Chris Abraham

I have collected the best-of articles from this site and have pulled them out, turned them into plaintext, and am serving them up piping-hot for your enjoyment.

PR Blogging for Brand Promotion

For-profit companies and the modern incarnation of the traditional university have a lot in common. Universities have been using viral, buzz, and word-of-mouth marketing for years in the form of university students, university professors, and especially university alumni networks. Each individual branded by sweatshirts, hats, loyalties, and alumni email addresses.

There is no wonder why Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Yale offer future Presidents lifetime free email addresses — because when smart people share valuable information, people will also notice where that person went to school, thus securing an association between smart people and their alma mater.

Years ago, I served as Managing Director of beehive North America, a software company that developed web applications using a Python-based programming platform called Zope. In order to see where the interest lay, I started the Zope Python User Group and a personal blog that featured my day-to-day while also being the only place where photos, information, and meeting minutes for the User Group could be found. I quickly realized that it is possible to shamelessly self-promote yourself, your wares, your company, and your services if you are perceived as giving way more than you get.

In my case, I used my personal blog to cover monthly ZPUG meetings, how my travels to Germany to visit my parent company went, and how cool it was to train Zope to the gang at Pfizer, Johns Hopkins, and the Nature Conservancy. I talked about working on new e-Books and developing new components for our Enterprise-level content management suite of applications that we were developing for a major Berlin bank.

Since it wasn’t a corporate blog proper and served as my personal home page, I could easily discuss everything that was happening to me, including recipes, pet stories, travel experiences, and lots and lots of work. Since I spent over half my waking hours working, I spent a lot of time blogging about beehive NA, its parent company beehive GmbH, ZPUG, and Zope and Python in general. And since the software is Open Source and constantly evolving and maturing, my blog became a valuable resource to find more Zope answers, Zope help, Zope information, Zope training, and Zope developers. And that trainer and that developer would usually be beehive NA or beehive GmbH.

Like I said before, Universities and been doing this kind of viral and buzz marketing for centuries. And since Universities openly share their scholarship with each other and the world, no matter how shameless the pomp of their title of doctor and professor, they and their hallowed academies most certainly offer back much more than they are perceived as taking. And yet they are not paupers. Universities control endowments in the billions of dollars and charge over thirty-thousand-dollars-a-year for the privilege of study. This is a shrewd business in which prestige, altruism, collaboration, brain trust, and purity of thought result in a self-promotional carte blanche that only finds its equal in organized religion. There is nothing even close in the commercial world.

Most of the early tech companies and early adopters of the Internet circa 1992 were former academics. The first thing these academics did when they moved from the Ivory Tower to a suite of offices was to get back into the USENET newsgroups they frequented during their research days. In truth the only notable difference in their discourse was in the signature file at the end of every posting. Instead of an .EDU address, the posters transitioned their emails to .COM. These were the pre-SPAM days when it was okay to have your plain text email address in a public posting. Everybody had their real email in their revealing signature at the bottom of every posting. This signature said a lot about you. It lent legitimacy to your words and allowed you to be the expert. If your media.mit.edu email address worked, then you were in fact who you said you were.

There isn’t a better form of word of mouth marketing than having the name of your company associated with brilliance. Universities have known this for years and it has become institutionalized in the axiom, publish or perish. Whether a professional journal, a conference, academic paper, the essay, or in postings on USENET, the reputation of an academic and the academy can hinge on the prestige associated with good PR. And in the academic environment, content is king.

USENET used to be exclusive and it wasn’t until well into the 90s when gateways opened up to AOL and other ISPs to USENET, followed closely by spammer, spiders, and bots. Forced into exile by bozos, baiters, flamers, and newbies, USENET became Balkanized. A brain drain into more exclusive communities ensued. One of the earliest homes for the alpha male techie was Slashdot, which launched in 1997 and is a prototype for the modern blog with Dave Winer’s Scripting News being one of the earliest. Both of these sites were highly technical with strong academic influences.

Until 1999, one might find some important vestige of USENET in a personal web site or in a Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) but these were publications and not open for debate and collaboration in the same culture of open sharing found in the Newsgroups. In the late 90s, web logging (blogging) became a viable option for savvy users and early adopters. Blogs allowed easy daily postings and associated threaded discussions and XML-based Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

Blogging articles – whether personal, technical, or professional – with the ability to accept reader comments and be able to track visitors has become a major force in the media in the last few years, arguably influencing the 2004 U.S. Presidential election. Not only were people interesting in learning what other people were thinking real time, but people were eager to talk back and get involved in dynamic debates over issues as they happened.

RSS has become very simple and widely adopted in recent years. The reading of online content via RSS client software allows online readers to dispense with their Favorites and Bookmarks and read online news, journalism, journaling, papers, search engines, and magazines in the same way we now read email.

Most consumers ignore corporate sites as sales pitch and propaganda. Not so if you allow your employees to speak for you. Talk not only about the cool new project and hot new services, but everything else. If you hire smart, if you trust your employees, if you walk the talk, then there is nothing to worry about. And people really enjoy listening to employees discuss their day-to-day. Consumers want to know your company’s eye color and they only way they’re find that out is by getting to your you through your employees.

It is similar to visiting campus before applying to college. You want to stop a couple students (or talk to a couple alumni) and ask them about their experience. People love gossip and people adore getting the inside scoop because everybody likes dirty laundry and everybody loves being let in on a secret. What this comes down to is that people demand to be entertained and nothing gives back more than feeling like an insider.

If I were to recommend blog-building to a .COM enterprise, it would have to be at this level: invite your brightest to blog just outside the umbrella of the company with your blessing. There are some important ground rules: the employee needs to feel comfortable and not micromanaged otherwise the blog will not be perceived as honest. People can tell when their being duped; additionally, it is essential that there is trust there on both sides; finally, it is important to find the employee who really wants to do this, otherwise the blog will fall to disrepair.

It takes such a leap of faith to convince the corporate lawyers to loosen their grip on blogging employees. And, as the number of bloggers who get canned by their employer for blogging, increases, people are going to become more covert about it. They go underground. They are blogging already anyway. Why not allow them to blog fully, blog freely, and share with the rest of the world the proud fact they spend half of all their waking hours working for you, your company, and fulfilling your vision?

What is a Ping Server?

Whenever you post a new entry to your blog I am pretty sure you tell all your friends. It is also important to tell blog search engines and news aggregators so that they too can check out all your new content. Telling them you have fresh content is called pinging them.

According to the definition on Feedster, “A ping server is a bit of software infrastructure, a server program to be specific, which lets a feed tell us ‘I’ve just updated; please index me now.’ What it receives is a small tidbit of information from a blogging or publishing tool which is called a ‘ping’. Hence the name.”

The simple solution is to make sure you visit Ping-o-Matic every time you publish a new blog entry. I have already published a comprehensive list of available ping servers and I will discuss other solutions in future articles.

Depending on which blog service or which blog software you use, there are simple ways to automate the act of pinging all of the ping servers.

I plan to delve much more deeply into this very soon.

Keeping Up With the Blogosphere

I scan a lot of blogs. I need to be on top of the blogosphere. To do this, it is impossible to visit the sites. I read their feeds.

Currently, I use the easy-to-use .NET-based SharpReader. To get you started by letting you drink from my fire hose, I am going to share my SharpReader feed.

After you install the client software, go to your File pull down menu, then choose Import Subscriptions and you will see just what I see every day.

Interesting Ways to View the Blogosphere

I was required to find sites that look at the blogosphere in interesting ways.

Technorati, Bloglines, DayPop, Feedster, Blogwise, Blogdigger, Blogpulse, Blogstreet, Blogdex, and, thanks to James Farmer, Blogshares and Pubsub.

I will explore each of them in more depth in a future post. I just wanted to get them out there. I always assume that everybody knows this kind of thing.

Whether Journalist or Blogger, Honor the Trust You Have Been Given

Bloggers Aren’t Ethical is a thoughtful essay about the artifice surrounding the rift between journalists and their journals and bloggers and their blogs.

Journalists like to cry foul that they have integrity, ethics, standard, and objectivity and bloggers just don’t. Whether journalist or blogger, there is one cardinal rule: “protect your words, protect your readers and honor the trust you have been given.”

If there is anything that Jeremy C. Wright did wrong in his article it would be his cheekiness. He doesn’t mellow his argument to include the essential concept of the reader and the writer having a bond based on trust. And the written doesn’t matter, “be they blogger, journalist, poet or playwright.”

What one really must do, whether your daddy is the NYTimes and your J-School was Chicago or not, “to violate that trust is the cardinal sin of everyone who values the written word.”

Out of the 20 paragraphs that make up the very thoughtful article, Mr. Wright only makes his own authentic and honest point in the eighteenth paragraph, which is, “Thankfully, there are some things that are obvious ethics “violations” even across the chasm that divides journalists and bloggers. Taking money in order to express a certain opinion is sure to damage a journalist’s credibility, as well as a blogger’s authenticity. Likewise, covering up a scandal wouldn’t be honest on the part of a blogger nor would it be objective on the part of a journalist.”

So, what he means is that the writer, be he a proper journalist or an improper blogger, is judged of course what he writes but also by what he does.

When You Blog You Are Not In the Pub

Just to be clear, when you blog it is not the same as taking the piss out of your boss and the job down at the pub. Blogging is public and universally-accessible so you will be discovered and probably fired if you bite the hand that feeds you.

The other morning NPR had an article about a Brit git who said that he wrote in his blog as if he were down at his local with his mates. This included a lot of vitriolic pissing about his awful boss and crap job. He was indignant when he was kicked to the curb.

Here are some recent articles outlining how “on the dole” blogging smack about your job might put you, lad, as well as some very useful advice.

Washington Post: Free Expression Can Be Costly When Bloggers Bad-Mouth Jobs

CNN Money: Have a blog, lose your job?

SFGate: BLOGS Beware if your blog is related to work

ZDNet Australia: Google blogger: ‘I was terminated’

INVESTORS.COM: Blogger booted by Google

Scotsman: Bookshop worker first to be sacked over internet ‘blog’

If you don’t like your job, just quit; otherwise, I highly recommend nipping down to the pub for real and getting rid of some of that rage. In the pub your insufferable pissing and moaning is ephemeral; on the Internet, your words are forever.

And if you are an employer who wants to find out if your employees or folks in general are blogging about you and what they are saying, pop me an email or call me and I would be happy to talk to you about some very effective solutions indeed.

Blogging Advice from Doc Searls

“Just think of blogging as emailing in public. Start with short posts about anything. Like most of mine today. If you make a big deal of it, it won’t work. It should be the opposite of labor-intensive.” This is the foundation of my blogging here.

Just before I launched this blog, I emailed Doc, arguably the first blogger, to ask him if he had any advice on blogs and blogging and he offered me that above advice which is priceless and really the difference between burning out and alienating your readership who really want to know you as much as what you have to say — to built a relationship — and having a bouncing baby blog full or personality, color, humor, as well as more serious topics of the day.

Mix it up. It is essential. People don’t want to read an entire essay, especially if you only intend to post once-a-week. Folks want to drop by and see the day-to-day. They want to read you.

In the invaluable communications training that my company sent me to, we learned that in public speaking, people respond less to what you say than to the way you say it. The same thing is true with blogging. For sure.

Once-a-week, I try to write a larger, more in-depth, piece. On marketing, brand protection, brand promotion, online marketing, public relations, search engine optimization, publicity, memetics, culture, propaganda, advertising, social networks, online social networks, virtual communities, technology, web development, emergence, emergent technologies, the future, politics, current events, viral marketing, word of mouth marketing, buzz marketing, and the like: case studies and whatnot.

Every day, on the other hand, I live by the words, “start with short posts about anything . . . if you make a big deal of it, it won’t work.”

Thanks for the amazing advice, Doc.

Only One Topic Per Post

It is important to only post one topic per article on your blog. People are skimming and scanning your blog.

Otherwise, there is a very good change that your secondary and tertiary points will get lost to your reader. The same goes for email, by the way. At the very least — for both — be sure to cover all topics in the first couple sentences.

Blogs are Not Forums, Message Boards, Newsgroups, Listservs, or USENET

There is a misconception that the blog is just another format for discussion like the mailing list, discussion forums, message boards, newsgroups, or USENET. This is not true. None of these messaging tools have achieved much success with crossover, which is to say, none of these tools jumped from the Internet to broadcast news, newspapers, and politics, for example. Blogs have.

Blogs are not about conversation or commentary; blogs are about the effortless transmission and conveyance of information.

Blogs are viral by nature.

Blogs are applications that are built to interconnect and influence. Blogs speak loudly, using pings, XML and hyperlinks as its Morse code and ping servers as its repeaters. Blogging applications like Movable Type and Word Press let the blogosphere know when something new has been posted while also making sure that every other blog that is mentioned and linked-to is also informed, resulting is what is called a trackback.

A trackback shows up under each article mentioned, and this is in the form of an excerpt of the article and a link back.

Comments and commentary on a blog article is important, but what is more important is the opportunity for every commenting blogger on every commented site to have their name, their email, and their own blog’s URL, mentioned in association with each comment.

And then there is the blogroll.

A blogroll is an intentional list of links to friend, family, and favorite blogs. Blogrolling is in important method for expanding each blog and blogger’s reach and social network. Finally, the real ace-in-the-hole is syndication in the form of RSS, RSS2, and ATOM.

These acronyms are essentially XML schema representations of the blog that are intended only for other blogs and blog-readers, for programs and applications.

A syndicated feed is what turns a simple web site into an international wire service not unlike the AP, UPI, or AFP. For one thing, it is so easy to keep up with over 200 blogs using a dedicated reader such as SharpReader.

Reading that many blogs without one is impossible. Also, since an RSS, RSS2, or ATOM newsfeed is expressly intended to be read and interpreted by computers, programs, and applications, providing a newsfeed to the world guarantees the widest and most powerful potential readership possible.

And finally, as if that weren’t enough, search engines favor RSS feed supported sites.

What is a Trackback and Trackbacks?

According to Saugus, “TrackBacks essentially provide a means whereby different web sites can post messages to one another not just to inform each other about citations, but also to alert one another of related resources. Typically, a blog may display quotations from another blog through the use of TrackBacks.”

Wikipedia adds, “TrackBack is a system implemented by many blogging tools, including Movable Type and WordPress, which allows a blogger to see who has seen the original post and has written another entry concerning it. The system works by sending a ‘ping’ between the blogs, and therefore providing the alert.”

What is a Blogroll and Blogrolling?

According to Wikipedia, “a blogroll is a collection of links to other weblogs. Blogrolls are found on most weblogs.”

Blogrolling is the original and most-respected service although any link list is commonly referred to as a blogroll.

More from Wikipedia:

“Various weblog authors have different criteria for including other weblogs on their blogrolls. These range from matters of common interest to frequency of updates and posts to country/geographical/communal relations to link exchange policies. Some blogrolls also simply consist of the list of weblogs an author reads himself, and some news aggregators allow their users to export that list directly to a weblog.”

“With the advent of syndicated newsfeeds, even blogrolls can be, and are being, syndicated. OPML is one of the popular ways to syndicate a blogroll in case a weblog author wants others to be able to access the weblogs in his/her blogroll.”

RSS Will Flourish Even When Blogging Dies

I agree with Threadwatch, Sharon Housely, and Jeremy Zawodny in their belief that browser-based viewing of the Internet in general and blogs in particular will fade, leaving the true valuable technologies, syndication in general and RSS/RDF in particular, to flourish and influence the entire world of content and data-sharing.

Over Half of All Visitors to chrisabraham.com Use RSS, RSS2 or ATOM

57% of the readership of this blog are reading via RSS, RSS2, and ATOM.

I am not including the folks who come in through incoming links, trackbacks, search engines, or article mentions; rather, I am looking for the visits that result from just “checking out Chris’ blog to see what’s up” which is to say, coming to the main index page.

Of course, the results are interesting but obviously inexact and imprecise.

So far this month, July 1-21, Chris Abraham - Because the Medium is the Message, snagged 8,457 browser-based web visit the main index page. In the same time, combining RSS, RSS2, and ATOM readership — 6,192, 2,300, and 2,865 respectively — we come up with 11,357.

In my read of the numbers, the majority of recurring visitors keep up-to-date with this blog via aggregators and RSS readers.

To compare, from July 1-21, chrisabraham.com received 24,514 visits from 15,298 unique visitors.

How Google Probably Ranks Your Site in My Opinion

Google indexes web pages and then ranks them based on three distinct and equally-weighted aspects.

The first aspect is a trinity which is based on the content of each page: page title, page description and keywords (meta tag data), and page full-text content. A page that has similar content wording (and density) is considered to be legitimate. If a web page has all three components it generally a reliable resource.

The second aspect is that Google favors web sites that are continually-updated; therefore, a blog is always indexed more often and considered timelier than a static “brochure” web site.

The final and most-important aspect Google uses to favor (and thus rank higher) web pages is each page’s (and site’s) link popularity. Link popularity is basically how many other sites link back to a site; in addition, Google goes one step further and considers a number of things to insure that the link popularity isn’t abused: prestige.

If an old, high-prestige, high link-popularity web site (or sites) links to a site, it is more beneficial to the site’s link popularity than if a host of insignificant sites link to a site. Old, popular, and well-trafficked sites always lend their prestige to the site to which they link.

The three taken together result in the ranking of the site based on a typical Google keyword search.

You need the content (flash-based and highly graphical pages without well thought out meta tags are virtually invisible to Google), you need the link popularity, and when it comes to it, you need to have new content to show up in the top-ten on Google.

A popular upstart blog or message board can oftentimes achieve better ranking than a big corporate website, especially if that website is new or has changed the architecture of its website recently (Google considers the sudden and complete change of the architecture and file-structure of a web site really fishy).

Why Do Blogs Rank Better on Google Than My Corporate Website?

The condition is commonly-called Google-gaming.

It is the favor that Google attributes to blogs, which is what is happening here: a blog is a) text-rich (lots of dense keywords and lots of textual content), b) frequently-updated (multiple times a day), and c) also a center for news (i.e. a blog — with timely information — Google would hate not being able to scoop web content.

It’s all a contest — very much like CNN v. MSNBC v. FOX: Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Blog Trees for the Blog Forrest

In addition to fostering an interactive and intimate relationship with customers, blogs offer a couple powerful secondary advantages: Syndication and the blogosphere.

Syndication, using Really Simple Syndication (RSS), allows a blog to be like a wire service, offering its “feed??? to anyone on the Internet who wants to “subscribe.???

Since it is simple to syndicate blog content, the real power of the blog and blogging comes from the content being “picked up??? and “echoed??? by other bloggers onto other blogs, thereby delivering content to a potentially much wider audience than merely the aficionados who were already participating in the blog itself.

If it weren’t for syndication and the blogosphere, political blogs and bloggers would not have been able to influence the outcome of the election or get Very Important News Anchors fired.

It is the secondary consequences of smart blogging that can create an echo loud enough to start an avalanche.

The More You Give Away the More You Sell

In a strange parallel to love, B.L. Ochman has found that “the more he gives (away for free), the more he receives (in money)” I believe the secret here in love and business is in not giving half-measures.

When business people “give their shop away” it means that they’re wasting time teasing and not giving.

Ever see how mad a dog becomes when teased with steak versus how loyal when you feed it? Same in business.

I have personally donated money to Greymatter as well as SharpReader, just two examples.

They’re both 100% free, no strings attached and no teasing, just raw steak.

Via ProBlogger, who is a perfect example of this.

Virtual Communities v Blogosphere

Weblogsky wants to know if there has been something lost in the move from cloistered virtual communities such as the Well and TMN to the balkanized blogosphere. My answer is yes.

TMN was a safe village in which I could walk late at night and leave my door not only unlocked but open. Secrets were shared and trust was kept and there were private places wherein I could share even more innermost innermost.

The blogosphere, on the other hand, is big city and feeds on naive innocents — you had better watch what you say and to whom. If you have anything of value, you had better lock your door and learn some street smarts otherwise the blogosphere like a big city could chew you up and spit you out, like it has done to so many who just got off the bus.

Like every urbanite knows, once you get your savvy, then everything is fun again. I didn’t need to be savvy on TMN. I cut my teeth in a very safe place.

The blogosphere is fun but it ain’t safe.

Thanks to del.icio.us/tag/unmediated by way of unmediated