As the number of blogs has grown, more consumers are keeping Web diaries dedicated exclusively to their favorite brands. Most of them are written without the consent of the companies that own the brands. But some companies are starting to pay attention to blogs, using them as a kind of informal network of consumer opinion.

Organizations are now spending more and more on getting people to their websites. However, just because someone visits your website doesn’t mean you have reached them. Your website may be too cluttered, with too many messages to too many audiences.

Every time you target a particular audience, you make another audience less visible and important. If you are trying to talk to 10 audiences on your homepage, you might as well be talking to none. As readers quickly scan your page, they see lots of messages that are not for them. Impatient scan readers like to be made feel special. Otherwise, they hit the Back button.

Every time you add a piece of content you make it more difficult for another piece of content to be easily found. Sure, you only make it a little more difficult. However, as you keep adding content, the navigation becomes less intuitive, and the search less effective. (Most people will not go to the second page of search results.)

The Night Of The Internet is the annual meeting place for the main players of the Belgian e-marketing industry and advertisers that have discovered the many advantages of interactive marketing. Organized for the first time in 1998, this widely acclaimed event is also the platform for the celebration of two series of awards.

While the McDonald's Corporation has not jumped headfirst into blogging, it certainly is further along the path of acceptance than many companies of its size.

Last week, the company began an internal program that introduced corporate blogs, available only on the corporate intranet, behind the firewall. While this is seen as a small first step, it's an important one in a company the size of McDonald's, said Steve Wilson .....

..... When Wilson first sat down with McDonald's senior executives to talk about the need for a blogging strategy, the first step was to explain to those executives just what a blog was and why they should care. After that, he showed them that even if they chose to ignore blogs, they wouldn't be going away.

"We showed them that there were already members of our crews blogging, operators blogging, and customers blogging," Wilson said. He then showed the executives results of a blog search that found 675,000 entries by McDonald's employees, franchisees, or customers talking about McDonald's in one 90-day period. "That got their attention very quickly," he added.

01. Employ a blog spammer. Beat them shitless once they've been hired (hazing spammers isn't illegal), but then employ them to help you figure out what all those asshats are doing. After they've told you the secrets, beat them shitless again.

02. Probationary Period. Only allow new users to create a limited amount of blogs. Say, only one for the first three months. Then, if that goes well, let 'em create six. Then, if THAT goes well, let 'em create six more. Offer carrots. "You've had your blog for a year. Happy birthday! You now have XYZ access!" Oh, isn't that nice. Slap rel="nofollow" on all outbound links for the first X months. I realize rel="nofollow" isn't perfect, and it's not going to stop people from doing what they're likely to do anyway. However, give spammers one less reason to come to you to do their dirty deeds.

03. Sponsor a Blogger. The "new" way to get a Blogger account is to be referred by someone else. Then, if the invited one screws up and starts spamming the blogosphere with bunk or copied content, revoke both accounts - the inviter and the invitee.

04. New banner button. You're showing me ways to get my own blog at the top of every single Blogspot page. However, since I don't have the Google toolbar installed *GASP* - I can't report spammers! What's stopping you from putting a "Flag" button in the banner, too? Let anybody report the problem, easily and quickly. NEVERMIND, I just saw it appear in the toolbar - and may have missed it before! Just flagged 10 out of 20 I visited... blatant problem children. Consider this point a note to all you do-gooders.

05. Take every experience seriously. Yesterday was not the first time anybody reported on the Blogspot honeypot problem. Even with Dave Sifry reporting that only a small portion of today's blog are splogs, how will the ratio sit in a few months? I can tell you, I get far more email spam than I do legit emails these days - and I get a lot of emails every day.

06. Cross reference your databases. I know you're tracking this stuff effectively in Google. You probably know which URLs are spam and which aren't. You likely know which ones are link farms with self referential links and which aren't. When a new Blogspot blog points to something that Google already knows is a "bad seed," automatically suspend that Blogspot account. You're Google, man...

07. Reward flaggers. Send 'em a t-shirt for every X thousand VALID splogs they flag. Give folks an incentive, and... it seems that everybody goes ga-ga for a t-shirt. Seriously. Even let 'em parade their VALID numbers somewhere on their blog. "I've killed X thousand splogs to date... and all I got was this lousy t-shirt." But it's NOT lousy - it's a good idea.

08. Audit randomly. Say, a few times a year, you do some kind of "Hey, we just wanted to make sure you're enjoying our service" message interruption when someone tries to access their account. It's a random hoop to jump through, and if you do it right, the true users won't mind a bit. Flag the account so that they have to answer a question to regain access to their account, via the Web or otherwise. XML-RPC folks will be forced to log in and answer a random (non-invasive) query.

09. Flag "hot" keywords. If you don't know what those might be, talk to your buddies over in the AdWords department. Any kind of pr0n subdomain references should be instantly earmarked for review as well.

10. No more dashes. Seems a good chunk of splogs have dashes in the subdomain. Eliminate that as a possibility. Seems that most "real" users don't care about using dashes.

Weblogs are often too internally focused and ignore key usability issues, making it hard for new readers to understand the site and trust the author.
To reach new readers and respect your existing readers' time constraints, test your weblog against the following usability problems.

• Technorati volgt op dit moment 19,6 miljoen blogs
• De blogosfeer verdubbelt nu elke 5 maanden
• De blogosfeer is nu 30 keer groter dan 3 jaar geleden
• Elke dag komen er zo'n 70.000 nieuwe blogs bij
• Elke dag is dat één blog per seconde
• Tussen 2 en 8% van de nieuwe blogs zijn spamblogs
• Dagelijks worden er tussen de 700.000 en 1.300.000 berichten gepubliceerd
• Dat zijn er zo'n 33.000 per uur (9,2 per seconde)
• Gemiddeld zijn zo'n 50.000 berichten per dag (5,8%) afkomstig van een spamblog

1. I am currently out at a job interview and will reply to you if I fail to get the position. Be prepared for my mood.

2. You are receiving this automatic notification because I am out of the office. If I was in, chances are you wouldn’t have received anything at all.

3. I will be unable to delete all the unread, worthless emails you send me until I return from holiday on 4 April. Please be patient and your mail will be deleted in the order it was received.

4. Thank you for your email. Your credit card has been charged £5.99 for the first ten words and £1.99 for each additional word in your message.

5. The e-mail server is unable to verify your server connection and is unable to deliver this message. Please restart your computer and trysending again. (The beauty of this is that when you return, you can see how many in-duh-viduals did this over and over).

6. Thank you for your message, which has been adde d to a queuing system… You are currently in 352nd place, and can expect to receive a reply in approximately 19 weeks.

7. I’ve run away to join a different circus.

8. I will be out of the office for the next 2 weeks for medical reasons… When I return, please refer to me as “Margaret” instead of “Steve”.

• Portability of video content
  
• Blogs
  
• The rise of celebrity weeklies
  
• Media transparency
  
• The growth of Hispanic media
  
• Business woes for newspapers
  
• Digitalization of print media
  
• Media consolidation
  
• Source agnostic/disintermediation
  
• Refining media measurement

"Weblogs brengen politiek dichter bij de burger"

Dat is de uitkomst van het afstudeeronderzoek waarmee Jeroen Steeman, student Nieuwe Media en Digitale Cultuur aan de Universiteit Utrecht op 21 oktober afstudeert. In de relatie tussen burgers en politici spelen media een uiterst belangrijke rol. Maar door de vercommercialisering van de traditionele media als televisie, radio en kranten verliezen de burgers het vertrouwen in de politiek. Het onderzoek naar weblogs en politiek wijst uit dat weblogs - zowel van politici, als van niet-politici - deze trend kunnen keren.

Het onderzoek gaat nader in op de verschillende kenmerken die weblogs kunnen hebben in politieke communicatie. Het gaat hierbij om weblogs als nieuwsmedium, als discussieplatform en als plaats voor het herbergen van een virtuele gemeenschap. Al deze drie functies hebben verschillende consequenties in de communicatie tussen politici en burgers.

Ten eerste zorgen weblogs ervoor dat er meer mogelijkheden ontstaan voor burgers om politiek nieuws te publiceren. Ze zijn niet meer afhankelijk van traditionele media om belangrijk nieuws naar buiten te brengen. Weblogs democratiseren het nieuws. Iedereen kan immers een weblog openen en gaan schrijven, maar een weblog kan ook potentieel door iedereen gelezen worden. Hierdoor zijn burgers in staat om rondom één politiek onderwerp verschillende invalshoeken te lezen en zo de mogelijke vervorming van het nieuws door traditionele media en politici zelf te omzeilen.

Deze democratisering van het nieuws zorgt er ten tweede ook voor dat burgers kunnen participeren in het publieke debat. Een weblog is uitstekend geschikt om op te discussiëren. Dat kan doordat bezoekers reageren onder een bericht op één weblog, maar dat kan ook doordat verschillende webloggers ieder op hun eigen weblogs met elkaar in discussie gaan. Vervolgens kunnen ook politici zich in dit debat mengen, wederom zonder tussenkomst van traditionele media.

Tenslotte zijn politici door weblogs in staat om een actieve virtuele gemeenschap van lezers te vormen. Deze virtuele gemeenschap van trouwe lezers kan vervolgens gevraagd worden om online of offline actie te ondernemen. De persoonlijke netwerken van de leden van een gemeenschap kunnen er voor zorgen dat meer mensen zich gaan interesseren voor deze weblogs en zo dus voor meer aandacht voor politiek zorgen.

Om te voelen hoe het is om met 'de poten in de modder te staan' heeft Jeroen Steeman tijdens zijn onderzoek regelmatig proefhoofdstukken van zijn scriptie gepubliceerd op zijn eigen weblog, Minitrue.nl. Daar schrijft hij af en toe over interessante onderwerpen rondom weblogs en politiek, maar ook over willekeurige zaken die hij interessant vindt.

De scriptie heeft als titel Blogocratie en is online zowel in html als in pdf gepubliceerd op http://minitrue.nl/blogocratie/.

The Blog Herald maakt regelmatig een berekening van het aantal weblogs per land wat resulteert in het aantal weblogs wereldwijd.
Eind juli was wereldwijd het aantal weblogs 70 miljoen en nu schat hij dat er wereldwijd 100 miljoen weblogs zijn.

There are two sets of figures: based on major blog using countries the figure would be around 75 million, which is a patchy figure because its difficult to count blogs based on the country of origin due to the worldwide phenomenon of people using US companies. Based on blogs created at major hosts (a more accurate measure) the figure is actually 134-144 million. So I’m taking a round 100 million + blogs figure.

• Read and understand. Make sure you really understand what is being said. It’s easy to read something negative and jump in with a response that might not be as informed as it should be. That just causes more trouble.
• Learn from it. Sometimes you’ll get a negative post because you were wrong. Take it as an educational experience.
• Don’t get defensive. This just makes matters worse. Take a step back and try to be objective. Thing long and hard before you respond to negative feedback.
• Ignore trolls. Do not engage in a discussion with someone who is just looking for a fight. Ignore the comment, or delete it if you feel comfortable with it.
• Post your comment policy. Let people know if there is are types of comments you don’t want to see. For example, if you don’t want off-topic comments, let your readers know.
• Respond with kindness and a willingness to understand. I don’t know how many times I’ve turned a bad comment into a good one by simply trying to understand the point of view being offered and taking a positive attitude.
• Admit when you are wrong. Your readers will actually respect you more if you acknowledge your mistakes. We all make them, don’t beat yourself up over it.
• Don’t take it personally. Sometimes it may seem like a negative comment is a personal attack, but this is often not the case.
• Take it offline. I’ve found that engaging in an e-mail conversation with someone who I’m butting heads with is very helpful in resolving the situation.
• Use self-deprecating humor. Let’s face it. If you have a blog that you post to with any frequency there are going to be times when you screw up. Sometimes this can actually be pretty darn funny if you can take a step back and look at it through another’s eyes. Take teasing from your readers with a grain of salt and if you can’t beat ‘em—join ‘em.
• Realize before you hit “post” that it’s a big world out there and you’re not going to please everyone every-time.

• About 30 percent of the observed waking day was spent with media as the sole activity versus 20.8 percent for work activity, while an additional 39 percent of the day was spent with media while involved in some other activity
• In any given hour no less than 30 percent of those studied were engaged in some way with television, and in some hours of the day that figure rose to 70 percent
• While television is still by far the dominant medium in terms of the time average Americans spend daily with media at 240.9 minutes, the computer has emerged as the second most significant media device at about 120 minutes
• About 30 percent of all media time is spent exposed to more than one medium at a time
• People ages 18 to 24 spend less time online than any other age group except those older than 65
• Levels of concurrent media exposure were higher among those 40 to 65 than people 18 to 39
• Women spend more time multitasking with two or more types of media than men
• Use of the Web, e-mail and phones is substantially higher on Fridays than any other day of the week

One of the reasons why even the best intranets need to be marketed to employees is that computer-based workers are often exceptionally busy and do not have time to explore and surf the intranet. They need to be educated as to what is there and why it is of value to both them as individual workers and also to the organization as a whole. Employees need to be ‘sold’.

Backlinks enable you to keep track of other pages on the web that link to your posts. For instance, suppose Alice writes a blog entry that Bob finds interesting. Bob then goes to his own blog and writes a post of his own about it, linking back to Alice's original post. Now Alice's post will automatically show that Bob has linked to it, and it will provide a short snippet of his text and a link to his post. What it all works out to is a way of expanding the comment feature such that related discussions on other sites can be included along with the regular comments on a post.

A generation has grown up using the internet as its primary means of communication, thanks to an early grasp of online communities and messaging services as well as simple technology allowing web users to launch a personal weblog, or blog, without any specialist technical knowledge. On average, people between 14 and 21 spend almost eight hours a week online, but it is far from a solitary activity. There are signs of a significant generation gap, and rather than using the internet as their parents do - as an information source, to shop or to read newspapers online - most young people are using it to communicate with one another.

About half of that time is spent chatting to friends in online communities or using messaging services, while another hour is spent emailing. The internet may be a window into their personal realm, but it is not a window on the world for young people: only one in 10 say they use it to keep up with news and current affairs.

THIS BOOK is for anyone who wants more online traffic, more revenue, more followers, more attention, more interest, more donations or more influence. The paradox, of course, is that the best way to get all these things is by delivering less.

Everyone’s an Expert is designed for people who are already familiar with the idea of blogs (hey, you might even have a blog) and AdWords and RSS and other Web 2.0 goodies.

• 26% of Americans age 65 and older go online, compared with 67% of those age 50-64, 80% of those age 30-49, and 84% of those age 18-29.
• 57% of African-Americans go online, compared with 70% of whites.
• 29% of those who have not graduated from high school have access, compared with 61% of high school graduates and 89% of college graduates.
• 60% of American adults who do not have a child living at home go online, compared with 83% of parents of minor children.

• Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of users are aware of RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS.
• 27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology.
• 28% of Internet users are aware of podcasting, but only 2% currently subscribe to podcasts.
• Even tech-savvy “Aware RSS Users” prefer to access RSS feeds via user-friendly, browser-based experiences (e.g., My Yahoo!, Firefox, My MSN).
• My Yahoo! has the highest awareness and use of any RSS-enabled product

Word is out, and it’s true: VeriSign has acquired the assets of Dave Winer’s weblogs.com. I’m sure Dave will have plenty to say on the subject, but weblogs.com this past year has reached a point where Dave needed to either a) invest significant capital into the development of Weblogs 2.0 – a ping server to handle the next several years of traffic growth, b) sell it to someone else who would do the same, or c) watch as the current system slowly (or maybe quickly) succumbed to the ever-growing stream of pings. Last Thursday weblogs.com processed just under 2 million (1.96M) pings for the day. When we started talking with Dave, a couple months back, the ping totals were barely half of that, and the load even then on the servers made pinging weblogs a chancy proposition during peak posting times (late morning and mid-evening in the US). For a long time, ping servers could be stood up as a single box running on a fast business DSL connection. Those days have passed at least for the popular ping servers; pings are well on their way to requiring serious infrastructure.

Elke seconde (augustus 2005) komt er minimaal één weblog bij. Per dag worden er wereldwijd 900.000 berichten geplaatst op al die weblogs. Ook Nederland draagt een aardig steentje bij. Exacte aantallen ontbreken, maar het aantal Nederlandse weblogs zal ergens tussen de 600.000 en 1 miljoen liggen.

Om de wereld van weblogs te ontdekken brengt Pearson Eduction Benelux het praktische boek Snel op weg Express - Weblogs uit. Dit boek is bedoeld voor iedereen die geïnteresseerd is in weblogs en er zelf mee aan de slag wil. Alle belangrijke facetten die te maken hebben met webloggen komen ter sprake. Aan de hand van interessante praktijkvoorbeelden en interviews met toonaangevende bloggers, leert de lezer waar deze op moet letten en hoe hij zijn eigen weblog succesvol kunt maken.

De volgende onderwerpen komen onder andere uitgebreid aan bod:

Waarom mensen bloggen en de invloed van weblogs.

Persoonlijke weblog, onderwerpweblog, bedrijfsweblog, nieuwsweblog en shockweblog.

Tekstblogs, fotoblogs, videoblogs, podcasting, vodcasting en moblogging

Zelf weblogs zoeken en volgen met RSS en trends ontdekken in de blogosphere.

Veel interviews met bekende Nederlandse bloggers, inclusief onmisbare tips.

Praktische uitleg van RSS met veel voorbeelden.

De vormgeving, de onderdelen en de indeling van weblogs.

Zelf bloggen met Blogger, Web-log.nl, Pivot en MSN-Spaces (via website).

Promotie en etiquette van een eigen weblog.

Extra voorbeelden staan op de speciale website die bij het boek hoort.

1. Legibility Problems
2. Non-Standard Links
- Make obvious what's clickable: for text links, use colored, underlined text (and don't underline non-link text).
- Differentiate visited and unvisited links.
- Explain what users will find at the other end of the link, and include some of the key information-carrying terms in the anchor text itself to enhance scannability and search engine optimization (SEO). Don't use "click here" or other non-descriptive link text.
- Avoid JavaScript or other fancy techniques that break standard interaction techniques for dealing with links.
- In particular, don't open pages in new windows (except for PDF files and such).
3. Flash
4. Content That's Not Written for the Web
Writing for the Web means making content: short, scannable, and to the point (rather than full of fluffy marketese).
5. Bad Search
6. Browser Incompatibility
7. Cumbersome Forms
8. No Contact Information or Other Company Info
9. Frozen Layouts with Fixed Page Widths
10. Inadequate Photo Enlargement

Ook zijn er mogelijkheden voor adverteerders om events te sponsoren maar ook eigen ruimtes in te richten. P&G is 1 van de adverteerders dat de mogelijkheden al ontdekt heeft om met deze moeilijk bereikbare groep te communiceren.

Hoewel Habbo hotel gericht is op jonge mensen zijn de principes breder toepasbaar in de interactieve wereld. Christian Batist zal de presentatie over Habbo Hotel houden.

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