Content Matters

Declan McCullagh has an interesting piece on the new journalist shield bill which Congress will vote on this week.  McCullagh and others have argued that the legislation has been watered down in that it no longer includes personal bloggers, but only professional journalists.

The original draft of the bill included a broad definition of journalist: "a person engaged in journalism and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person."

The technical definition in the bill is now someone "who regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public for a substantial portion of the person's livelihood or for substantial financial gain and includes a supervisor, employer, parent, subsidiary, or affiliate of such covered person."

As McCullagh points out, under this new definition, a blogger who is a serious blogger and breaks news, but who doesn't get compensated (through Google Ads or otherwise) for their writing would not be covered.   CNET's Don Reisinger furthers McCullagh's argument, suggesting that when he began his career, by volunteering, that he met many other credible journalists who were not being paid for their efforts.

I disagree with McCullagh and Reisinger in this case.  I write this blog.  I also twitter my thoughts from time to time.  I also post commentary to Congoo.  But I'm an industry participant, not a journalist.  And, while I may have "inside information" from time to time, that's not the same as having someone share information with a journalist.  I believe that it's critical for us to provide real protection for true journalists to not have to reveal a source in most instances.  Yet with the many forms of online communication today, it's a slippery slope to suggest that anyone who posts any content online should have the same protections as a journalist.  That loose definition could result in a backlash, where those protections are taken away from those who truly need them.

Many in the content business read John Blossom’s Content Blogger religiously.  The blog includes a daily recap of “must read” articles along with his own highly insightful takes on issues in the content industry.

A few weeks ago, John added a daily vlog to the mix – the ShoreViews Video blog.  While video blogging isn’t new, its use has been limited.  Video can be a compelling format.  In this case, it gives John the opportunity to get his personality into the posts.  Those who know John (or who have attended a content industry conference in recent years) know him to be smart and thoughtful with a somewhat wry sense of humor.  That personality doesn’t always translate in print, but on the video it comes through.

I had the chance to catch up with John last week to learn more about his experiences with video. 

Content Matters: John, you’re the first blogger in the content space to try video blogging.  What’s the response been so far?

John Blossom: Pretty good response so far, but it’s not yet clear to me that it’s a traffic builder.

CM: Which is faster for you to create, the video or written content?

JB: Overall, I think that writing is about as fast as video.  I can do most of the video in a single take but it takes a few minutes more to do the post-production work.

CM: How do you plan to integrate the video with the traditional text?  Are you planning to use audio for short posts, then expand in text?

JB: I did one video where I talk about some of the weblog posts.  I think that it works out pretty well that way, but it also works to talk about headlines that I wouldn’t necessarily write about, where some simple show-and-tell just works better.

CM: Any other thoughts for those who might consider video blogging?

JB: It’s a time-eater, but less so as I get the hang of the process.  I’m not sure whether I’ll continue to do a daily video.  I may switch to a weekly or event-driven format, such as for interviews.

CM: Thanks, John.  We’ll be watching the blog to see where you take it next.

My take: I think that vlogs are interesting, but I’m not yet convinced that they’re compelling in the business market.  In speaking with clients in the financial markets, they seem to have no appetite for video; it’s quicker to skim or to search text than to watch video, and the open and noisy trading floor environment is not quite a home theater setting.  I think that we’ll need to see improved video searching before Wall Street accepts video.  However, the corporate market is probably more ready for video today.  Meanwhile, entertaining video, such as that of Wallstrip or Rocketboom has already demonstrated the ability to attract an audience.  For those who have the time to experiment, I think it's smart to get out ahead of the technology and play with video now.

Those interested in seeing John’s vlog can find it on the Content Blogger site or on Robin Good’s MasterNewMedia site.

I wrote about this deal and why I thought it was great for RSS last week when it was still a rumor.  It's now official; Google has acquired Feedburner.

More details are available from Union Square Ventures and the Feedburner blog.

For anyone involved in content delivery, this deal should be a good thing.  Google's business is all about monetization and if anyone can figure out how to monetize RSS, they'll be the ones to do it.  Congratulations to Dick Costolo and the Feedburner team.

I'm a big fan of the ASP model and try to minimize the installation of software wherever I can. 

However, there are times when I just cannot or prefer not to be connected.  I get frustrated on an airplane, when I can't type in my contact notes because Salesforce.com made "no software" their logo and mantra.  I take a commuter train each morning and have to write blog posts offline in Word, then copy them into TypePad when I'm connected.  I use an offline RSS reader to read posts on the train, even though I'd prefer the navigation of online-only reader Netvibes.

Google has taken note of this and has just announced Google Gears at its Developer Day event.  Google Gears is an open source development environment designed to run both online and offline.  Gears is driven by javascript APIs which support data storage, application cacheing and multi-threading technologies.  Google hopes that this plugin can become a standard for offline applications.

As part of the launch, Google has added Gears offline capabilities to its Google feed reader.  It will soon Gear-enable its office applications such as Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Calendar.

With Google, it's hard to anticipate whether they will put a serious push behind their new offerings, particularly those outside of its core advertising platform.  If they put a big push behind Gears and it gets takeup in the open source community, it could have a significant impact.

For more on Google Developer Day, take a look at http://code.google.com/events/developerday/
For more on Google Gears, see these posts from TechCrunch, O'Reilly Radar and Robert Scoble.

TechCrunch reports that Google will acquire RSS feed management company Feedburner in a deal reportedly worth $100 million.

This deal could be big for a number of reasons:

First, it suggests that Google will put its force behind RSS adoption.
Second, it means that Google believes that it's feasible to monetize RSS feeds. 

Feedburner offers a feed and blog advertising network.  To-date, publishers have struggled to figure out a way to monetize the reading of their RSS feeds.  While most people think of Google as being in the search business, they're really in the traffic monetization business. The acquisition of Feedburner suggests that Google believes that RSS can be monetized through advertising.

Another way to look at this, as suggested by WebProNews, is that while Microsoft, through Vista, will be pushing user adoption of RSS, Google will be pushing publishers into creating more RSS.

Feedburner was founded in 2003 and has raised $10 million to date, led by Mobius Venture Capital, Union Square Ventures and Portage Ventures.

Many people (including me) have touted the "year of RSS" for the past few years.  With Microsoft and Google pushing it, it looks as though the time for RSS may finally have arrived.

Tracking blog readership is a far from perfect science.
Applications like Feedburner allow you to see how many of the users who are subscribed to your feed login on a given day.  But that doesn't let you know how many have read a given blog or post.

While it will remain murky, understanding your blog subscriber base is about to get a little clearer.  Google has announced that beginning February 17, it will begin reporting subscriber numbers for users of Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage.

Until now, Google Reader users were missing from the charts produced by Feedburner (as shown in the example on the right).  So, bloggers should expect to see an uptick in their reported readership.  Market share figures on RSS readers are hard to come by, but with Google Readers's recent growth, I'd expect them to amount to 15-20% of the traffic of a technology-focused blog.

To better understand how Feedburner calculates subscribers, take a look at this post from the Feedburner blog last fall, which commemorated TechCrunch reaching the 100,000 subscriber mark.

I've been blogtagged (the blogosphere's version of a chain letter) by Steve.  So, here goes - five things that you probably don't know about me.

1. I began my career with an online service (LegiTech - sub of McClatchy) in 1985; only later did I "backslide" to print media with Nelson (now Thomson Financial), where we followed the traditional print-to-electronic conversion.
2. My athletic career peaked early when, at age 12, I got dunked on by Chocolate Thunder (aka Darryl Dawkins).  It's been downhill ever since.
3. I collect 20th century political campaign pins and related materials.  My prize possession - an unopened pack of Adlai Stevenson cigarettes (circa 1952).
4. I once had a head-on collision with a speedboat - while driving a car.
5. My first plane flight didn't occur until a business trip when I started my first job out of school.

In an effort to find bloggers who haven't already been tagged - I'll pass this along to Shannon Holman, Steve Arnold, Jake Harris, Larry Schwartz and Ed Stevenson.

Scott Karp has penned a thought-provoking post on his Publishing 2.0 blog, entitled "Content Businesses Don't Scale Anymore".  The basic premise of the post is that all of the recent content businesses which have scaled dramatically in recent years are content platforms (YouTube, MySpace, Google) and not creators of original content.  Karp further notes that even the long tail of revenue tends to reward the aggregators in the head, with more modest benefits trickling down to the tail.
Factually, I think Scott's points are accurate.  My question, however, is whether scale matters in the content industry.

The content business has long been a market of small companies focused on niches.  Interestingly, many niche content providers are profitable, particularly in the b2b space.  Many industries require scale to become profitable.  For example, in the enterprise software space, a company really isn't considered viable without revenues of $80-100M.  I can think of dozens of content businesses with revenues of $10-25M and 20% margins.

On the b2b side, most of the dominant "traditional" publishers, such as McGraw-Hill, Thomson, Primedia and Reed Elsevier, were built through the acquisition of small, niche players.  With the possible exception of the newspaper industry, there are few content companies that scaled well, even in the old days.

Scale may matter in the consumer space, where you need millions of page views in order to compete for the mainstream advertising dollar.  However, in the b2b space, I believe that growth and profitability are the key metrics for content companies.  A lot depends on the reason that you are building your business.  Is your goal is to get page views high enough to be acquired or is it to build a profitable business with sustainable growth?  If it's the latter, then scale shouldn't be your key measure of success.

Danny Sullivan, search engine guru and longtime editor of Search Engine Watch (acquired by Incisive Media this summer), has announced the formation of his new blog platform to be entitled Search Engine Land. 
While the name may conjure images of "Toto, I don't think we're in Sunnyvale anymore", the content itself will surely be top notch (and, let's face it, the available domains which include the term "search engine" are pretty limited by now).  Danny has partnered with "Paradox of Choice" author Barry Schwartz and SEW alum Chris Sherman to write content for the blog.
The official launch will be December 11.  In the meantime, if you can't wait to read Danny's thoughts, you can see his personal blog, Daggle (I especially like the Stonehenge pictures).
Best of luck to Danny, Barry and Chris with their new venture. 

For me, Election Day brings memories of late nights watching Peter Jennings, Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw provide news and analysis.  Of course, Peter is gone, while Dan and Tom have retired.  But even if they were all still here, I doubt that I'd be turning to them tonight for coverage.

To see how influential the blogosphere has begun, all you have to do is take a look at how the major media outlets are covering tonight's election results.  Time/CNN will host about 20 bloggers, from DailyKOS to RedState (left to right) in their "Internet Lounge", while MSNBC will include a number of bloggers in its coverage.

Looking at the chart to the right, you can see how sites like DailyKOS, Little Green Footballs and the Huffington Post have attracted hundreds of thousands of users.

The mainstream media still provides a level of quality (and fact-checking) that you can't get from the blogs.  But many of us are turning to the web and to less formal channels for our political information.  According to ABC News, 43% of likely voters use the Internet for updates on political information.  That's why sites like MSNBC's First Read and ABC's Political Punch are seeing their usage grow.

So, where will I turn for results tonight?  I'll probably watch the MSNBC coverage, but I'll also use CNN's website to compare race-by-race results to NPR's Election 2006 breakdown of key House races and Votemaster's Senate Race poll.  And, of course, at 11pm EST I'll tune in for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (and guest Dan Rather) for their priceless insights on Indecision 2006.

In the meantime, in the immortal words of Dan Quayle (via Kenneth Cole) "Don't Forget to Vot".

Last week, Google integrated its Blog Search results into Google News, providing users with a comprehensive view of both “traditional” news and blog posts for their searches. 

Yesterday, in a related move, they added Blog results to Google Alerts.  As shown, you can now set an alert to be "comprehensive" (news, blogs, web and groups) or select an individual type.  The default is comprehensive.  For those of us who track news from various sources, including blogs, this is a huge convenience.  More importantly, these two changes will begin to expose blog posts to many more users who don’t regularly follow blogs.

Today, about half the Content Matters traffic comes via Google web search (the rest is a mix of RSS readers and specialized blog search via Technorati, Google and others).  This web search traffic consists of users who are not specifically seeking out blogs.  Integration of blogs with Google News and Alerts should provide similar exposure to users of online news.

As TechCrunch points out, Yahoo last month reversed course, pulling blog content out of its news results temporarily, as they rework the results.  I expect that we’ll see an integrated view from Yahoo again in the near future.

As content from various sources begins to be included in the “news” bucket and as traditional news is disseminated through more diverse platforms, we will continue to see erosion of the traditional destination news sites.  That’s why the next ten years will bring even more rapid change than the past ten to the news industry.

Business Week is reporting that startup PayPerPost has received $3M in funding from Inflexion Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Village Ventures.

The scam business model behind PayPerPost is pretty simple.  Advertisers can pay bloggers to post (positive) comments about their company or product.  And, there's no disclosure requirement for the bloggers that they've been paid to write these nice things.  Put best by Jon Fine in a previous BW article, "shilling without disclosure is a bad idea."

Of course, the folks at PayPerPost spin it somewhat differently, comparing it to product placement on television or a movie.  But I don't see that.  Instead, it looks more like radio shill host Armstrong Williams, celebrating the "No Child Left Behind" policy without disclosing that he was on the Department of Education payroll.  Or, the Cato Institute fellow who wrote positive editorials and columns, in return for funds paid by Jack Abramoff.

For years, investor relations "consulting" firms offered to write pseudo investment research reports, funded by the company  being written on.  At the same time, various IT consulting firms will write a "white paper" touting various technology for a fee.  Similarly, online seeding and other online "word of mouth" marketing efforts were used to launch the career of Christina Aguilera, among others.

As I've posted previously, one of the great challenges in the world of user-generated content is how to keep ratings trustworthy.  While those questions may not be easily answered, requiring disclosure any time a blogger is being paid for their post would be a good starting point.   

For more on PayPerPost, read Marshall Kirkpatrick's TechCrunch post, PayPerPost.com offers to sell your soul.

Disclosure: I have not been paid for writing this post.

MyBlogLog launched a set of analytics tools about a year ago to help bloggers track activity on their blog.  You may have noticed text such as "nth most popular outgoing link" pop up when you mouse over a link on Content Matters.  That's MyBlogLog at work.  It gives bloggers a better sense of what their readers are reading, where they're coming from and what external links they click on.

Last month, the team at MyBlogLog took that one large step further, adding a community aspect to blogs.  On the left pane of Content Matters, you'll see a new section, Content Matters Community, including photos and screen names of the five most recent visitors to the site.

Readers are encouraged to "join" the community for the blogs which they read.  These communities then can be used to generate recommendations for other communities to join (blogs to read).  Even cooler, MyBlogLog can automatically set you to "join" a community after you've visited that blog X times (default is 10).  In much the same way that last.fm can introduce you to music that you may like, MyBlogLog can introduce you to new blog content which is of interest to others in your community.

To learn more, take a moment to set up a free MyBlogLog account and join the Content Matters community.

What's the impact for publishers?
Trade magazine publishers and other content providers who dominate vertical markets should be looking for ways to create a community. There are many ways to increase user interaction; simply having your readers faces appear on your blog can be an easy, yet appealing piece of the community experience.  You might showcase community members elsewhere on your site, or even use them as a sounding board for editorial and features.

Eric Marcoullier, Todd Sampson and their team have created an interesting environment catering to the blog community.  Right now, it's fairly bare-bones, but it will be interesting to see where users take these communities.

In the meantime, I'd encourage you to sign up and begin to play.

Some of the notable blogs which have adopted MyBlogLog Communities already include:

Fred Wilson's A VC
Brad Feld's Feld Thoughts
Ben Barren's RSS'ing Down Under
Steve Rubel's MicroPersuasion
Valleywag
and hundreds more

Thanks to Guillaume Du Gardier (via Steve Rubel) for noting a few new visualization technologies focused on mapping the social networks of blogs.

I'm a huge fan of visualization tools, particularly for social networking and similar applications.  Tools like i2 Analyst Notebook and ClearForest's ClearResearch provide insights into huge volumes of information for the professional user.  Grokker and Vivisimo provide similar benefits in the web search world.  The tools Rubel shows are not at that level, but each does an interesting job of showing the network of links around a given blog or website.

Of the two, Touchgraph is the more useful one.  Links between sites are color-coded to make it easy to see inbound or outbound links.

More visually appealing, but with less functionality, is this map by Sala Aharef's Websites as Graphs.  It helps you see the density of a network, with color-coded indications of links, images and more, but is not very navigable.

As users struggle to deal with information overload, data visualization will start to take hold among mainstream users.   In the meantime, we can admire the creativity of the early offerings.

A couple of months ago, Fred Wilson blogged about his favorite business model, where web companies provide free use of their basic service, then offer premium versions and add-ons, available for a fee. As Fred pointed out, many successful companies have adopted this model (Skype, Flickr and Trillian, among others).  Fred closed his post asking if there was a name for this model, and if not, what might be a good name.

Alacra's Jarid Lukin proposed the name "Freemium".  And, from the looks of it, it seems to have stuck.

Tom Evslin used the term yesterday, in describing the Feedblitz business model.  Feedblitz is familiar to those of you who read Content Matters via email.  It takes my RSS feed and wraps it into an email and sends it to users who don't want to deal with RSS.  It performs its job admirably, while costing me nothing.  Under the Freemium model, Feedblitz charges for personalization of the emails and a frequency of more than once per day.
This week's issue of Wired Magazine also includes a reference to the Freemium model, in its article, Blogging for Dollars.

This chart, from Technorati, shows how the term Freemium has expanded throughout the blogosphere.  Its first appearance was in a March 23 follow-up post from Fred and was subject of a flurry of link love in the two weeks that followed.  Since then, it's appeared on blogs 223 times, and that doesn't include the mainstream press like Wired or other websites.

The Freemium model has been around for a while, but seems to be flourishing in the Web 2.0 world.  And, it's interesting to see the language spreading as virally as the applications themselves.

Since the mid-90’s, KM companies have been trying to solve the “expert finder” problem, that is, finding the experts within your organization for a given topic or problem. 

While finding the internal expert is critical for all large companies, it’s most acute at large consulting firms and investment banks.

There have been various KM attempts to solve this problem, some simply using resumes (have skills and experience, but never get updated), while others tried to get users to update proprietary databases with skills and interests, generally with low participation rates.

Rod Boothby, at E&Y, posts about how they are using people blogs to capture and maintain the critical information about skills and projects, to quickly find the experts for a project team.

This is another example of how inexpensive and easy-to-use hosted social software applications are solving KM problems where larger, more complex applications failed.  The ease of creating blog pages (in this case, using templates for consistency), of linking project pages to people pages, and using standard web search tools, encourages adoption and makes maintenance easy.

There’s a lot of experimentation going on right now, applying a “social spin” to new and existing technologies to generate new uses.  Frank Gruber has an interesting post on a new company, Waxxi, which is launching an interactive podcasting capability. 

The basic concept is that Waxxi will host a scheduled interactive podcasting event, where participants can call in and participate.  The audio portion will be augmented by an IM stream as well.

Waxxi’s first interactive podcast will occur May 20, 2006 at 10:30 am PST / 1:30 EST.  The podcast will feature Robert Scoble (Microsoft’s best known blogger) and consultant Shel Israel, co-authors of the business blogging book Naked Conversations.  You can register for the podcast at the Waxxi site.

As Michael Arrington points out, there could be a few hiccups in this podcast, depending upon the number of participants and the level and methods of moderation.

That being said, this could be an interesting vehicle for content providers and conference companies.  Today’s webinars tend to be uni-directional – just a talking head clicking through PowerPoint slides.  If you can leverage your community of users to create an interactive dialog, that could be very compelling.  And, since the end results are captured as a podcast, you can develop a collection of interesting audio content for your users.

Dave Winer has launched a new application called Share Your OPML.
The OPML file is the file that stores the RSS feeds that you read. 

Share Your OPML is sort of like a Last.fm for RSS feeds.  The goal is to compile a database of what people are reading, as well as the patterns within the individual taxonomies, then use pattern matching to suggest other feeds.  Like Last.fm, you can easily see other users who have similar interests to yours - just click on the "Subscriptions Like Mine" link.

There's also a top 100 ranking (right now, TechCrunch is #1 by a fairly wide margin).  Share Your OPML is built under a Creative Commons license, so you can expect others to build onto the framework with new functionality.

To participate, just upload your OPML file.  Most RSS feedreaders have a menu item that lets you export your OPML file with a single click.  So, take a minute, upload your file and discover some new and interesting feeds.

Buying and Selling eContent got off to a quick start.  After Esther Dyson's keynote, the first panel discussion, “When Everyone’s a Publisher: The impact of user-generated content” was moderated by David Meerman Scott.

Rusty Williams, Co-Founder of Prospero, led off with a view of how professional publishers should look at user-generated comment.  In Rusty’s view, premium publishers need to be orchestrators of content.   Publishers should embrace this – build a blog, subscribe to RSS, etc.

The model is changing from “inside-out” to “outside-in”, collecting content from all sources and places.

Bloggers shouldn’t be smug; it’s not a religion, it’s just a technology.  Only blog if that’s something you feel comfortable doing.  Richard Branson: “business is about being true to yourself” – use the tools, feel how it expresses you, etc.

Larry Schwartz, President of Newstex, discussed their inclusion of blogs within their news feeds.  According to Larry, Newstex views blogs as commentary; they have several hundred blogs today.  In terms of why bloggers would syndicate their blog, they have found bloggers choose to syndicate their content for a few reasons:
1. To generate traffic for their blog
2. To get publicity (particularly consultants)
3. Some professional journalists want the chance to post their opinions without having to be reviewed by an editor.

Newstex users, largely traders and other financial professionals, see blogs as a way to find information before the mainstream media.  He cited the example of last week’s announcement by Apple Computer of their intention to support Windows.  Gizmodo picked up the story at 9:05am, while AP and other wires were 30-40 minutes behind that.  The time advantage allowed traders to get in and out of the stock while others were just reading the news.

Cyndi Schoenbrun, researcher for Consumer’s Union, uses blogs as a research tool.  They serve as an early warning system as blog editors post to their blog several times per day, a more frequent news cycle than the MSM.  Also, blog editors often have good access to CEO’s at conferences and provide podcasts and transcripts.

For Cyndi, blogs must be proven to have authority, for her to rely upon them.  While authority is hard to determine, she looks for transparency (does the blogger identify their professional identity?) and also looks where advertising is not intertwined with the content.

Some of the sources Cyndi relies upon are PaidContent, I Want Media, Mediabistro and Rexblog.

In response to an audience question about whether Consumer Reports would look to blend user-generated content with their authoritative research, Cyndi indicated that they were already doing a modest amount of that today by having subscribers post comments on automobiles.  They are currently looking to expand that to consumer electronics.  At the same time, they tend to act cautiously and are concerned that a manufacturer might stack the deck with favorable ratings and reviews.

Blogburst, the blog syndication service, which I've posted about previously, will officially launch on Monday.
It will be interesting to see how the various newspapers choose to integrate the blogs into their services.  Interestingly, this comes the same day that the NY Times Public Editor announced that the Gray Lady has expanded its use of blogs written by Times reporters.
Whether Blogburst can successfully monetize blogs or not, it's clear that the mainstream media is taking a more serious look at how they can blend authoritative content with opinion.

 TypePad, Six Apart's blog hosting service, has just introduced TypePad widgets.

Through TypePad widgets, users can add a select group of features to their blog.  For example, you can add a Eurekster Swicki, just like the tag cloud on the left pane of Content Matters, or add Rollyo, Feedburner, Pandora or any of more than 30 widgets.

Previously, the only way to add these to a TypePad blog was a somewhat arcane hack of creating a list, leaving a blank title then pasting the javascript or html code into the contents.  TypePad has eliminated the need for the hack (at least for the list of widgets they support), which should enable more people to use them.

If you’ve got a blog and are looking to add more functionality, take a look.  If you'd like to create your own TypePad widget, you can submit a request to Six Apart.

You may have noticed a new tag cloud on the  Content Matters blog.  Entitled "Content Buzz Cloud", it's on the upper left of the blog.

The cloud is a "Swicki" and it comes courtesy of social software provider Eurekester.  At first glance, it looks simply like a web 2.0 tag cloud interface a la delicious.  But, the swicki is more than that.  Behind the tag cloud is a vertical search engine.  Similar to Rollyo, the Swicki lets you select specific web sites to include in your index.  It also includes a full web crawl, but the matches from your vertical sites show up higher in your results.

So, what's the social software angle?  Well, a Swicki is designed for community tuning.  Users can tune the results by removing sites that don't match, by adding new sites or by marking certain sites to go to the top of the results.

For Content Matters, I've focused the Swicki on content-related topics and sites.  Swicki is still in beta, and some key features, such as including select blogs, are yet to be released (today, it includes all blogs in its index).  So, how are the results?  Try a few searches and let me know.

BlogBurst is a new service to syndicate blog content to mainstream media outlets.  Created by Social Software provider Pluck, Blogburst will distribute content from select blogs (Blogburst is by invitation only) to the online sites of newspapers and other traditional media.

Blogburst receives licensing fees from the newspapers it sells the content to.  Initially, bloggers receive no compensation, but gain wider exposure.  According to Search Engine Journal, Pluck plans to compensate bloggers once they finish the beta period.

So, is it worthwhile for bloggers to participate?  I'd say so.  Prior to Blogburst, one of my Content Matters posts was picked up by the WashingtonPost.com and generated a nice spike in traffic.  Most bloggers today are more focused on exposure than on revenue, so syndication is a positive.  Conversely, as Darren Rowse of ProBlogger points out, you have to be OK with the idea that your syndicated posts may show up higher in search results on a partner site than on your own.  I have begun to syndicate Content Matters on Blogburst, but that's a decision each blogger will have to make for themselves.

For more takes on Blogburst, look at BlogSEO and of course, TechCrunch, who hosted the party where Blogburst was announced.

Blogger Robert Scoble has done a quick blog search test to see how quickly the search engines pick up new posts.
For his test, Scoble has created a fake word, brrreeeport,and has asked bloggers to add that word to one of their posts (as I have done here).
Scoble is monitoring the number of posts that appear on Google Blog Search, Technorati and Feedster, as well as the main web search engines.
As of this afternoon, Technorati shows brrreeeport to be among the top blog searches, trailing only Quickdraw McGraw (Dick Cheney) in popularity. 
It's an interesting assessment of how quickly the various engines pick up posts in the blogosphere.

I love Web 2.0 technologies.  All of these great tools for social collaboration are fantastic, and the fact that they're all hosted applications makes them accessible and affordable.  I truly love them...
...when they work, that is.
I've previously praised Six Apart (TypePad's parent) including them on the "50 Content Companies that Matter" list.  Their TypePad service is easy, affordable and does 80% of what I need it to.
But recently, TypePad has gone through some growing pains.  Last fall, they had some stability issues and were forced to offer partial refunds to their subscribers.  During the past 3-4 weeks, these problems have come up again (while they apparently move to a new hosting facility) and the site has run with sporadic service.  I realize that, in context, this isn't a huge problem.  After all, the citizens of Iraq have only 2-3 hours of electricity each day, so my not being able to see usage statistics on my blog is a pretty small problem.  But, it is a problem that Six Apart has to resolve quickly. 
The downside to running an ASP model is that the switching costs for users are extremely low.  There are no systems to install and integrate, no hardware to purchase and no users to train.  I switched from blogger to TypePad about a year ago, and have been happy until now.  But if the stability issues are not quickly resolved, I think we'll see many TypePad users explore other options.  I know of one content industry blog that switched from TypePad to Blogger just this week.
So while I still like TypePad's tools, I hope they get their access problems fixed quickly.

Though we're not even at the halfway point in January, two new blogs have launched this month with a focus on the content space.

Clare Hart, the innovative CEO of Factiva, has just launched From the Hart, a CEO blog focused on the world of business information.  Under her leadership, Factiva has reshaped the world of business news, delivering workflow-based solutions for CRM, reputation monitoring and other business needs. 

The Bloom Group is a leader in professional services marketing.  I had the pleasure of working with them on a research study, in combination with business guru Michael Treacy, on behalf of the U.S. Chamber.  Ed Hastings of the Bloom Group has just launched a personal blog, That We Know, focusing on IT, content and the world of professional services.

Welcome to the blogosphere Clare and Ed.

Here's your chance to tell the rest of the world which blogs you like to read.

The 6th annual Bloggies enable you to nominate your favorite blogs by regions of the world, by topical area (politics, tech, etc.), your favorite blogging tools and more.  So, if you're interested, take a minute and cast your votes.  There's even a category called "best-kept secret" weblog for blogs like Content Matters (not so subtle hint) that don't have the readership of DailyKOS or Engadget. 

Just a brief note of appreciation to Scott Thompson and the team at Content.biz (sister company to MarketingSherpa), for naming Content Matters one of their "13 favorite blogs" on the content industry.

Now, I know some of you are probably wondering "are there really 13 blogs covering the paid content space?"  Well, it is a narrow niche, but thankfully it's one where part of the job is to be focused on content technologies, and so there is a healthy community of content industry bloggers. 

In addition to Content Matters, the Content.biz list includes Bill Trippe's blog, Poynter Online's eMedia Tidbits and Russell Perkins' Infocommerce blog among others, along with podcasting sites such as Inside Digital Media and On the Record...Online.

The ranking only included non-commercial blogs (i.e. those blogs which were not serving simply as a delivery mechanism for a publisher's content). I think it's fantastic that so many people in this community are so enthusiastic about the content business that they take the time to share their thoughts. 

I also applaud the team at Content.biz for relaunching their blog after a one-year hiatus, and have added it to my RSS reader.

I am guessing that in the next seven days, more digital pictures will be taken than in any previous week in history.  During 2004, more than 18 million digital cameras were sold in the U.S.  Worldwide, the total is more than 55 million (according to Fredonia Research).  A high percentage of cellphones today have cameras as well.

I anticipate that Christmas morning (and Chanukah too), millions of additional digital cameras will be unwrapped, while the tens of millions already out there will be snapping dozens of pictures.  I know that I will be using my Digital Rebel XT to take shots of my 6-year old unwrapping a Canon point & shoot that was at the top of her list for Santa.

What does this have to do with Content?  Plenty.  Unlike with film cameras, where all of those pictures would eventually end up in shoeboxes in the back of your closet, the digital world turns that into valuable content.  And, just as Del.icio.us allows users to tag their text-based content so that it’s accessible to the rest of the world, its sister company, Flickr, makes image content readily available to share with friends, family and (if desired) the rest of the world. 

One of the huge benefits of photo sharing sites is the ability to easily upload photos from practically anywhere.  You can send an image from your phone directly to your photo account.  What Flickr offers, beyond the simple capabilities of Ofoto or Shutterfly, is that it adds tagging to the process, enabling your pictures to be found. 

Just this week, I’ve been following Fred Wilson’s travels to Cambodia and Thailand.  Fred has posted a few photos to his blog, but the rest can be found on Flickr,

I can recall a former colleague emailing a daily diary (via CompuServe) to 50 close friends during his annual adventure vacations in the early 90’s.  He was cutting edge at the time.  Now, blogging from an airplane or sending images from your Treo are things we can take for granted.

Flickr has developed a number of tools to make their site more useful.  In addition to basic tagging, they have developed algorithms to rank photos based upon “interestingness”, as well as by the number of times a photo has been viewed, the number of comments it received and how often a member marks a photo as a “favorite”.  Flickr also offers a “Blog This” link to each image, so you can easily blog any photo.  Through these capabilities, Flickr has developed a fairly loyal and active user community of photographers and photography lovers.

Just as text was about 10 years behind structured databases in your ability to access it, image files are a few years from being part of the mainstream search environment.  But, Flickr has carved out a compelling niche to drive social interaction on the web and seems to be a critical part of Yahoo’s Web 2.0 strategy.  And, for that, it’s clearly one of the 50 content companies that matter.

To help make RSS feeds more interactive, Feedburner has launched a new capability called FeedFlare.  Their announcement is here.  FeedFlare automatically inserts up to seven metadata elements as a footer at the end of each post, enabling users to more easily tag the content with del.icio.us, email the post to another user, email the post’s author, or to see links and comments for that post.

While the initial launch is focused on blog posts, Feedburner announced plans to provide tools which would allow publishers to automatically add the FeedFlare metadata to all documents being published.  In essence, Feedburner will provide publishers with a simple to use plugin to generate useful metadata.  Feedburner also intends to provide an open API to enable publishers to add new web services. 

So, what’s the benefit of FeedFlare?

First, it enables bloggers and publishers to retain some of their “identity” when their feeds are syndicated.  Sure, if you’re reading this at www.ContentMatters.info, then you can already or tag the post on del.icio.us, etc.  However, if you’re reading this in an RSS reader, or if it’s been syndicated to another site, you can still email me and I will be sure that it comes to me, not the owner of the other site.

Once the API is released, the benefits become more clear.  Publishers will be able to modify the metadata created – for example, to post to a del.icio.us competitor, to provided various language versions of the metadata or to create contextual advertising links.

In the coming months, as RSS feeds become part of the mainstream web environment, tools like FeedFlare will be needed to make RSS an interactive environment, rather than a simple feed of text.

Initial comments on FeedFlare are provided by Richard McManus, Fred Wilson and TechCrunch.   

Today it was announced that Weblogs, Inc. was acquired by AOL.  Congratulations to Rafat Ali whose PaidContent.org broke the news yesterday during the We Media conference.  Jason Calcanis' Weblogs, Inc. had quickly developed some very compelling content, most prominently Engadget, but also the Blackberry Hub, Blogging Baby, Autoblog and others.  It's the same model that Primedia Enthusiast Magazines had used in the "traditional" publishing market; have compelling content geared towards niche markets of enthusiasts, written by enthusiasts.  And here, it's proven to be just as compelling, but without the huge infrastructure required for a magazine publisher.  It's rumored that the sale was in the $25M range, which seems a solid price for that property.

Of course, anyone involved in the NYC technology industry during the dot.com boom knows Jason.  His Silicon Alley Reporter was must reading for anyone in the tech or content space.  He later sold its successor to Wicks Business Information, which then sold to Dow Jones.

A day later, PaidContent also reports (via Jason Kottke) the rumors (yet unconfirmed) that Dave Winer's weblogs.com has been sold to Verisign.  Weblogs.com was the first ping server.  For those who don't blog, a ping server is the way that bloggers let the world know they've added a new post.  While search engines spider and index content periodically, blogs are more like newsfeeds, so you need to ping the server to let all the search engines, RSS Readers and other tools know that you've added a new post.

What both of these transactions show is that the blogosphere is generating real value right now.  This is not like the dot.com days where acquisitions or IPOs were based upon future potential, but instead are solid purchases based upon the traffic (and ad dollars) being generated right now.

Congratulations to Jason and Dave.

UPDATE: Michael Graves, of Verisign, confirms the Weblogs.com deal and explains the fit.

Today, I add Del.icio.us to the 50 Content Companies that Matter.

Tagging is a concept not often thought of outside of the content industry.  Traditional publishers and aggregators tag their content to make it more easily retrievable, either manually (as Chemical Abstracts Service might do to patent filings) or automatically, generally using Bayesian classification or similar.  On the client side, some sophisticated corporate users have begun tagging efforts inside the enterprise, typically as part of a Knowledge Management initiative.  These have tended to be labor-intensive processes with questionable ROI’s.

In the blogosphere, these centralized approaches don’t work.  The blog world does have a similar challenge in terms of the model (publisher or client) – with Technorati allowing “publishers” (bloggers) to tag their content, while Del.icio.us pushes the tagging to the reader.  In this market, I am betting that the latter solution will be the winner.

Del.icio.us has brought tagging to the masses, providing a platform for community-based tagging.  This approach lets users gain the benefits of the tags of all the other users out there, sort of a “Wisdom of Crowds” approach.

Perhaps more importantly, Del.icio.us has done this without anyone really knowing that they are tagging content.  Rather than tagging content, Del.icio.us has branded this as “social bookmarking”.  Where tagging is performing work for the benefits of others, social bookmarking has direct benefits for those who use it.  And for those who see “social bookmarking” as too technical, the new term “folksonomy” has emerged, combining the taxonomy concept of classification with the community-based aspect of Del.icio.us.

Rather than a simple folder-based approach to storing and sorting websites of interest, Del.icio.us lets you assign tags (or categories) to pages to make it easier to group, sort or retrieve them.  For example, the Content Matters blog might be assigned tags of Content, Technology, Blog and Tools.  The Del.icio.us toolbar, either as a pop up stand-alone toolbar, or embedded within your browser toolbar, lets you assign tags as quickly as you might add them to your favorites list.  But the benefits are much greater.  I’d point them out here, but there are already some great posts on the topic, including those by Fred Wilson and Tom Evslin among others.  Also, Jeff Jarvis provides a nice summary of the Tagging session at yesterday's Web 2.0 conference.  My suggestion is to configure Del.icio.us, invest 20 minutes tagging the pages on your Favorites list, then start seeing the benefits yourself.

During my years at ClearForest, we had a vision of every document in the world being tagged (by ClearForest) at least once.  Del.icio.us is providing a framework where every document or page on the web may get tagged by everyone who reads it.  And for that, they are clearly one of the 50 Content Companies that Matter.

Six Apart is the leading provider of blogging tools to the “professional” blogging community. 

While Blogger (owned by Google) and AOL offer free tools to the consumer market, the bulk of the “serious” blogs you read are probably developed using either TypePad or Movable Type, both products of Six Apart.  Movable Type is a comprehensive platform designed for the enterprise, while TypePad is a hosted solution licensed on an annual fee (author's note: Content Matters is built on TypePad).  Earlier this year, Six Apart acquired LiveJournal, a (mostly) free, open source personal blogging environment catering to individuals.

Six Apart introduced the concept of trackbacks, enabling bloggers to easily find others who have linked to their blog.  This concept, as much as anything, has helped develop communities of like-minded bloggers and is a de-facto standard in all blogs today.

Though many people think the Six Apart name is derived from the community aspects of blogging (“six degrees of separation”), the Company reports that the name is based upon husband and wife Ben and Mena Trott’s birthdays – six days apart from one another.

The blogging space is competitive, and will get even more competitive as Yahoo, MSN and others focus more efforts there.  Open source solutions such as Drupal have a loyal and devoted user base.  Meanwhile, today, it’s estimated that Six Apart has more than 10 million users across their three product lines.  The Company has done an effective job localizing their software and has struck partnerships with key distribution channels in the U.S. and abroad.  Six Apart's 50+ employees span three continents today.

Six Apart continues to innovate.  They've recently added a “tip jar”, another way for bloggers to potentially monetize their content beyond running Google ads.  While few blogs tip jars will cover the daily coffee, it's a creative method to generate revenue and can also be used for fundraising, as Michael Parekh is doing on his blog. 

Six Apart has just announced that their new platform, code named Project Comet, early in 2006, which promises to integrate the community aspects of LiveJournal with multimedia and the robust capabilities of Movable Type and TypePad.

The challenge for Six Apart will be to fend off the competition in a market where there is a low barrier to entry.  While an eventual acquisition may be inevitable, according to Staci at PaidContent, Six Apart is well poised to continue seeing sustained growth in the professional blogging market in the near-term.  And, as the leader in a key segment of one of the fastest growing content technologies, Six Apart is clearly one of the 50 Content Companies that Matter.

Since many blog readers are not using RSS feed readers for blog access, I've added the option to receive email alerts to new postings.  To sign up, simply enter your email address in the "subscribe me" box in the upper right corner of the blog.

I've chosen Feedblitz as my email syndication tool, due to their simple interface and flexible capabilities.  One advantage that Feedblitz offers over Bloglet is that the emails include the title of the posting in the message.  So, rather than just knowing that a post was added, you can see whether it might be relevant to you before clicking.

From a user perspective, Feedblitz allows you to manage all of your blog subscriptions in one place.  If you prefer to use email rather than an RSS reader for blogs, I'd recommend you give Feedblitz a try.

In their typical, low key fashion, Google has launched the beta version of their Blog Search.  No major press releases, no huge developer conference, not even a mention on their main search page.  But, if you click "more", there it is under Google Services.

It's exactly what you'd expect from Google.  The same clean interface as their web search engine, an advanced search option, plus the accurate results you'd expect to see.  In fact, when I tested a few phrases and keywords,  I found the results were much closer to what I expected to see than those of other Blog search engines such as IceRocket or BlogDigger. 

I think users will find that Advanced Search is more important when searching blogs than when searching websites.  The Google link-based algorithms for relevancy work very well in web search, but seem less so in my initial blog search tests.  The ability to search by Blog Name, by words in the title of the blog or anywhere in the text is much more critical in searching blogs than looking, for example, for a corporate website.  Narrowing the search by date range and author make it even more compelling.  An interesting feature is the ability to receive results of your search via RSS. 

Google waited a while before dipping its toe into the world of blogging, but now they are here and will be here in a big way.  The independents (Technorati, IceRocket, etc.) will have to continue to focus on providing analytics and feedback to bloggers as I believe Google will own the end-user blog search space.

Technorati's updated "State of the Blogosphere" reports, delivered as Part I and Part II, show some pretty amazing growth during the past six months.

Today, they index over 14 million blogs worldwide, double what they indexed in January. Of these, they indicate that more than 55% are "active" (defined as at least one post in the prior 3 months), with more than 80,000 new blogs per day. About 13% of blogs are updated at least weekly.

Technorati now indexes more than 900,000 blog posts per day (or 10 per second), more than double what it was seven months ago.

Much of the growth comes from new blogging tools in AOL and MSN, along with dedicated sites like Blogger and LiveJournal. Mobile blogging is beginning to register, with people finding new uses for their camera phones and similar.

One interesting note from the report is that posting activity peaks between 7am - 12pm PDT (10a - 3p eastern) and is 5-10% slower on weekends. In other words, this is not simply teenagers posting their diary to AOL after school, but means that blogging is occurring heavily in the workplace. Assuming that bloggers are also those who are reading RSS and blogs, it might suggest that the RSS market will be a strong opportunity for B2B publishers and content providers in the near future.

This week, both Google and AOL put their toes into the RSS water.

While Google seemed to dip their pinkie toe in, AOL jumped feet first, putting RSS front and center of their new portal.

AOL has teemed with Feedster to create "My AOL", a personalized home page on the AOL portal, in an effort to compete with Yahoo and MSN for ad revenues. In this new portal, currently in beta, feeds are the very heart of the system. Leveraging Feedster, AOL provides a simple, user friendly way to add feeds, whether from major content providers or your cousin's blog. It's a clean interface, with sponsored links on the right column, a la Google.

Google, on the other hand, has taken a very small sip of the RSS waters. In their new portal, you can pick and assemble off-the-shelf news, weather and related topics, while they also have a "Create a Section" area where you can subscribe to feeds. Unlike virtually every RSS reader out there today, the Google interface merely lists the headlines, requiring users to click into an article to see more info. Knowing Google, they will have a full fledged RSS reader in the weeks to come. They've never been afraid to test things, so it's not surprising they would put a limited function RSS reader out there, intending to improve it over time. At the same time, ClickZ reported today that Google applied for a patent today for embedding advertisements into syndicated RSS and Atom feeds.

The combined news is pretty clear. While most people still don't know what RSS is (and probably never will), RSS feeds are about to become a significant part of the content delivery world. And what's also clear is that the "advertising free" RSS feeds we've enjoyed for the past year are about to become a thing of the past. We will soon see significant ad dollars being spent on RSS feeds.