuals Impact Web Site Visitors Instantaneously

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 01/17 at 02:07 PM • A Little Design

There’s a fascinating article on Nature.com today about how quickly Web site visitors make a judgement about a Web site’s visual impact—they do it fast.

From the story, titled “Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye”:

Like the look of our website? Whatever the answer (and hopefully it was yes), the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.

The story goes on to imply that having a negative visual impact means visitors may leave before they even know what you’re offering, but I don’t know that that is necessarily true. Bad design can hurt a Web site, it’s true, but it isn’t the only factor in creating a usable Web site—just apparently the one that makes the first impression on your visitors.

 
Comments (2) • Permalink

Igniting Buzz Conference Feb. 27, 2006

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 01/17 at 12:17 PM • Blogging Events -- Marketing

If you’re thinking about viral campaigns, you might want to look into the Wall Street Transcript’s Igniting Buzz Conference being held Feb. 27, 2006, in San Francisco.

We have assembled a unique conference that will arm you with strategies for developing, executing and measuring the impact of sensational word of mouth marketing campaigns. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to learn best practices for Maximizing Returns on Viral Marketing Campaigns.

The agenda shows sessions on Best Practices for Seeding Buzz, Controlling Buzz, and Creating Buzz Through Blogs: Mastering the Art of Conversation Weaving. I’ll be sorry to miss the Legal Limits on Seeding Buzz session myself, but I’ll be in Banff talking about blogs at The Banff Centre’s Canadian Women in Communication/Corus Entertainment New Media Career Accelerator Program. (How’s that for a long seminar name?!)

 

 
Comments (2) • Permalink

Know Anything about an XO Outage?

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 01/13 at 05:10 PM • Not About Blogs

Is anyone experiencing a service outage with XO Hosting? I can’t get to their site, and naturally the site I manage that’s hosted there is down, as well. I’m just trying to verify that it’s not a local issue.

Thanks!

 
Comments (2) • Permalink

Ze Verrry Best Podcast How To Evah

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 01/08 at 01:43 AM • Audio, Video & Photo Blogging

For a little weekend fun, check out this video podcast, “How to Video Podcast” from French Maid TV (link not entirely work-safe).

A gimmick, you say? Nonetheless, you can learn how to do a podcast—at least, you Macintosh users can.

image
 
Comments (3) • Permalink

Get your 2006 Bloggies Nominations In

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 01/06 at 02:39 PM • Blogs

Through next Tuesday you can nominate your favorite blog for a 2006 Weblog Award in the following categories:

  • Best Web Application for Weblogs
  • Best Australian or New Zealand Weblog
  • Best Asian Weblog
  • Best African or Middle Eastern Weblog
  • Best European Weblog
  • Best British or Irish Weblog
  • Best Latin American Weblog
  • Best Canadian Weblog
  • Best American Weblog
  • Best Tagline of a Weblog
  • Best Podcast of a Weblog
  • Best Photography of a Weblog
  • Best Craft Weblog
  • Best Food Weblog
  • Best Entertainment Weblog
  • Best Weblog About Politics
  • Best Web Development Weblog
  • Best Computers or Technology Weblog
  • Best Topical Weblog
  • Best GLBT Weblog
  • Best Teen Weblog
  • Most Humorous Weblog
  • Best Writing of a Weblog
  • Best Group Weblog
  • Best Community Weblog
  • Best-Designed Weblog
  • Best-Kept-Secret Weblog
  • Best New Weblog
  • Best New Weblog
  • Weblog of the Year

Remember, the first step to winning is to have one of the 10 most nominated web logs in a category, so don’t assume someone is taking care of those nominations for you!

 
Comments (0) • Permalink

Change Blog Software and Lose RSS Subscribers?

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 01/02 at 01:44 PM • Blogging Tips -- Blogging Tools

I was cruising through my blogroll today, catching up on reading blog posts and removing some blogs I haven’t been reading lately, when I realized I was still subscribed to Robert Scoble’s old RSS feed. In October, Robert migrated to the WordPress platform. Migrating a site to a new platform is a big job, and frequently one fraught with problems for blog readers. For instance, permalink URLs are often no longer valid. Archives are sometimes lost. Sometimes photos get stripped out… it all depends on how well the migration goes. One things always changes, however, and that’s the RSS or Atom feed URL. This means you need to migrate all your RSS feed subscribers to the new feed. You can see in this screenshot of my Scobleizer subscription through Bloglines, that Robert says he had 9,000 Bloglines subscribers—and more than a month after his reminder to subscribe to the new feed, he still has 8,292 subscribers to a now defunct feed. (OK, now he has 8,291, because I took myself off that feed.)

image

Frankly, this is alarming. Are all those people subscribed to the new feed? Are folks just not reading Scoble? (Oh, come on, everyone reads Scoble religiously, right?) Or did they, like me, subscribe to the new feed and forget to take themselves off the old? Whatever the reason, it’s likely that Scoble has lost a certain number of readers simply because he made a technology change.

There is a workaround solution for this—setup your feed with Feedburner. You’ll get a feed in all the many RSS/Atom flavors, and a Feedburner feed URL. Change blog software and, as long as you update Feedburner, your users won’t have to do a thing to continue reading your words o’ wisdom.

Of course, it would also be nice if blog software developers (at least those producing the kind you install on your own server) came up with a common syntax and location for the feed URL, so that switching to a new platform had a little less impact, but I suppose ensuring better compatibility with a competitor’s product isn’t necessarily a great business strategy.

 
Comments (1) • Permalink