It’s no surprise that blogs are highly optimized for search engines, tend to be the weapon of choice for linkbait campaigns and are usually the chosen weapon when a single individual (or marketer) decides to take on an airline, supermarket chain, or budget airline.

Add to that the fact that affiliate marketers are also employing it’s flexible architecture to construct landing pages, opt-in forms, affiliate content sites, shopping/shopping comparison sites, coupon sites, customer loyalty sites (plus the occasional or maybe not so occasional affiliate cookie stuffing site) and you’d realize that it’s not just a diarying platform anymore.

In a tweet yesterday, Top Ranking Marketing CEO Lee Odden fired out this tweet “Even thought I’ve said contrary, content published with blog software is technically a blog, but without comments, it’s not social #blogchat”

I sent the reply:

“Does the underlying platform define a blog? Or does blogging refer to the style in which content is published online?”

To which Lee replied:

“I think it’s the style in which content is published. We create newsrooms with blog software but I wouldn’t call them “blogs””

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So while publishing content (however, you may define it) on Blogger/Blogspot or WordPress may have been considered “blogging” before, I see that blogging (along with affiliate marketing) is growing up, we have to dig below the surface, to perform a more detailed analysis to see if it’s defined as a blog.

I’d associate the first generation of blogs (from the 1990s) as more of the “online diary” phase of blogging.

Later, as the medium progressed, editorial, expert comment and analysis crept into the mix. We weren’t limited by the everyday “I had mac and cheese for lunch” blog content (that’s prevalent in the infant media Twitter).

And still later, corporates got into the blogging-Public Relations/undercover sponsored blog side of things.

So blogging’s all grown-up, but does it have anywhere to go?

While marketers, merchants and affiliates wearing all hats from white to black are generating traffic, collecting leads, converting leads into customers and generally transforming WordPress into a transaction platform, still blogging in my opinion, excels as a personal or corporate branding platform.

I’ll be invite a public relations specialist to come on the Friday Podcast soon and one of the key issues will be seeing how blogs and social media are employed in the areas of reputation management and crisis managment.

I’d recently spoke on a panel at a recent conference, and one of the panelists, a crisis management expert, talked about dealing with the media during the recent hijacking of the US-crewed Maersk ship by Somali pirates. Having a communications plan in place, along with the right communication channels to distribute this information, in the age of instant cellphone messaging and Twitter, can make the difference between showing the pro-active response by an individual or a business entity, or it could be a major public relations disaster.

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For more blogging tips, check out the Secret Blog Weapon.

Great things about Twellow:

• Categorizes twitter streams by vertical/niche, eg: automotive, movies, blogging, news
• Groups related twitterers together

It’s offset by one major flaw, which unfortunately is tied to Twitter’s current state of development – analytics don’t mean much more than a brute force “followers” number.

The higher the number of followers, the higher you’ll rank in the results, with the net effect that Robert Scoble is ranked first with 28,000 followers, followed by Jake Marsh with 12,000, in the blogging category.

The results are limited by the enrollment of your twitter feed into the system for benchmarking and indexing.

But I’m having serious doubts about using followers as the determining criteria.

Could social networks be the new playground for blackhat marketers?

In the initial stages of Yahoo MyBlogLog’s launch, I know of a number of programmers who automated the creation of new profiles and artificially inflated community sizes and went out to spread spammy marketing messages.

With the current state of Twitter development, what’s to stop marketers from either automating or farming out the creation of a horde of twitter followers, thereby artificially inflating the size of their community.

It’s not secret that a forum with 100,000 registered members with 5-10 active users is pretty much dead. What about a twitter account with 50,000 inactive followers?

I wonder if Twitter will enforce a minimum activity threshold (a number of twitters sent out within a set time interval) like some webmail providers have instituted to continually prune dead and inactive accounts.

Will Twitter be able to present useful stats in the future? Likely, but not in the near future as they’re still coping with growing pains and the resource overhead of third party Twitter API calls, to the extent that pagination (an archive of your twitter conversation) and “replies” (twitter messages that you have received) have been disabled.

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It could be a while before we see Twitter metrics evolve to comprehensive display the time visitors are spending reading your updates (ie stickiness) and clicking through to your links (conversion?).

Till then “followers” could be a proxy for a twitter popularity contest (traffic quality is a big question mark).

Tread lightly. A conservative approach can do more to preserve your social goodwill, rather than making rash experimental stabs.

What this means is content from this blog may be syndicated through WebProNews, or through the ientry content network, namely:

• Search Newz
• Web ProBusiness
• Small Business Update

It’s a pleasure to be listed among the company of other ientry bloggers, such as:

• Aaron Wall
• Lee Odden
• Michael “Gray Wolf” Gray
• Todd “Stuntdubl” Malicoat
• Robert Scoble

and numerous other first rate bloggers.

When I first started blogging in July 2006, my intent has always been to provide quality content and build a community based on that principle.

Seeing the traffic grow month-on-month and receiving more than my fair share of encouraging emails is icing on the cake and a boost when the inspiration engine runs a little dry.

With blogging already becoming the media channel accessible to everyman, the future certainly looks bright.

I don’t read many magazines, reading most of my content and feature content online.

Besides reading the print edition of Singapore’s major English daily, The Straits Times, which comes with weekly tech, fashion and lifestyle “magazines”, on the rare occasion, I check out:

• Revenue (I read the online digital edition when I can)
• Skymall catalogue found on most domestic flights
• Tabloids like US, People

Tabloids and rag mags are a good opportunity to conduct niche research, especially for FMCG (fast moving consumer goods). You can find out which are the hot jeans, perfumes/fragrances, electronic items and build a niche themed site within a couple of hours.

Depending on how hot the trend is, you could reap affiliate or CPA commissions for a couple of weeks or even more than a year, if you trendspot correctly.

The other thing is magazine preferences reveal a lot of a person’s personality. Kris and Lee Odden have a fairly strategic/macro type approach (having leading their own respective business organizations), but more so from their choices of the Smithsonian, Forbes, Inc., while younger guys like Shoemoney and Joe Whyte go for more topical/news type publications like Playboy, Wired, Maxim, Stuff.

To propagate this meme, I tag:

• Laura Alter
• Michelle MacPhearson (who was a good sport to take part in the Goals meme)
• Sleepyblogger Robyn Tippins
• Social Traffic Queen Alex Mayo
• PlanetAndrea

I was reading Shoemoney’s post on Las Vegas Pubcon 2006 and in his comments, I see the following:

That was a pingback from Lee Odden blog.

Lee is CEO of TopRank Online Marketing and has a widely read, high traffic, high PR blog.

It caught my eye like Seth Godin’s archetypal “Purple Cow” (which stands out from the herd of brown cows).

“Nice Fellow” is seldom a term used to refer to Shoemoney.

I’m used to people refer to Jeremy as the SEM specialist or the Ringtone King, but “Nice Fellow” really stuck out for me.

I just had to read Lee’s post: Pubcon Day .05.

It was a succinct summary of the goings on at Las Vegas PubCon and while reading Lee’s post, the following caught my eye:

In the top right corner, Lee’s got a post entitled “Guy Kawasaki Needs Your Links”

[I’m not exactly sure why Guy feels he needs to break into Technorati’s top 10 because I’d prioritize list building over SEO/traffic.]

Lee does an excellent job of summarizing Guy’s presentation, though it’s similar to other ‘Art of the Start’ presentations he’s given. [Like i’ve posted at: Guy Kawasaki Art of the Start. Guy’s almost pathologically famous for his ‘I’ve got 10 points’ opening to his talks]
But I liked the relevance of Lee’s link because I just ordered a copy of Guy’s book “The Art of the Start“.

And while I’m at Guy’s blog, I also checked out his post: The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint, which is also relevant for those who prepare and present lots of presentations [like my wife, whom I’ve just emailed the link.]

And she’s been reading my copies of Guy’s “Selling the Dream” and “Rules for Revolutionaries” because she’s involved in a hush-hush project at work.

The point of all this?

Don’t discount the value of the humble trackback or pingback.

It can bring you around the blogging world and come back with a load of traffic.