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December 30, 2005
My first blog ever was exactly one year ago today, for Marqui's World. I remember being nervous and excited, sitting in my living room at home, about to (in a very personal way) enter into the cacophony of the blogosphere.
I had no idea what the year would hold, and have to say, looking back, that my experience in business blogging has wildly exceeded my expectations.
I've come to the conclusion that a business' word is its brand. And in this new world of communication options, it has never been more important to consider the power of words.
Upon reflection, and for inspiration, I leave my last post of 2005 with the words of Jeanette Winterson. She wrote a book called Sexing the Cherry in 1989 that amazed me because of the following vignette, which I am delighted to quote here.
(In fact, I loved it so much when I read it, I called her publicist to see if I could have it animated. I worked with some animators from Will Vinton Studios at the time, and the answer was, unfortunately, no.)
Upon reflection, it lives more strongly in the imagination. I hope you'll enjoy the ride - compliments of Jeanette:
"To escape the weight of the world, I leave my body where it is, in conversation or at dinner, and walk through a series of winding streets to a house standing back from the road.
The streets are badly lit and the distance from one side to the other no more than the span of my arms. The stone crumbles, the cobbles are uneven. The people who throng the streets shout out at each other, their voices rising from the mass of heads and floating upwards towards the church spires and the great copper bells that clang the end of the day. Their words, rising up, form a thick cloud over the city, which every so often must be thoroughly cleansed of so much language. Men and women in balloons fly up from the main square and, armed with mops and scrubbing brushes, do battle with the canopy of words trapped under the sun.
December 20, 2005
Earlier this morning, Janet and I participated in a kick-off call for our latest and greatest foray into the great marketing unknown. We have commissioned the consulting firm Influencer50 to produce one of its self-titled research reports for us. These reports come highly recommended by the fine folks at Sterling Communications (VP Elke Heiss to be precise) and have already received rave reviews from the likes of NETGEAR, so we thought we'd give it a try.
A little background info from Influencer50's Web site:
Our popular Influencer50 reports identify and rank the 50 key influencers in your specific marketplace. These influencers are the executives, gurus, partners, distributors, trade association executives, financiers and industry authorities, among many others, who have the greatest impact on buying decisions in your sector.
Sounds good. But this is the part that really got my attention:
Research has demonstrated that 10 years ago industry analysts and journalists made up between 75-80 percent of the major influencers on technology buying decisions. More recent research has shown that today that figure stands at 45-50 percent (dependent on exact marketplace). They're still very significant, but now almost 50 percent of influencers are neither analysts nor journalists.
It will take Influencer50 a couple of months to compile all of the info and deliver the final report (all 30 pages of it!), which will rank the top influencers according to market reach, quality of impact, frequency of impact, and closeness to decision.
Stay tuned for more on the process and the results...
December 13, 2005
It's only 1:30 PM on day one of the Syndicate Conference, and I don't think anyone will be able to beat this quote from Sandy Marks, Internet Advertising Director at MSHC Partners, during the panel session on Advertising in Blogs and RSS:
"One of the best blogs for political advertising is actually one that focuses on composting toilets."
Even more amusing was the guy sitting next to me who muttered, "Well, that certainly says something about the state of politics in our country."
Priceless
December 13, 2005
I found this concept to be very compelling in Doc Searls presentation this morning at Syndicate.
Production vs Consumption
Doc pointed out that syndication has democratized a corporate idea. On the live web, there's been a complete reversal of power. We used to think of consumers as consumers of goods and services.
Syndication is about production, not consumption. Consumers are now producers of content. And at Marqui, we know content is king, after all.
I love the idea that in the very nature of this "Production vs. Consumption" concept, we're building wealth (production) vs. scarcity (consumption).
Doc has blogged his own keynote address. You'll find his thoughts here. It's a great read.
December 13, 2005
I'm sitting in the keynote address of IDC's Syndicate Conference in San Francisco. Marqui is exhibiting here, and our CEO, Stephen King, will be presenting this morning.
Doc Searls is the conference chair. For those of you who don't know him, he is one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto - one of the oft-cited 'reference books' on the impetus of the blogosphere. He calls it a business book, born on the web, and living on the web.
Doc posed that there's been a split in the web - since Dave Winer came up with the "profound concept" of edit this page. It was profound in 1999 because it allowed people to take a static page and edit it. The branch was born in that concept.
Suddenly there was the static web - highly architected sites that were considered by companies as "real estate." Most web sites are static today.
And there has become the live web - where pages are suddenly living, changing - driven by interactions with human beings. Blogs and wikis and social sites like Flickr are examples of the live web.
People can interact with each other through the web. That is profound.
December 9, 2005
Interesting news from Yahoo this afternoon -- the company just announced the acquisition of the very popular "del.icio.us." If you aren't sure what del.icio.us is, it's a fancy type of bookmarking service.
According to the description on the company's web site, del.icio.us lets users keep "a collection of favorites" ... which means you can:
- Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, etc. and access them from any computer on the web.
- Share these favorites with friends, family, and colleagues.
- Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite -- they've already done the work of finding it for you.
Yahoo also acquired Flickr, the popular photo-sharing site, earlier this year. Intriguing how everyone pays so much attention to Google and yet Yahoo is expanding its little empire in some unique ways...
December 9, 2005
Steve Rubel, blogger and PR pundit from Cooperkatz threw out some stats recently on the growth of the blogosphere. According to Technorati:
- There are 1.2 million blog posts per day - or 9.2 posts per second
- The blogosphere doubles in size every three to five months. (Moore's Law seems sluggish in comparison)
With every major single event (hurricanes, tsunamis, etc.) blogs spike.
As such, the media is hanging out in the blogosphere. Can the media find you there?
December 6, 2005
So I needed a break today from the mental pressure of creating a presentation on SaaS (Software as a Service - web-based software like Marqui) for an ITEC event this week.
My buddy Ryan over at eROI sent me a fun diversion, the "Wear Short Shorts Office Olympics" site. Of course, I was curious. And I had a good laugh while I was there. I can't believe Ryan actually is pointing people there. But I'm glad he did.
Forget about SaaS, that's SASS!
December 2, 2005
As you may have guessed from Janet's most recent post, Marqui is back on the event circuit. After finishing up her speaking gig at the Beyond Blogs and Social Networks Summit, Janet will be shifting gears to talk about the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market next week at ITEC in Portland, Oregon.
From there we head out to the Syndicate Conference in beautiful San Francisco, where Stephen King (Marqui's CEO) will be speaking on Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and advertising. There will be quite a few of us Marquians there (Stephen, Janet and me at the very least), so be sure to track us down and say hello if you are going to be at the show (we'll be at booth 4).
On a related note, I updated our industry event page recently, so for a full listing of our upcoming engagements, click here.
December 1, 2005
I'm here in New Jersey for two days at the SRI "Virtual Handshake" Summit. There's a great line up of speakers, and I'm excited to be at the event.
It's clearly not set up for actual blogging of the event. I have to sneak off and find power in order to do so, which is sad.
Point of order: Any business blogging event must think about their attendees a little differently. To be fully buttoned up, organizers now need to provide free wireless access and plenty of power cords for attendees to blog the business going on in the event. The folks at the Blog Business Summit have that nailed. Basically, you can tell who've been through it a few times.
It's sad to have to miss some of the networking time in order to let readers know about what's going on here. So rather than blog during the event live, I'll write impressions (they're good1) this evening.
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