Singaporean student shuts blog after libel threat

Reporters Without Borders says a student in Singapore was forced to shut down his blog this week for fear of a libel action by the head of a government body. Article on the New Zealand herald.

See the official apology from Singaporean bloggers Acid Flask.

10 million Blogs!

Blogpulse now references 10 million blogs. An interesting fact I lifted from their announcement is that only 51% of them are active (someone posted something in the last 90 days).
Congratulations as well to their marcomm department for sending a pre-announcement to bloggers.

UK Election Blogs

The UK election is in full swing and although I am not allow to vote, I enjoy following the campaigns and debating issues with my friends and colleagues. The 3 majour parties haven't made a clever use of the web so far but there are some attempts to win voters through some straight blog talking:

Labour Party
Conservative
Liberal Democrats

I could not write a better review of these blogs than Brian Wheeler on the BBC site.

Blogs Will Change Your Business

Business Week is running a cover story on blogs. You will not learn anything knew but the article is well written and contains all the usual tales of the blogosphere (from Captain Morgan, Dan Rather, GM, Netflix to the "Queen of the sky" and the tsunami).

The fact that the magazine is pushing it on its front page will hopefully act as a wake-up call for businesses and "communication professionals" who still think that what happens on a computer screen only matters to geeks. The authors are introducing their new blog as well, which will be about: blogs.

On another note, I just came back from Brussels (where I did a presentation on blogs to some of my European colleagues) and it struck me that all these blogs scare and success stories are US based. Where are the juicy European bloggers stories?

Online UK Election Predictor

My UK colleagues created this neat application, in collaboration with our Public Affairs practice to help visualise how percentage gains for each political parties at the election will impact the number of seats they hold in the House of Commons. If you are interested in UK politics, you can run simulations and get daily campaign coverage updates.

What exactly is Blogpulse counting?

I am a casual user of Blogpulse for trends graphs and while preparing for a presentation, I suddenly wondered what Blogpulse was actually measuring on its "Trend Search" charting tool.

For example, see that dummy graph I created (I was hungry). The X axis is time, and I guess the unit is a day. But what is the Y axis?

It says "Percent of all Blogs". What does that mean? Does Blogpulse counts the number of blogs mentioning my keywords or the number of occurence of these keywords across all blogs for a particular day?

I looked on the site and on the FAQs but no mention of the methodology.

I talked to a few people I know who use Blogpulse and no one knew.

A picture is worth a thousand links

Buzztracker is a software that visualizes frequencies and relationships between locations mentioned in articles from the Google world news directory.

Newsmap provides a visual layer, similar to some stock markets movements visualisation tools, over Google news and graphically shows the stories with the largest volume of coverage. You can even narrow down headlines per countries (covered by Google News only).

Both services are free.

Breakfast Bytes

My Australian colleagues run regular seminars called "Breakfast Bytes" on blogs and new communication technologies. I love the format, the energy and the fun.

Carat launches blogs service

"The agency is giving advertisers the opportunity to extend their online ads by placing ads on blogs or blog networks. It will also offer clients a service where it will create a blog to encourage communication between the brand and customer and understand what is being said about a brand within the blogging community." Story on Digital Bulletin.

Oh dear... looks like Captain Morgan will have many siblings soon.

Are we seeing the last days of blogs without pop-ups, sponsored links, banners and "near missed" contextual ads?

This is my opinion. Sponsored by...

Journalists support Apple bloggers

Eight US newspapers and the Associated Press agency have thrown their support behind three bloggers sued by Apple. Full story on the BBC.

The blogger with no name.

Blogs are getting increasingly popular and it is now safe to assume that if you dish about your boss or colleagues on a blog, you will be found out.

Fortunately, the EEF is giving away tips on how to blog anonymously. A quick summary here:

1. Use a Pseudonym and Don't Give Away Any Identifying Details
2. Use Anonymising Technologies
3. Limit Your Audience
4. Don't Be Googleable

I wanted to find out if blogs were the ultimate catharsis for abused employees:

No.

Google to Start Video Blog

Google has announced that it will soon start a video blogging service, where users can archive their video clips.

Trust MEdia: Edelman and Intelliseek categorise bloggers

Edelman and Intelliseek released a white paper on the impact of blogs.

Titled: “Trust MEdia: How Real People Are Finally Being Heard” , the paper is available in PDF for download from Intelliseek (you must register first) or from Edelman.

One of the highlight is a catalog of popular blogs organised by categories. The classification methodology is described but I would be curious to see the difference in popularity between bloggers within a same category. For example, if you use number of links as a criteria for "popularity" and check out some blogs using technorati, then rank them, you will find huge gaps in the number of links between them.

In consumer tech, Engadget has 10,534 links and is most linked blog. Using this technique, I found that the 3rd most popular is Doc Searls with 5,240 links (half the links within 3 ranks only). PDC bloggers would be the 7th most popular but has 170 links only. What a drop! It goes downhill from there.

I am curious to see whether this is a pattern across all categories where you will only have 3 to 4 star bloggers with loads of links then a huge drop in number of links for the others.

Overall, I must say that the report is a good read and provides compelling arguments for marketers to warm up to blogs.

Should Captain Morgan Walk The Plank?

My friend Guy sent me this link to Captain Morgan Rum’s blog. I don’t know the brand (I don’t think they sell in Europe) but it looks like an easy sell for an ad agency: the brand has character, speaks its mind and a blog would be the perfect setting to “create a community of interest around the brand values to generate positive WOM”.

What amused me most is not the blog per say, it’s pretty dull but the string of conversations about this blog complaining how lame it is.

I think it is less bad that the Mazda experiment as at least it allows for comments, and there are regular postings. Although there are some speculations on how such new blog got so many comments so quickly. Gus thinks that Captain Morgan should thank the agency’s “assistants, interns, secretaries, college students, elance or maybe just one guy/gal with a strong pot of coffee and a really wild imagination.” I would agree with that.

Noah Brier comments that it’s not a blog as it has no RSS feed. It’s an interesting point. I read this survey from Blogads who polled over 30,000 bloggers and found that 72% of respondents never read blogs through RSS.

The lack of RSS didn’t bother me too much but I was irritated by three things:

- The Captain do not reply to comments on his blog. This is hardly surprising. Ad agencies are so used to shout loud about products that they became death and as such can’t hear what customers say anymore. I would think that DM and PR agencies do a better job at sustaining dialogs.
- To post a comment, you have to register and provide too many details. It’s like opening the floodgate to a tide of unwanted junk mails. The incentive to provide my home address needs to be stronger than a post on a blog.
- When you post a comment, you get a nice message saying: “Comment Posted! Since I'm busy with the Blog AND maintaining a full-time party schedule, your posting might not show up right away. So, cut me some slack and have a little patience... - The Captain”. That’s a nice way to say: wait until our moderator wakes up and he will see whether your comments are flattering enough to be included”. That’s lame.

So should Captain Morgan walk the plank? If you take it as a commercial blog and therefore have very low expectations, it is not too bad in its category. But ultimately time will decide. When the ad agency’s interns will cease to be incentivised to keep it alive, it will be up to the good decent Internet people to judge. The ones who don’t bother giving up their home address so they can have a discussion with a bottle of rum.

Who Blogs? Bloggers Demographic Survey

A really interesting suvey from BlogAds who polled over 30,000 bloggers. Quite a few surprises:

• 75% of bloggers are male, over 30 years old.
• 43% have household revenue of over US$90,000.
• Only 4.7% of bloggers are under 20 years old…. That shoots down a marketing myth: “blogs, oh yeah… I heard about that… we’ll definitely look into it for our youth offer…”
• 1 out of 4 respondents claim to dedicate 20% of “media time » to blogs.
• Finally, only 27.6% of respondents use RSS… most will read blogs as they do websites.

More politicians write blogs to bypass mainstream media

Great although not very deep article on how politicians use blogs to reach their current/future constituents. Blogs convey a feeling of intimacy (like reading someone's diary) and politicians know that they can leverage blogs better than traditional websites or newspapers when it comes to make their views and opinions more likeable.

IBM, Spam and Spammers

IBM is set to unveil a service Tuesday that will send unwanted e-mails back to the spammers who send them. It is reminiscent of the Lycos Europe initiative, albeit the latter was more of a PR stunt than a serious attempt to address the problem. As usual, the arguments against such approach are the added load to the network. The service is said to return the spam directly back to the computer, not just the e-mail account, that sent it. I guess that would have been handy to Mark Mumma, a web designer/hosting provider who is beeing sued by Cruise.com after he asked them to stop spamming him... read his account of the story here.

EuroDisney Blog University Postponed

The New Communications Forum scheduled for the 5th/6th of April at Eurodisney has been postponed.

No reasons why on the official website. I was interested to attend and maybe contribute to the forum but unfortunately my email and phone calls to the organisers were left unanswered... could it be a communication problem?

Yahoo jumps on the blogwagon

Yahoo is launching its blogging offer: Yahoo 360 on March 29 by invitation only. The service is expected to integrate existing products such as instant messenger and groups. Users will have the option to restrict viewership of their blogs.

Blog, un’opportunità o una minaccia?

I just came back from a conference on blogging organised by our Italian colleagues of Digital PR in Milan. The event was well attended which shows that blogging is definitely top of mind for communication professional across Europe.

Program was as follow:

1. Alberto Mari, the author of “Blog e Wiki” spoke about blogs, how they work and how they differ from websites or newsgroups.
2. Vincenzo De Tommaso from Digital PR gave us an overview of blogging in the Italian market.
3. I presented on corporate blogs, starting from why blogs are so successful to how corporations could use them. I will upload a copy of the presentation soon so stay tuned…
4. Luca De Biase, a journalist and lecturer at the University of Padova talked about blogs impact in the media landscape.

Or at least, this is what I understood :-)

During the event, I also had the pleasure to meet with Paolo Valdemarin from evectors. They sell RSS feeds solutions, notably to the BBC.

There is a blog on the event but it is only available in Italian. See comments from one attendee (there is an automatic English translation available).