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.)

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.

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.

1. No Author Biographies
2. No Author Photo
3. Nondescript Posting Titles
4. Links Don't Say Where They Go
5. Classic Hits are Buried
6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation
7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
8. Mixing Topics
9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

• As of October 2005, Technorati is now tracking 19.6 Million weblogs
• The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months
• The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, with no signs of letup in growth
• About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day
• About a new weblog is created each second
• 2% - 8% of new weblogs per day are fake or spam weblogs
• Between 700,000 and 1.3 Million posts are made each day
• About 33,000 posts are created per hour, or 9.2 posts per second
• An additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are from spam or fake blogs, on average

• 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

• 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.

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