There are three primary options for choosing a business blogger:

1. Write your business blog yourself.
2. Enlist an employee to write your business blog.
3. Hire a professional blogger to write your business blog.

Each of the options above has pros and cons.

First, there is no one who knows your business, customers, and goals better than you do, but finding time to write great content doesn’t come easily to everyone.

Second, employees can be great bloggers, particularly if they’re familiar with the social Web and are vocal advocates of your brand and business.  However, you have to monitor your employees’ conversations and behaviors online to ensure they adequately represent your business and brand and don’t disclose any proprietary information. 

Third, hiring a professional blogger is an excellent alternative, but not all bloggers are what they claim to be.  You’ll find a huge variation in writing abilities, social Web experience, and technical knowledge, and those differences are usually very visibile when it comes to the rates that bloggers charge.  There is a reason the old adage, you get what you pay for, is still around.

Following are five skills you should look for in potential business bloggers to ensure you select a blogger who is willing and able to develop a successful blog for your business:

1. Has a knowledge of blogging and the social Web

Just because a person knows how to use WordPress doesn’t mean he or she understands how to effectively write, publish, and promote blog content to build a successful blog.  He or she should have active social networking, social bookmarking, and microblogging accounts and understand how to drive conversations, sharing and traffic to a blog.

2. Has excellent writing skills

The person who writes your business blog should have excellent writing, grammar, spelling, and proofreading skills to represent your brand well and alleviate the need for you to edit his or her work.

3. Listens and understands your wants, needs, and goals for your business blog.

The person who writes your business blog should aggressively learn about your business, industry, competitors, customers, and so on in order to be able to effectively write interesting blog content that attracts an audience and sparks conversations.

4. Is responsive, responsible and ethical.

The person who writes your business blog should actively respond to comments and emails related to your business blog and they should be responsible enough to publish blog posts without being micro-managed.  They should also understand what content is and is not appropriate for your business blog without having to run every post topic by you for approval, and they should understand the ethics and laws of the social Web, so your business blog doesn’t attract a negative reputation or legal trouble.  Otherwise, you might as well write your business blog yourself!

5. Has search engine optimization knowledge

The person who writes your business blog doesn’t have to be a search engine optimization expert (that’s a career unto itself), but he or she should understand the most important do’s and don’ts of search engine optimization and search engine reputation management to effectively write posts for maximum search engine referral traffic.

Keep an eye on Business Logs next week for tips for finding professional bloggers to write your business blog for you.

Image: stock.xchang

1. Direct marketing and promotion

While businesses should never use a blog solely for self-promotion, it’s not forbidden to include marketing messages now and then.  If your business is offering discounts or coupons that benefit your consumers, then there is no harm in talking about them on your business blog.  Similarly, you can talk about your products and link to your online catalog.  Just remember that at least 80% of your online content should not be self-promotional.

2. Establish expertise

Use your blog to establish your business as the go-to place for information related to your industry, products, and so on.  If you publish great content on your business blog, others will notice and share that content.  In time, you’ll develop a reputation as an expert in your field with reliable and authoritative information that is useful.  That’s the kind of content and expertise that people actively seek.

3. Generate publicity

Again, if your content is amazing, people will talk about it.  They’ll leave comments on your blog, share your blog posts on Facebook, Twitter, etc., and they’ll blog about your content with a link back to your own blog.  All of that conversation and linking helps to build your online brand and is a powerful form of publicity.

4. Build relationships

The most powerful part of social media marketing is the ability that social Web participation gives a business to build relationships with consumers, business partners, and so on around the world.  Relationships outlive short-term promotions and are an essential part of any long-term business strategy.

5. Seem more human and less corporate

Since blogs are typically written in conversational tones, the blogger’s personality can shine through and give a business a human side that consumers respond to positively.

6. Help people

If you offer tips, tutorials, and useful information on your business blog, people will appreciate that help and come back to your blog again and again.  Eventually, that traffic and word-of-mouth marketing related to your helpful content leads to sales.

7. Spread accurate information

There is no doubt that at some time someone is going to say something negative about your business on the social Web.  A business blog offers you a platform to publish accurate information without trying to control the online conversation.

8. Search engine optimization and search engine reputation management

A blog is an amazing tool for search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine reputation management (SERM).  The content you publish on your blog creates a myriad of entry points to your blog that search engines can find and allows you to optimize content so the best information about you ranks high in search engine results related to specific keywords.

9. Feedback, research, and questions

Use your business blog to ask consumers questions, get feedback about your products and services, and to do research about new products and offerings.  Once you build your blog audience, you’ve got an “always on” focus group.  Use it to your advantage!

10. Position your brand and business in relation to your competitors

Define your business niche, analyze what your competitors are doing online, and then use that information to position your own brand and business online.  Establish your differentiators and use your business blog as a tool to ensure consumers understand your brand promise.

Image: pshutterbug.

First, what is a brand?

A brand is a promise to consumers that creates customer expectations for every experience they have with that brand.  As you continually meet those customer expectations for your brand, consumers develop loyalty to it, seeking it out over other brands, and advocating it (or defending it) to other consumers.

Next, how do you build a brand?

There are three main steps to building a brand that apply regardless of the industry your business is in or the tools you use to communicate your brand messages and develop your brand image.  Those three steps are:

1. Consistency: Your brand messages must be consistent across all marketing touch points.  Inconsistency leads to consumer confusion and causes people to turn away from your brand in search of another that continually meets their expectations.
2. Persistence: Brand building takes patience.  You must continually communicate your brand messages again and again without giving up.  Brands are powerful assets, but brands are also part of a long-term marketing strategy that requires persistence.
3. Restraint: While it can be tempting to over-extend a successful brand in an effort to reach new audiences and boost your bottom-line, you must exercise restraint and choose brand extensions and other branded opportunities with caution ensuring that the opportunities you pursue consistently support your brand promise.

Finally, how can business blogging help companies build brands?

Blogging is an incredible tool to spread your branded messages, build relationships with consumers who can become your vocal brand advocates online and offline, and support a sustainable, long-term marketing strategy.  Your blogging efforts live for a long time and have the ability to spread across the Internet for years to come.  Not only do your blog posts remain accessible through your blog’s archives until you delete them, but links to them from other blogs and Web sites also stay active.

Unlike a television commercial that lives for 30-seconds and reaches the specific audience who is watching a specific television channel at a specific moment in time, business blog content lives and spreads for years to come.

From a brand building perspective, business blogs are a marketer’s dream come true!

Image: stock.xchng

The litigious route

We live in a litigious society after all, and oftentimes businesses resort to the law when they feel they have been bad-mouthed. I’ve experienced this one time or another in the course of my involvement with several blogs and new media networks. There was one time when I received a demand to take down some content on a blog that was allegedly libelous to the complainant’s company. Thing is, the blog in question wasn’t even mine. It had been submitted to a blog directory that the company I work for owned. In some cases, the content in question is not even a blog post, but sometimes a comment posted by a third party.

Sometimes these legal cases do prosper. But most of the time, they not. This would only go to show that the business entity involved may not necessarily be well-versed in social media. Being quick to do damage control through the courts would give the impression that you are a bully, and that you are using lawsuits as a tactic to scare off anyone who dares talk or write about you in a bad light.

Filing lawsuits left and right can also be very costly and time consuming. So unless a blog post or any online content consists of blatant, baseless accusations against you with the intent of being malicious, then litigation is probably not the best way to deal.

Fighting fire with fire

I think the better way to deal with complaints found online is to address these online, as well. If you already run a blog or other social media presence (like a Facebook profile or a Twitter account), then by all means you can use these mediums to air out your side. If not, then it’s high time you set up a blog or other social media account of your own. I suggest you also post a comment on the original source of the complaint, be it a blog post, review, tweet or any other content online.

Don’t just be outright defensive, though. That also gives the impression that you’re too quick to the draw. Here are a few things you can do to help clean up your image and also build up goodwill along the way.

• Identify yourself. Are you the business owner? The customer service manager? Tech support? People will believe you if you have clout, and if you have direct affiliation with the brand, product or service in question. Most small businesses have a small operation, with only a few staff. It’s a good idea to respond if you can speak for your business yourself. If a business owner himself engagse the audience, then this would be viewed as being more sincere than if it were the PR manager (or even a hired PR firm) who would be doing the talking.
• Check and double-check the facts. Don’t be a victim of fraud or online bullying. Be sure that the complaint is valid. Was the product wrongly shipped? Was the product really defective? Was there a problem in the production line? Was someone in your staff rude?
• Identify possible problems. Nobody’s perfect. And while any business strives to give the best to its customers, chances are there will be some clients who will not be satisfied. Sometimes, it’s a defective run in your production line, and you might have to recall and replace a few items. Sometimes it’s a design flaw, and you would really have to redesign from ground up. Maybe you do have a rude customer service personnel (or at least someone who has had a bad day) and you need to take action. Be sure to identify the source of the problem. This way, customers won’t view your brand or product as a failure in its entirety. There’s always room to improve and grow, after all.
• Apologize. Issue a personal and a sincere apology, if you feel that there was some shortcoming on your end.
• Offer a solution, or at least an explanation. Some problems can be easily solved. Products can easily be recalled and replaced. Services can be re-done. However, if it’s something out of your control, then be sure to state this also.

The essential factor here is communication. Connect with your audience. Engage your audience. It’s even better if you are proactive, and if you are connected with a community of your patrons and customers from the start. This way, people will also feel more comfortable in alerting you to potential problems. Your audience might also be kinder to you if they know you’re part of the community.

Connect. Engage. Communicate. That’s what social media should be, from a business standpoint.

image credit: flickr/cocraetr

Most businesses not only understand this, but understand how to use Twitter to their advantage. Online marketplace Etsy, for example, regularly tweets about upcoming promotions and deals, and responds to customers right away via Twitter. Starbucks, the company from whom I purchased the coffee I’m drinking while writing this post, also uses Twitter wisely, responding almost immediately to their followers and posting information that any Starbucks customer would find interesting.

And then there are the businesses that get it wrong. I’m not naming anyone in particular, but you see these every day: Twitter business accounts that put up their logo, fill out their profile, then proceed to post nothing but junk. They may gain followers, but aren’t using Twitter to their full benefit. If you use Twitter for your business, here are some Do’s and Don’ts for you:

Do not post pure marketing tweets.
Something we see way too often: a page of a business’ tweets containing nothing but “We are the best! Visit us now at http://blahblah..” over and over again, in different wordings. Really, what’s the point? If someone is taking the time to read your tweet, offer them something useful. A discount code, perhaps, or a link to a special deal, if you want to promote a product.

Do sound like a real person.
People like talking to other people, not machines. If your Tweets don’t sound like a real person wrote them, you’re in danger of losing touch with your customers. And speaking of being in touch with your customers…

Do reply to tweets.
Whenever someone sends you an @reply, remember that there’s a real live person, possibly a customer or client, behind it. Don’t ignore these- and especially don’t ignore direct messages.

Do give your Twitter profile some personality.
Take the time to customize your business’ Twitter profile with a nice background and colors that reflect your company.

If you do use Twitter, do use Twitter.
That is, make it known to everyone that your business is on Twitter. Put a Twitter button on your website or blog, add a link to your email, put the URL on your business card and company brochure.

Do plan your strategy.
Read through Twitter’s official 101 for Business, have a look at their best practices, and develop a strategy for using Twitter to your business’ full advantage.

Finally, have fun with Twitter. It’s a powerful tool, but it’s also meant to be a fun and easy to use tool, which is why it’s become so popular.

Do you have tips for using Twitter for business?

This is the problem I’ve always had with articles about “how to blog”, “how to get more traffic”, and “how to boost your RSS subscribers” — so many of these articles are written by blogs that have no business writing about these topics. Heck, even when I’ve had a blog with thousands of RSS subscribers I didn’t quite feel qualified to write on these topics because I knew I was still low on the totem pole. Of course you don’t have to be qualified to talk about a specific topic on your blog — you can talk about whatever you want — but I never wanted to do a potential disservice to my readers.

Opinions are like a**holes, everyone’s got one. Some people like to spam forums with links to their blog to gain traffic, and others like to write cohesive and witty comments. Obviously in that scenario you can figure out which is the better method, so why is the spammy tactic the one that so many people write about as an effective method for promoting your blog? One reason is that bombing forums with links is a common talking point on lists that give you “Top 100 Ways To Promote Your Blog” which are taken to heart by newer bloggers. Just because people include it in an article doesn’t mean it’s a good idea, so don’t take these lists at face value since many of them are created just to get traffic to their blog.

Blogs about blogging, articles about writing articles on your blog, when does the meta craziness end? Well just because information on blogging is abundant doesn’t mean that you should read one blog, one article, one author, and then call it the gospel. You need to fact-check your information, read a dozen lists and articles, create your own best practices, and then create strategies that work best for who you are, what your blog is about, and who you’re trying to reach. The same moral rules that apply in the real world also apply online, so whenever you come across a “tip” that seems a little shady, just ask yourself, “would doing this technique/method make me annoying to someone else?” and you’ll figure out what’s a bad idea and what’s not. It’s actually pretty simple, but sometimes the goal of having a check get mailed to you once a month is more alluring.

Don’t take tips from just anybody, in fact, don’t take tips from me at face value either. Read many things, decide for yourself, and then create strategies that still uphold your moral values. Doing everything that someone puts on a Top 100 list is a fast-track to nowhere. Doing a few things really well (like leaving smart comments, emailing authors that you appreciate, writing accurate & interesting entries) will get you well on your way and you didn’t even have to sacrifice your morals during the process.

“As managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, Guy Kawasaki funded all the really smart ideas he could find. None hit it big. So earlier this year the guru of Silicon Valley start-ups decided to fund a really dumb idea that cost as little as possible.”

I’ve written about Kawasaki’s venture before it was launched. This post isn’t about my opinion of Truemors, but the damage that this type of article does for the integrity (*cough*) of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in the Valley.

It seems that the crux of this article is that if you continually think you’re doing the right thing but are wrong every time, you shouldn’t readjust your initial assumptions, you should simply throw all reason out the window and do whatever you feel like doing since that’s obviously the answer you’ve been looking for. Kawasaki remarked in the article that although he has considered many of his company’s investments to be sound, few (if any) have panned out in any sort of remarkable way. Unfortunately for venture capital firms and the people who provide them with capital to begin with, investments aren’t judged by the uniqueness of the idea, or the founding team, or the technology, they’re judged with how they perform and if an exit strategy occurs yielding profit. Venture capital firms are companies who need to make money to stay afloat, just like any other company. Now does this mean that Garage isn’t a good venture capital firm? No, it simply means that they’re hurting for an exit like starving lion. All their portfolio companies could be happy as pigs in shit, unfortunately that doesn’t make Garage a successful investment firm it just makes them friendly and helpful business partners.

Perhaps their investments are made in good concepts and not good companies, or perhaps they’re investing in the team instead of the execution, I’m not the person to say, but I sure as hell wouldn’t want my investment firm featured in a newspaper piece where the basis of the article is “we thought all our previous investments were smart but we were wrong, so the hell with smart” because that doesn’t do much to bolster the morale of Garage’s current portfolio companies.

This is especially interesting to me because I’ve been a reader of Think Secret for many years, essentially since the site started, and followed the lawsuit from its genesis to now. Nick is actually a few years younger than I am, is still in college, so seeing him go up against a giant company like Apple is interesting for me since I’ve enjoyed his reporting over the years.

As part of the press release that Think Secret posted, it said that a “positive solution” had been reached for both sides. To me, that means the lawsuit has been dropped and perhaps Nick got a payoff to stop writing. I don’t know what type of payoff, perhaps Apple paid his legal fees plus some cash, but maybe it was larger than that. Maybe once the EFF got behind Nick’s case Apple realized they were going to lose, so they decided to turn the tables and stop that from happening. If Nick won then other rumor sites could safely pursue information inside of a protective Apple NDA without worrying about the legal consequences, so by Apple paying off Nick it stopped the forthcoming rumor flood.

Ars Technica mirrors my sentiments in that they also believe he got a nice payday:

“Apple was faced with losing the case and having to pay attorney’s fees,” explained Opsahl, which is likely part of the reason why it decided to settle instead of continuing to pursue it. As for Ciarelli, “We understand that Nick is very satisfied with the outcome of the case,” Opsahl said. “We hope that Apple learns a lesson over this.”

With a wad of cash in his pocket and some real journalistic work experience behind him, Nick can no move forward and has many opportunities to choose from. Of course those opportunities don’t include writing about Apple rumors, but there could be far worse outcomes to this story.

Amidst the congratulatory reach-arounds was an entry on the Socialtext blog by well-known entrepreneur and Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield. A quote:

“Our experience has been that JotSpot customers convert to Socialtext when they realize they need a real business-class wiki,” said Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield. “We have been gaining customers since they discontinued their Appliance offering. We hear a high degree of uncertainty from users faced with a potential lag in innovation and unclear integration strategy with Google. Socialtext is ready to support you and your business during this critical time.”

My translation out of PR speak and into what Ross really wanted to say:

“JotSpot was a competitor and we love it when some of their users come to us. JotSpot isn’t focused on the enterprise-class like we are, and because of that shortcoming we’ve been signing up some new accounts, and now will offer JotSpot users a free Socialtext wiki so that they can do grown-up, adult things like collaborate on Gantt charts and P/E ratio calculations. We’re silently upset that Google bought JotSpot, and the only mud we can sling is that even though Jot users will soon get Google’s world-class servers, there’s still a chance that their data is unavailable for 1-2 hours or the migration takes longer than they planned. If that improbable event does occur, not only will your business lose money but your children will all get projectile diarrhea, so you better migrate now or we’ll have to say we told you so.

Some things that Ross obviously left out of his heart-warming congratulatory post:

• All JotSpot accounts, at any level, are now free, as in beer.
• All JotSpot accounts are still active, you can login and do whatever you want.

See if JotSpot were being evil and shutting down all user accounts, suspending paying users, and holding data for ransom then Socialtext’s offer would be a light shining from heaven. But because there’s honestly nothing negative about the Google acquisition from Jot’s users’ points of view, it just comes out as underhanded. The timing really is interesting though, because just a day before JotSpot was acquired, SocialText announced a partnership with Microsoft to let Microsoft SharePoint users have simple, editable pages….. err….. enterprise-class collaborative wiki solutions be part of their application.

SocialText laughs on Monday but JotSpot gets the last laugh on Tuesday.

As of yesterday, the logo is gone! I don’t know if it’s down permanently or whether they’re removing it from their ad campaigns, but I think this is definitely something for everybody to be happy about. A few emails were sent on my part to their legal team (no response yet however) but I think the biggest force in this situation had to be the community uprising that everyone participated in, and for that I thank all of you. One of the things that companies don’t realize is the power of blogs, and that’s evident via a quick Google search for Meridian Communications — my friend Nathan Smith’s entry about what happened comes up pretty close to the top. The next time a potential client researches their firm, they might actually end up reading about this entire situation and maybe thinking twice.

I don’t know what legal or logistical steps were involved in removing it from the website, but I want to personally thank the people at Meridian Communications for listening to some random designer’s email pleas. I don’t have a legal team, I don’t have a fancy office, and I sure as hell don’t have (or want!) gigantic multi-national companies as clients, but I do have email, I do have my blog, and I do have 9rules, and I think the combination of those three is pretty darn powerful.

Oh, yeah! The Contest!
The winner of the gift certificate was to be randomly selected today, and — *randomly selects the number 26 in his head* — the 26th commenter, Dave Anderson, wins! He had a great entry with the Toyota logo turned into a pair of vibrating speakers…. great job!

As for my Top 5 favorite submissions, that was a bit tougher, but I managed to pull together a list of my favorites in no particular order:

• Francois’ CEO lettermark
• John B.’s Yota’s Siesta
• Wardini’s MS Paint Snake
• xmpcray’s Awesome Osama
• Phillips’ To… Yoda and Peeter’s Froyoda!

Congrats everybody!

Flipped, color shifted, and some leaves jiggled around, but it’s pretty obvious. In fact if you line up their version with the 9rules logo 2nd from the right in that image, the big leaves on the left and right line up perfectly, along with the bottom stem. Here’s another image with their version layered on top of a flipped 9rules logo. I’ve pointed out the best parts :)

Now while the 9rules logo is not trademarked to 9rules, Inc., it’s still copyrighted to me. Back in April 2005 I documented my creative process over at Paul’s blog and there are hundreds (if not thousands) of references of it all around the Web so prior art is not the issue. The issue is that it’s just totally lame of them to do it to anybody.

I have been in contact with their ad agency’s legal department (meaning, they wrote me a really long email after I wrote them a really short one) and they still maintain that the two logos look nothing alike.

Since Toyota has taken a Web 2.0 Mashup Hammer to the 9rules logo, I thought it only fair that I mash their own logo up in a similar way. Everybody, I present to you, the shiny new (and totally original!) Business Logs logo!

Maaan, so much friendlier! While it may appear that I merely flipped the logo, re-colored it, and removed a small area, you can rest assured it’s completely and totally different from the Toyota logo in every way, shape, and form. Toyota logo? What’s that?

To celebrate megacompany Toyota’s willingness to use the 9rules logo for whatever they want, I now invite all of you to join the Toyota Logo Mashup Challenge! Grab a gigantic version of the Toyota logo from over here, change it up in some small (but totally creative and original!) ways, and then post a link to your version in the comments. Each commenter on this thread who posts a link to their version of the Toyota logo will be automatically entered into the Toyota Logo Mashup Challenge! On October 19th a winner will be randomly selected and they’ll get a $25 Amazon Gift Certificate courtesy your neighborhood Toyota Dealer…. err…. courtesy my wallet!

Aaaaaand get your engines runnin’!!!

At the end of September this year, a few weeks ago, blog network b5media raised a Series A venture round, and although we’re not direct competitors we are still in the same space together. Whenever a blog-related company launches something new it’s big news since it’s a small industry niche that we’re in, so when b5media announced their funding round it brought out various reactions from around the blog world, some of which I talked about here. Taking on funding is a bit step for many reasons, but regardless, major props need to be sent over to b5.

One of the reasons I like blogging so much is because it’s a soapbox for me to speak and see what others have to say in response. On many entries here I analyze a company, talk about the executives, maybe joke about their users, be sarcastic regarding their popularity, but generally just have a good time talking about the web industry that I love so much. The problem with doing the same thing with a company in our niche getting funded is that you can’t knock on parts of a blog network because they’re all run by an actual person somewhere, at their house, writing about what they love, and I made the terrible mistake of crossing that line. I commented at Valleywag the same way I write joking entries here, but it was totally unnecessary and I got rightfully murdered for it. Regardless of what I meant by the comment, I offended a lot of people and for that I’m truly sorry. My comments didn’t need to be said, and no one has the right to comment on someone’s passion.

A bit later I posted a link in the 9rules Humor community referencing the Valleywag post, and I stuck my foot in my mouth there as well. At the end of the post I linked to a few b5media blogs I saw listed in their sidebar randomly, and without giving it a second thought, published the list. I only meant to poke fun at b5 over their Valleywag feature, not insult anyone who wrote for any of their blogs, but it was taken that way and I’m very sorry for that too. I’m an idiot.

The problems came to a head yesterday when the Blog Herald tried to incite a comment war between 9rules, b5media and everyone else, but we didn’t show up. I’ve upset enough people in this whole mess so heading to BH (like I might have done in the past) just wasn’t a good idea — my blog network analysis and sarcasm hat has been hung up. I’ve emailed those who I’ve pissed off and tried to bury the hatchet, and this post is just another attempt at putting things behind me and moving forward.

From now on I’m staying far away from any type of blog network analysis, sarcasm, comment war, or anything else because not only is it not worth it now, it’s never been worth it. 9rules is very popular around the world and one of the responsibilities that goes with running a company like that is knowing when to shut up, knowing when to apologize, and knowing when to keep your feet on the ground. This was one of those times when I stuck my foot in my mouth and didn’t mean to offend anyone, but it happened, and I think writing an entry in such a public manner is my only real way to repent.

Back to your normal programming…

The problem with the current state of “Web 2.0″ blogs is that many are afraid to actually speak their minds. I spoke my mind about the TechCrunch redesign back 4 months ago and now my comments are blacklisted at TechCrunch — price of my opinion I suppose. The problem is that everyone has a startup or a story they’re peddling to a bigger name blogger, so they have to watch what they say lest they upset the Web 2.0 gods and don’t get their hot product featurette.

Nick Douglas and Skeptic have upset the A-List brethren many times over, probably because nobody likes to hear the company they’re 1) starting, or 2) investing in sucks the big one and is worthless. I tend to get the most worked up about things I’m upset over, so that’s why I write more frequently about companies I think are doing things wrong rather than the ones that are doing things right.

I honestly don’t care who is writing Dead 2.0, why they decided to hide in the first place, or any other conspiracy theories — I just know that the author sees the Web industry the same way I see it, and I’ll always be a reader.

(BTW: Sorry about the absence… we switched servers, had to do some MySQL jumping jacks, but now we’re back!)

(BTW2: Just fixed the comment submission problem, comment away!)

How it happened:

1. People “in the know” estimate Digg’s worth at $200 million
2. Kevin owns approximately 30-40% of that imaginary figure
3. 30% of that imaginary figure equates to $60 million of imaginary money

Sure sounds like he made $60 million in 18 months to me….

Who This Really Affects

I left a comment at JF’s blog saying that this cover is unfortunate for a number of reasons, and in my mind the #1 problem is that it now puts unrealistic expectations into the minds of young entrepreneurs scraping it out in their college dormrooms or studio apartments. I know my parents will see this cover and immediately take it at face value, then turn around and ask me where my $60 million is, or ask if Digg is similar to 9rules, or any other host of questions. I could explain to them why he didn’t actually make any money yet (“We have a clear path toward becoming a profitable company.” -Kevin Rose) and it’s a simple bubble extrapolation but none of that will matter because the dollar signs will already be in their mind. Absolutely fucking worthless journalism.

Winer says he’ll stop blogging by the end of this year, but I say, “why wait 9 months?”

Ouch. That’s probably the most blatant rip I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen dozens of lifted designs. And just so we’re clear, they are using the exact same code as well as the look and feel, so this can actually be legally quantified as copyright infringement.

SiliconBeat wrote about Next Internet, saying:

“The “well-funded” company says it is incubating “a next generation Internet Ad Network” and is hiring execs.

I’m assuming they’re using their “well-fundedness” on things other than their own site design, since it probably took them about 30 seconds to copy Flock’s XHTML & CSS and paste it onto their server. My boy Nick Douglas scooped the story at Valleywag as well.

I stuck this entry on Digg just so the people involved can feel the power of the social web ;)

UPDATE: Well it looks like being on the front page of Digg forced these hacks to take down their site and put up a nice table-based “design” in its place. How can a company be a technology incubator and 1) steal one of the most well-known web 2.0 designs out there, and 2) not think that people were going to talk about it in a very public way? Oh well, the site’s been updated but Google’s cache never lies:

Google Cache of Stolen Design

Now, I think that this service definitely provides value to the reader, however I’m wondering if the sites that are compiled into these Top 10 pages have been asked ahead of time if they could republish their content? The Venture Capital page has republished full text entries from their sources at the bottom, and this trend is continued throughout the site on other Top 10 lists like the Rose Bowl, Pets, and many others.

From what I can gather, if a site in a Top 10 list page has full-text RSS feeds, then their entire entry will be republished, but if they only have excerpts than the excerpt will be shown. Top Ten Sources appears to make no effort to limit the text — I’ve seen some entries in their lists that have 12-15 paragraphs, complete with quotations, code examples, and even images (yes, still linked to their author’s site, also known as “hotlinking”), and even some people have Google AdSense in their feeds, and yup, their AdSense boxes show up on their associated Top 10 page. So basically, Top Ten Sources takes all your information from your RSS feed, republishes it on their site, and then uses it to build traffic. I’m not sure about their revenue model yet, however if it involves running ads against other people’s content then that’s a major no-no.

To be fair, 9rules displays member content in categories as well, however 1) our members gave us permission to do so, and 2) we will never display their full post, regardless of if their RSS feed is full entry or not — the most we display is 3-4 sentences. Plus, we strip out all images to avoid just such a case I pointed out above.

So the question I pose is this: Are the blogs you are republishing consulted ahead of time about this? I looked at the About Page for the site but didn’t find anything that spoke of an agreement or copyright notice. I think this issue definitely needs to be cleared up, because if they’re doing this without consent Top Ten Sources is no better than the 3-4 site scraping bottom-feeders who republish the Business Logs RSS entries everyday, or the thousands more who poach other copyrighted content from around the web.

John Palfrey just responded to this entry (as well as a few others) that talked about Top Ten Sources and copyright. In the article he mentioned this entry and called me a “respected member of the blogosphere”, to which I am deeply honored and flattered. While writing this entry about Top Ten Sources, I knew in the back of my head that they probably sent emails to the included blogs about the aggregation, and I was right:

“As the editor compiles the site, the editor sends out an e-mail to the person who appears to be responsible for the site, or, sometimes, posts a comment to say that the site has been chosen. The site renders a list of those sites offering the feeds as directlinks to the page. The site also subscribes to those feeds and renders them all together on a single page. It is this latter activity that I take to be the concern.” — John Palfrey

Top Ten Sources emails newly included blogs as they are being aggregated, and are given the opportunity to opt-out at anytime. My opinion has now been changed :)

Maybe I’m just confused, but isn’t the whole point of Web 2.0 is the browser is not the platform but the internet is? Doesn’t this kind of defeat the point? Isn’t the web supposed to be about enabling this kind of functionality dynamically as part of a site/destination/service rather than the browser?

As far as I can tell flock is saying, “Hey, we took this web services and microformats and put them in the browser instead of having people put them on sites you visit.” Sounds like they built walls instead of tearing them down. Either way it’s all irrelevant unless they have a business model that works. There is no such thing as it relates to the browser business. Browsers are free and if they don’t meet your needs they can be re-created easily with custom functionality using mozilla code or simpler methods such as hta files for people who appreciate MS tech (search for mybrowse.hta).

From my new best friend Jake Lockley and his comment at WeBreakStuff.

Dead horse officially beaten :)

Anil explaining what happened back in the 90s:

Interestingly, most bubble companies, especially those with unsustainable models, ended up flipping to one of the big players (AOL, Microsoft, Yahoo, eBay, later Google) or one of the then-big players (Lycos, Excite, et. al). This would happen after the initial run-up in stock value, and would end with a crash or a slow slide, after which the VCs made money, founders made a little bit of money, and everybody else pretty much ended up underwater.

So basically bubble companies would go IPO, get a huge run-up in value, then their stock would deflate, and a floundering has-been Dot Com would be sold to a major tech figure for a few stacks of bennies. Now, small teams are creating mashup faux-companies, generating lots of buzz, and are acquired prior to making any real money. The end result of both scenarios is nearly the same dollar figure.

Is this the new economy? Do revenues no longer matter? Is buzz and site traffic the real measure of success? Are pre-money valuations pulled from thin air, or out of asses, or both?

Since our company/service/network is getting links from everywhere nowadays, I wanted to quickly clear up some confusion regarding the name of what it is we’re doing.

The company is “9rules, Inc.” and the network is “The 9rules Network” or just “9rules.”

These capital R’s dropped everywhere are making our CEO cry in public, and believe me, that’s not pretty. Lowercase r’s are where it’s at. Uppercase is for suckers :-)

Mike and I thought people would get a kick out of it. We believed that the entry was innocent enough and that we put enough of our humor into it to get our point across without sounding too demanding. We were wrong. Shortly after the entry was posted Duncan Riley caught wind of it and wrote:

I’m sure this is an oversight from 9rules and not meant with any evil intent, but not being grateful for getting links, dictating the form, and then insulting people who use an uppercase “R” really isn’t the way to endear yourself to others. As I’ve written at the post: good will is fickle, insult those who help you by linking to you and the only people who are suckers are 9rules.

And as is the case with anything controversial on the Internet it spread. We could see where people would get the idea that the entry was harsh, but after we made some comments we figured it would be over and done with. Wrong.

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch (people we respect and a blog that really is a must-read) wrote an entry titled Top Ten Things You Can Do To Get Blogged and at #10 was our branding entry under the rule “Don’t be a Jerk”. Ouch. With TechCrunch being TechCrunch the entry got linked by many people, one of them being the prolific Steve Rubel. So again we took action and commented and even sent TechCrunch an email hoping to lessen the fire.

Again we thought we were done, but we continued to see comments on other blogs about our linking policy and it started to turn into a meme/joke of sorts. Yesterday we decided to take some action on the subject and this is just one of the good reasons why a company would want a blog. Even though we still hope that people link to us as “9rules” we understand that it doesn’t matter how you are spelling the name, as long as you are linking it. Add this fact with a little bit of our dry humor and we came up with a new linking policy.

What was the effect of writing this entry 12 days after the original one caused all of that commotion? Duncan Riley, the man who started it all, wrote an entry on it with this to say:

Following a fair bit of controversy over a post asking that people link to the network use a lower case “r”, the 9rules network have published a new links policy that to the relief of many demonstrates that these guys aren’t as evil as the first post made out, but more importantly Paul Scrivens has a great sense of humor as well.

If that was the only thing to come out of this then we would have been happy, but to our surprise Michael Arrington, one of the writers for TechCrunch, commented with:

ok, that’s funny. even I’m able to “get it” now. :-)

Now some of the people who read the original’s message will have in their mind the fact that we messed up and it will be hard to change that. In a perfect world the original wouldn’t have happened the way it did, but we feel we came out a bit stronger because of it. Sure it won’t get linked up like the original did, but we were able to show our willingness to admit our mistakes and have a sense of humor about it.

Is that always the answer though? Admit your faults and tell a joke? Of course not. The answer is to probably not make the mistakes in the first place, but we know that is nearly impossible. How many times could Microsoft tell a joke after a virus shuts down 50% of the world’s computers (exaggeration, but you get the point)?

We were quick to comment on the sites where we saw people calling us out. We apologized for how they viewed the entry, but also made sure to justify why we wrote it. If all you do is apologize then not only does it show a weakness in your company’s decision making process, but people will come to expect that you have no problem with making mistakes because all you have to do is say you are sorry.

Don’t take your actions so seriously where you can’t see when you make a mistake, but don’t take your company so lightly where you think telling a joke will get you out of a foot-in-mouth moment. And by all means respond quickly.

With back-to-school shopping and the recent XHTML relaunch of BananaRepublic.com (which doesn’t work in Safari) you would think that traffic to the brother site Gap.com might be sparked a bit, but Gap shows they don’t care by not having an online store up for an entire month. And, no, it’s not a technical issue, it’s a bravado issue.

Gap is building hype and leading customers on, and not in a good way. Screw you Gap, I’m not shopping at your online store now, or in the future when the awe-inspiring Gap.com goes live. Where’s SwichTower for enterprise-class e-commerce stores when you need it?

Gap.com is selecting some (lucky?) users to check out the new site. Doesn’t seem much different to me.

Great review of the new Gap.com — check it out.

For example, we always believed that we could make 9rules a very big deal, otherwise we wouldn’t have started it. Since working on the Network back in May we lost sight of how people viewed us. In our minds we are still small and that’s probably because we know everything that is happening from the inside. Here is just one example of what someone thinks about us:

I think in most markets you are going to have the big 3(gawker, weblogsinc, 9rules) and then the rest. The rest can be successful, but the big 3 will be the most talked about. It will be interesting to see if anybody can dislodge any of the big 3 over the coming year, although I find that highly doubtful. The big 3 in this case appear to have oodles of traffic more than any of the others(including my own).

– Jacob

Comment #4 from Is There Room for Another Blog Network?

Part of the Big 3?! As great as it is to read that, we never saw a Big 3, although we can definitely quantify a Big 2 (WIN and Gawker). That just makes me wonder what other people think of us. How can we check this kind of stuff? Sure Technorati and PubSub have been a big help, but they are just tracking the small amount of people who are actually writing about us. What about the people who have negative feelings towards us, how can we get access to their thoughts if they do not write them down or publish them?

Besides doing some surveys you can’t. However, with the tools the web provides you can track what things are being said by the people who do publish them, and we always like to respond to people regardless of they are critical or give us praise. Yesterday, while looking at my referrer logs I noticed this link from Yay Hooray forums and began to read with earnest. Here are the two comments that made my eyes bulge out of my head:

9rules has attracted some good writers. Personally I don’t see the draw and Paul Scrivens (of 9rules/whitespace) is one of the most annoying human beings in existence.

Yeah Scrivens comes off as a jackass.

While it’s great to be talked about, it’s not so great having people think of me this way because the feelings they associate with me are probably the same ones they associate with the Network (another issue to discuss later). So what could I do in this situation? If it was just myself that represented the company I would have nothing to worry about, but I have to look out for the reputations of Mike, Matthew, Colin and 60 other people so this was definitely a big deal for me.

I decided I would simply go along with it by saying:

I agree I can’t stand the guy and I have to look at him in the mirror and sleep in the same bed with him everyday.

The end result? I am not sure if the feelings of the original commentors changed, but I seem to have garnered some respect by a few others for doing so. The whole point was to not make myself look worse off and I think I accomplished that. I could have left the whole thread well enough alone, but that leaves my reputation in someone else’s hands instead of my own.

You can’t be aware of how everyone views your company or yourself, but you can be aware of the ones that are willing to speak out and its those people that you must initiate conversations with. That’s what makes weblogs so important for companies. You can’t control what people say about you, but you can control the medium that it takes place in and therefore manage your reputation a bit easier. That’s the value we see in blogs.

As for checking your reputation? Just read what people have to say about you, but keep it in perspective. Some individuals just have a negative viewpoint about certain things while others may throw nothing but praise your way. It’s your job to be selective and decide whose comments are the ones your company needs to worry about.

This is why we talk about not every business needing a blog because if done improperly you will get some major backlash like the Juicy Fruit folks are receiving right now. What makes this silly is that if they replaced the world “blog” with something else on their site then there would be no complaining. Instead, they are riding on the coattails of blogging to try and generate buzz. At least they got the buzz part right.

What else is wrong with the site? The way the permalinks work is one thing. If you clicked on the link above you should’ve landed on Day 39. However, if you click on the next entry link the url doesn’t change (at least not in Firefox OS X). I like the idea behind the site, but I don’t like it’s execution and that is what is most important.

Just another example of Old School Marketing trying to work in a New Media world.

Normally I would just leave a snarky comment and be on my way, but this time, I ran into something a little out of the ordinary. After I clicked through from Bloglines, I wrote my comment and tried to submit it when MovableType threw me an error that said effectively that “The Entry Does Not Exist.” I’m used to strange web errors (hey, I’m a designer, weird things happen) so I went back to the SVN homepage so I could reload the entry, and maybe it would work this time.

When I went back to the SVN homepage, the entry had disappeared. Gone. Not linked anymore. Just in case the link is taken down completely by the time you read this, I managed to screengrab the entry and the negative comments that were posted before it was pulled. AdSense has been removed from the screenshot, and the design/content is ©37signals:

So What Really Happened?

You can see from the comments that other SVN readers thought the entry wasn’t very good either. So why was it pulled from the homepage and effectively hidden from SVN readers? It could be because it was pushed live by accident and wasn’t totally finished yet (even though it has a nice little conclusion) but maybe it was because the reaction to the entry was so negative and the 37signals crew wanted to stifle reader comments lest they reflect poorly on their company and products.

Conspiracy theory or the truth? What’s your take?

Updated 9am Tuesday: Jason weighed in on the conspiracy theory in the comments, and it proved Occam’s Razor to be true — the simplest answer is usually the best. The simple answer is that the entry wasn’t meant to go live that early, and Jason wanted to keep it for posting today instead. No conspiracy theory. No cover-up. Just call us the lone gunman.

Oakley

In my lifetime, I’ve owned 6 pairs of Oakley sunglasses which include my very recent (yesterday) purchase of the new Why 8.2 wireframes, which cost way more than one should ever probably spend on sunglasses. Oakley is known for using the highest quality materials, the most scientifically-tested lenses, and the most exacting engineering specifications in the eyewear industry, so by purchasing them you have already made an investment in a high quality product.

Under Armour

Under Armour started with a former Maryland Terrapin hating traditional cotton t-shirts because they became heavy with absorbed sweat during games. That football player, Kevin Plank, decided he could put out a better product and capture a market that was traditionally dominated by large sportswear companies. His company made the Fast 50 in 2002, and now generates hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and is used by major sports teams in every league, and across the globe.

When I think of high tech eyewear, I only think of Oakley. When I think of sports performance apparel, I only think of Under Armour. Their reputation as innovators drives their product, and I can’t think of anything better to drive sales than innovation and creativity. Great job guys.