SOMEWHAT FRANK

Technorati Rankings Accurate Again

Finally Technorati's rankings, sources, and links are reflecting accurately again.  I had emailed support a couple of times last week and never heard anything untill yesterday when I got a personal email from Naill Kennedy, the Community Manager at Technorati, and he gave me my updated ranking and link totals. Thanks Naill, I appreciate your assistance.

Vince Vaughn Doesn't Like Cell Phones

I was watching an interview with Vince Vaughn on Last Call with Carson Daly's and I found it interesting that Vince has never owned a cell phone. I think that is pretty impressive in his line of business. He also mentioned his recent move back to Chicago. Welcome back to the Windy City Vince.

Pondering The Future Of Blogging

Jeremy Zawodny recently asked the question "When will blogging peak?" and then went on to ponder it further in comparing blogging to online shopping in 2000. While I agree that blogging will at some point become common place, I am in line with Jeremy and do not know when it will peak. I think we are at least a year away from the tipping point, since I feel like blogging is still gaining momentum. Besides the few million people that blog today there are millions upon millions that do not even know what blogging is, let alone how to do it.

Blogging is a wonderful place to spread your thoughts and think out loud. It is also a powerful medium for connecting people all over the world with interests in the same niche or hobbie. So we  should all cherish blogging for what it is today, before it becomes just another online functionality and while there is still room for blogging technology to advance to offer new twists and features for even the most veteran blogger to enjoy.

Google's Revenues Up 98%

Google is banking, that is the bottom line. They reported today:
"...revenues of $1.384 billion for the quarter ended June 30, 2005, up 98% year over year. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition costs or TAC, the portion of revenues shared with partners."

LEAD Program Invades Tribune

Today I had the privilege of speaking for the second consecutive year, with some of the “best and brightest” minority high school students in the country as they rapped up the four week LEAD (Lead Education and Development Program in Business, Inc.). Tribune hosted the students sponsored by Northwestern University during their 2005 Summer Program.  I spoke about technology and business and my role at Tribune Interactive and appreciate the opportunity. While Paul Pace explained to the students how Tribune does it's online data marketing and Jaime Rodrigues, our summer intern, also spoke of her experiences at TI since May in the areas of marketing & development. It was rather enjoyable.

Here is a little snippet on LEAD from their website:

“A national partnership of America's top corporations and business schools, the Leadership Education and Development Program in Business (LEAD) is at the forefront of building a talented and diverse workforce ready for the business environment.”

LEAD is an initiative to introduce minority high school juniors to challenging careers in business. Its mission is to influence those high school students with outstanding academic performance and demonstrated leadership skills to pursue careers in business. LEAD engages them in a four week Summer Business Institute (SBI) program at a sponsoring university, in this case Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. Through SBI and other initiatives, LEAD guides students towards various corporate career paths, and exposes them to the corporate world environment. Here is some additional press coverage on LEAD by BusinessWeek. Also a nice write-up can be found on the Society of HR Management website.

IceRocket and Pluck Shadows Tagging

IceRocket and Pluck are both making huge strides into the blog search and tagging arena by offering tagging methods for your blog posts. Check out this link on IceRocket for instructions on how you can begin tagging. Thanks to Steve Rubel with additional support from IceRocket CEO, Blake Rhodes, for bringing IceRocket tagging to light.

Additionally, Pluck has released the Pluck Shadows Beta. It is a new blog search by Pluck which allows you to tag pages that are already published via the Shadows web site or a browser toolbar you can install to tag pages. It took me a second to figure out how this all works since it is not using the conventional tagging method of actually placing tags into the code of your posts. However, this unique tagging method is easy to use and should have appeal to both the technical and non-technical blogger. TechCrunch does a wonderful profile on Shadows here.

The creation of these new products brings even more players into the ballgame when asking the question Who Will Be #1 In Blog Search? I wonder if Technorati is getting nervous yet?

Google To The Moon

To commemorate the NASA Apollo 11 mission Google has launched Google Moon which uses Google Earth imagery to explore the moon. This will really come in handy if you ever are lost on the moon. But seriously, they have some pretty fascinating satellite images of the big chunk of cheese. See for yourself here, and be sure to zoom in all the way.

I'd love to see Google take it step further and explore the ocean's of Earth and show us some of the deeper depths that have never been explored by the human eye. That would be incredible.

You can find more details on Google Moon at Micro Persuasions.

Blogging Predictions

I recently read the eMarketer report "The Business of Blogging" and did not totally agree with everything that it inferred, but I did I come up with my own predictions on the business of blogging. While the study indicated that businesses will be slow to adopt the blogging technology as a form of corporate communication, I strongly disagree due in part to the power of blogs and their ability to harm or tarnish a business's reputation by posting negative messages. Most businesses currently do not have a way to combat the negative claims on blogs. Businesses are under the impression that what blogs say about your business matters. Therefore, my first prediction is as follows:

1.) Businesses will soon adopt blogs as a tool used to respond with a positive message to blogs attempting to tarnish their images with negative posts.

The study also spoke of a few examples of blog post content helping to uncover and drive media coverage in the form of breaking news. I believe that this will continue to be the case but become even more prominent. One of the examples was Memogate or the CBS News shake-up with Dan Rather. Another positive blog-to-media or (B2M, coined for the first time here by Somewhat Frank) event was the Clorox Bleach Pen which inspired many admirable blog posts like this one by One Good Bumblebee, which then turned into very nice sensational media pieces. So my second prediction is:

2.) Blogs will drive more media coverage. (B2M)

With the current state of the blogging platform technology it is apparent to me that more people will be putting out blog sites rather then actual web sites. I think the main reason for this is the minor differences in appearance and function and ease and speed of blogs to production.  So I feel that many company's will eventually realize that you will not lose viewers by creating a blog site rather then a web site from scratch. In fact, the blog platforms are so flexible you will probably be able to do everything you did before and more.  Just to add more fuel to the fire, the weblog platform structure enables blogs for  mobile delivery more readily and with ease making them even more appealing to the next generation of sites. See my platf0rm analysis post here. Finally, my third prediction is as follows:

3.) Blogs will start to replace simple websites.

We will see what the future hold and if any of these Somewhat Frank  predictions hold water.

For a PR/Marketing perspective and analysis of the eMarketer report check out Mitch Joel's post here.

Google Wants T-Shirts From Zazzle?

What would Google, renowned venture capitalists John Doerr and Ram Shriram, want with the company Zazzle, a company that produces t-shirts, stamps, posters and prints? This post on the Bobnar Blog reports Google might have some interest in Zazzle as  John and Ram just joined the Stanford based company's board of directors. I think the interest might have something to do with the library of images Zazzle has rights to which consists of 500,000 digital images, including more than 3,500 items of copyrighted material licensed from Walt Disney including icons of Mickey Mouse and my favorite Disney character, Goofy.

I am sure we will find out their intentions soon enough.

Blogs Are Websites Too

According to new data from Nielsen/NetRatings, almost two-thirds of blog readers don't realize they are reading a weblog. This makes sense to me, since really a weblog is just a website that posts comments in a somewhat standardized fashion, however with the blogging platforms available bloggers have a great deal of customization flexiblity within that standard and create wonderful looking websites that are actually weblogs in disguise. I just wonder:

• How much do these same users trust weblogs vs. websites?
• Do these users trust a weblog as much as a regular website?
• Does the word "weblog" frighten these users?
  

Check out this post by Steve Rubel for details on the data.

Beach Day In Chicago

Chicago hit 95 degrees today and I hit the beach to collect my thoughts on technology, business and other aspects of life...and catch some rays.

Journey Rocks Chicago's Shore

DON'T STOP BELIEVING ...  echoed across Lake Michigan last night as Journey performed on the Chicago shore at the new Charter One Northerly Island Pavilion as part of their 30 year anniversary tour. They handed out free copies of their new CD titled Generations to anyone that showed a ticket stub. Since I was fortunate enough to throw on my tight blue  jeans, beat up concert tee and attend the show I got a copy the CD as well as this audio clip from the show recorded via my cell phone to my Vonage phone account.

Blog Platform Option Analysis

Recently, I took a look at a number of weblog platforms and software toolsets to try and determine which would be the best for Somewhat Frank. I examined WordPress, the Six Apart offerings of Moveable Type and Typepad as well as few other vendors. I ended up going with TypePad since it seemed to allow me to launch my blog the most quickly with the least amount of set-up. I was going to perform more of an analysis but found USC Anneberg's Online Journalism Review had already done an excellent job here, including this comparison chart. A special thanks to The Blog Coach for pointing it out to me here.

BusinessWeek Blog Search Story: Based On Blog Posts

Stephen Baker recently wrote this story on BusinessWeek Online on the state of blog search based on several blog contributors' research and posts on the different players in blog search then spoke of it in this post.  I would like to think I might have helped contribute with the Somewhat Frank ~ Blog post titled,  "Who Will Be #1 In Blog Search?", but who knows, it could be wishful thinking on my part.

Google Eyes Baidu's IPO

Last week in the post "Does Google Want Baidu.com?" I spoke of Google's potential interest in Baidu and this week there is more speculation as  reports have, Baidu, the Chinese search leader's value on the rise. Austin Pauls does a very fine job analyzing the situation here. Also JDMBA had a nice IPO analysis here. So what will happen next?