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Posts Tagged ‘techcrunch’

The “Is Blogging Dead” Meme and Other Navel-Gazing Nonsense

It seems like it’s becoming an annual tradition for a blogger or reporter on a slow news day to observe that a trend of “a-lister” bloggers are retiring from the blogging scene and one of the informal golden rules in reporting is:

  • If it happens once, it’s an accident.
  • If it happens twice, it’s a coincidence.
  • If it happens three times, you have a “trend” story on your hands.

So 3 prominent bloggers quitting the scene within a period of 1-2 years = trend?

The one thing about the “golden rule” was that it generally applied to the brick-and-mortar context, not as much when you’re talking about 3 or more bloggers out of the hundreds of millions of blogs out there.

Statistically, even 100 top bloggers out of a universe of 100 million blogs would be 1 / 1,000,000. In decimal points that would be 0.000001% of the blogging population.

is blogging dead

So wondering if “blogging is dead” is akin to wondering if fixed-line telephones are dead or if the fax machine is dead. Nice linkbait, but I don’t think there’s much substance or value to that argument.

Jason Lee Miller notes in his WebProNews piece that fame (or the price of it) might be the cause of (more…)

How Not To Be A Tool On Twitter

Twitter ranks as one of the best platforms for:

  • Seeing what friends and business contacts are up to.
  • Communicating either publicity or privately (via direct messages)
  • Tunneling through to someone on their iPhone or other device, set to receive tweets
  • Concise and to-the-point communication because everyone is limited to 140 characters

As a “micro blogging” platform, Twitter has gained sufficient critical mass that enough people are on it (like MySpace was in 2006 and Facebook was in 2008) to make it a viable and useful platform. (Sadly, other platforms like LinkedIn and Plurk have not achieved sufficient critical mass to be considered ubiquitous at this point).

Despite the benefits of Twitter, inevitably some marketers are going to be flexing their e-peen by sending frequent tweets about how they’re hit 5,000 followers, 20,000 followers or are in the top 50 on the top Twitter groupies list.

In my opinion, talking about the size of your community in a bragging fashion is disrespectful to the people who are following you. In a very real sense, you ARE reducing them to a mere number – one of 50,000 nameless faces who have chosen to take their time to read your potentially useful content.

Instead, why not spend time getting to know your community/followers.

Instead of going on an ego trip, can you say you know most of your followers?

On another note, twitter is not your platform to send a string of product launch announcements or to send your affiliate links out to some hapless n00b who happened to follow you.

Now that we’ve defined the “ego” type posts, what falls into the non-ego/useful content basket? For me they fall into (more…)

Are You Engaged In “No Rest For The Wicked” Internet Marketing?

At this time of the year with Christmas and New Year’s reducing the number of official work days in December, has your productivity been affected? Especially for those of us who are tethered to our computers, either because we’re:

  • Working
  • Hosting/calling in to a conference call
  • Playing games
  • Watching a movie
  • Going through our business balance sheets
  • Coordinating with our remote operations team

Or some other activity of your own choosing, I have found that I spend about 1.5 to twice as much time in front of my computer as I spend sleeping on my bed every day.

So do the holidays represent a boon or bane to the internet marketing continually building their business (especially during the holiday shopping season).

frown

Specifically, Do the holidays disrupt your business momentum and do either you and/or your business suffer as a result?

With the 24×7 nature of the internet, it’s inevitable that there’ll be a number of casualties (direct or indirect) are suffered along the rush to be the first and #1, especially in a high stakes game where “Speed can be of the essence. If a blogger is beaten by a millisecond, someone else’s post on the subject will bring in the audience, the links and the bigger share of the ad revenue.”

In the words of TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington: “I haven’t died yet,” although he’s (more…)

Can Microsoft Get Its Social Media Game Together?

In the aftermath of an aborted takeover of Yahoo!, Microsoft continues to remain the 800 lb gorilla in the tech industry. The question is where does it go from here?

There’s still talk about Microsoft working with Yahoo! on a collaboration for its search services, but really to leapfrog search engine leader Google, requires a paradigm shift. One possible avenue? The social media game.

Witness the fact that Google hasn’t done much with Blogspot/blogger in the last couple of years.
Services like Google’s Blog Search seemed like a half-hearted implementation.

That’s not to say that Microsoft and Yahoo! are exactly leading the field either.
The Web 2.0 space is still littered with their dying or dead blog services and communities.
A search at Microsoft’s Social Computing Group shows a number of interesting projects, but none really earth shattering to shift the field.

microsoft wallop
A couple of years ago, Microsoft spun off its own social network Wallop, to fanfare from Mashable and TechCrunch.
So what happened?

For sure, “cloud computing” still seems a distant reality, hobbled by a lack of compelling applications (in contrast, the Japanese with NTT Docomo’s I-Mode service do just about everything with their 3G phones which fold origami-like into small objects of art. Elsewhere in the world, cell phone users rejoice when they get restaurant recommendations or proximity locaters on their phones…).

It could be a good couple of years till (more…)

The Mike Arrington – Eric Marcoullier Connection…

…or maybe not.

Anyway, when TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington shows up on your MBL widget, something’s brewing:

mike arrington mybloglog

I am making an educated guess that it’s got something to do with the MyBlogLog post I put up.

And I see that Mike has just put up an update that MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier’s new project, Gnip (or gnip central to be exact).

No official word on Eric’s personal blog.

The Gnip Central site which will focus on “Web 2.0 Infrastructure” is still in stealth mode.

You can however, check out Gnip’s entry in the CrunchBase.

I’m sure there’ll be more updates on TechCrunch in time to come.

Tag! You’re It, MyBlogLog 2.0

Yahoo! blog community service MyBlogLog has added tagging to its arsenal of killer app features. An innovative use is the ability to tag spammer and regulate the flow of overzealous mass messaging within the service.

The new tagging feature allows you, as well as other MyBlogLog members to issue tags to your personal and community profile.

For example, someone could tag you as “SEO Expert”, making you easier to find.

As a set of common tags proliferate, I can see tagging as the basis of creating another level of connection within the community.

Here’s what MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier’s tagging profile looks like:

tagging mybloglog

I created a fictious “mamalemon” tag on my personal profile and entered that keyword into the MyBlogLog search engine. It didn’t find my profile (it reported zero results).

Would tags show up in the MBL search results?

I’d think it makes for a more (more…)