everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Current Events

  • Blogs on the cover of BusinessWeek

    It’s going to be another busy week – BusinessWeek has a lengthy cover story on why companies need to pay attention to blogs.

    Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite.

    At the same time BusinessWeek Online launched five new blogs (powered by Movable Type) at Blogspotting.net

  • The King of San Francisco

    The King of San Francisco

    As we were driving through the city Tyler asked who lived in the majestic building that is known as the City Hall. I said that the Mayor of San Francisco worked there but he didn’t know that term, “Mayor.” I said that the Mayor was someone who ran the city.

    “Oh, so the king of San Francisco lives there?”

    Hmm. With all the hubub over the Bay Bridge, a King might come in handy.

  • Thomas Nelson Corporate Blogging Policy

    One of the best corporate blogging policy guidelines I’ve seen. Written in plain English with just the right tone; not too corporate, not too casual – it’s just the right. I guess that’s to be expected coming from a publishing company. Their goals are simple:

    • To raise the visibility of our company,
    • To make a contribution to our industry, and
    • To give the public a look at what goes on within a real live publishing company.

    They also have established a Blog Oversight Committee, “a group of fellow-employee bloggers who are committed to promoting
    blogging within our company and making sure that the Company’s
    interests are served.” The BOC is there to evaluate new blogs to make sure they set the right tone and be there to provide direction if there is any doubt on what one can or cannot post on their blog. Their carrot and stick is inclusion into the corporate blog aggregator page which is equivalent to an endorsement.

    If you would like to have us link to your blog, you must submit it to the BOC. Before doing so, you should design your blog and write at least one entry. Once you have done this, send an e-mail to Gave Wicks with a link to your blog. The BOC will then review your blog and notify you whether or not it meets the criteria.

    The idea that one should dive in, set up the design and make their first post before submitting their blog for evaluation is a great idea too. Only those that are serious about blogging will get to this stage and by the time they have, they will have thought about their message and tone.

    It is also interesting to note that Thomas Nelson views each blog as the employee’s creation and therefore does not endorse a specific blogging package nor do they allow employee’s to expense costs for the blog (they also allow employees to run advertising on their blogs to offset expenses). This gets back to something Andy Lark explained to me. Whether they blog about their company or not, make sure to own their blog and it’s content. Your thoughts and relationships in a blog develop outside the context of your corporate affiliation and his view is that your blog, being the embodiment of all this, should be portable and follow you from company to company. This is why Andy established a blog on TypePad even while he was an employee at Sun which makes their own blogging product.

  • Real Estate as an API

    This is a great case when two APIs get hooked up to make something greater than what each service could offer on its own. Paul Rademach, a tech lead for animation tools at Dreamworks, has connected Google Maps to Craigslist to present a visual UI for real estate listings. You can set your location and price parameters and get a map that you can zoom in on and scroll with pinmarks for every “hit.”

    A yellow pin indicates that photos are associated with the listing and clicking on the pin will bring up the information from Craigslist as shown in the image on the left.

    I dreamed something like this would be possible with other layers being added in as needed like those old Mylar overlays you would see in atlases or anatomy textbooks. I can already think of two overlays that I’d like to see if I were a homebuyer. Comparables and School Districts. Once geo-locater enabled web services are exposed for this data, it would be fairly trivial. I think much harder is getting this data.

  • Bite PR Blogging Seminar – Mark Jen

    Mark Jen was fired from Google. He broke a few cardinal rules such as not being sensitive to Google’s culture which didn’t support blurting things out. He also broke a cardinal rule of blogging by deleting posts. This is a huge red flag that will only draw attention to the post which can be retrieved from RSS feeds and browser caches. He also mentioned sensitive information right before 4th Quarter earnings were released.

    Mark now works for Plaxo.

    Plaxo has a blog but they’ve made a decision to segment the comments over onto the forums.

  • Bite PR Blogging Seminar – Doc Searls

    I’m attending the Bite blogging seminar at the W in San Francisco. Swish venue with not only lemons and lime in the drinking water but strawberries.

    Great line up of speakers, about 50 – 60 people seated. They’ve got wireless so I’ll pass on some of the highlights.

    Doc Searls – talks about his writing of Cluetrain Manefesto

    On Blogging – email that I would write with “cc:world”

    On time it takes to blog – if you look at your email, the volume you put out in email probably exceeds what’s up on my blog.

    On marketing – it’s about conversations and not messages. Branding was a concept that P&G brought from the cattle industry. Branding is about putting out 8 boxes of soap and “singing about the difference.”

    On writing as content – John Perry Barlow once said that he never heard about content until the container business felt threatened. Once you start talking about “content” you’re already off base.

    On the Net – it’s a place, not a medium. The nodes of the net are not separated by time or space, a blog post is immediate. Once you You don’t send a message using “content.” You’re having a conversation in a place. You are “on the net,” you use real estate metaphors to describe the net.

    Update: I left off the best line of the conference. As a parting thought, Doc described (and I’m paraphrasing” his life before blogging as one of, “pushing many big rocks a short way uphill” and his life now as a blogger as, “rolling many snowballs down a hill with the compelling ideas gaining mass as they roll downhill.”

  • Maps? Cool. Satellite Overlay? Wicked!

    So those of us on the bleeding edge have all seen Google Maps and have commented upon the clever use of XML datasets to create a seamless browsing experience. Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, BLAM! Google took the wraps of an overlay which provides a satellite image of any map you bring up.

    This includes driving directions so you can zoom in and “fly along” your commute to work. Nice touch is that the speech bubbles that are used to annotate the addresses generate a shadow on the satellite image.

  • Happy Anniversary

    Happy Anniversary

    Today is our 7th wedding anniversary. The way it’s been lately with our two kids and work, we’re lucky to catch a dinner at Applebee’s and call it a night out. Here are some old photos from simpler time before all that, when we were able to get all our friends and family into a room for a day of unfettered celebration.

    She looks just as dazzling today as she does in this photo but she stopped wearing the veil years ago.

  • Ship of Fools

    In case you missed it, here’s a round up of some of the mischief making the rounds today (check back later as I’ll update this as the day goes on)