Jeremy at WebproNews has an interesting article written after meeting some comment spammers.

Then a partial solution is fairly clear. I’ve heard and seen others discuss it over the past few months. The search engines needs to be smarter about reading and indexing content.

Read more at Some Comment Spammers Have Blogs Too

Jordon Cooper has a good post titled The Twelve Days of a New Media Christmas which is choc a bloc full of new media goodies to make any new media junkie’s mouth water – ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas are upon us and our trees are full of “geese a layin”, “piper’s piping” and “partridges in their pear trees”. In other word nothing useful at all. Instead of braving the long return lines at Wal-Mart in the hope you can return seven swans a swimming, why not check out some of the programs and web servies listed below and have a new media new year. All of the programs help spread knowledge, ideas, or help you create some new ones.’

Earlier in the year I ran a blogging experiment by the name of Blogger Idol on one of my other blogs. It was a fun way of connect bloggers together to all write on a common theme each week. Over 150 bloggers signed up for weekly emails with a suggested theme. It took a bit of energy and time for me to run it but it was well worth it as I met some great new bloggers from around the globe.

The benefits of participating in the Blogger Idol experiment were numerous.

- A free and easy way to promote your blog

- Builds page ranking as your blog is listed on the Blogger Idol weekly pages as well as other bloggers pages if they vote for you

- Discover other quality bloggers

- Stimulation for post topics (sometimes we all get bloggers block and need a starting point).

Participating bloggers ranged from personal blogs, to business blogs, to photologs and even a couple of political blogs.

We took a break from the project a few months back but have decided to get it going again as of today. This time it will all run on its own domain/blog so as not to dominate this one. If you’re interested in joining the project head over to Blogger Idol and join in on week 1′s topic of ‘All I want for Christmas….‘ Entries can be anything from stories, photos, essays, rants, poems, quotes – whatever. Creativity is encouraged.

You can also submit a topic for future weeks and sign up for the weekly emails announcing new themes.

Clickz reports that ‘Online Retail Traffic was up on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday – ‘The market share of U.S. visits to the online shopping category was up 27 percent this Thanksgiving Day over Thanksgiving Day last year. Shopping visits on Black Friday this year were up 24 percent over figures for Black Friday a year ago.’

This is no surprise to me as I have done a bit of an informal survey of my problogging friends via MSN the last couple of days and found that most of them report increases in earnings from affiliates and contextual advertising over the last week – including Thursday and Friday. Those who especially saw gains were those blogging about consumer products. Whilst traffic on personal and political topics was down for most – those with a topic mix focusing on electronics, toys and other gift ideas have found their traffic and income stream surging in the past week.

Richard Zwicky writes that ‘Blogs are Diamonds in the Rough

Blogs are a potential diamond in the rough for your businesses marketing effots. The material posted on an ongoing basis to blogs are a veritable gold mine of insights for readers, provided by business leaders, market leaders, innovators, philosophers, marketers, political commentators, and many other opinion makers who never before have enjoyed such easy access to a simple and unmoderated public forum in which to share their opinions, ideas and insights….’

Steve from Micro Persuasion has kindly posted a presentation he did on the Impact of Blogs on PR. It is a well thought out presentation that covers the basics through to some good conclusions on the topic – complete with powerpoint slides and audio.

‘Bloggers are the leading force of change here. A blog is basically a web site owned by an individual or group that’s written with a human voice. They are easily discovered, usually organized chronologically, and written by people you can reach out and touch. It’s this last point – the social nature of blogs – that differentiates them from more staid corporate web sites.’

Read more at Micro Persuasion: Presentation on the Impact of Blogs on PR

The Command Post did a talk to editors of Associate Press newspapers recently and put the content of what he said up online – its well worth the read.



‘Here’s the lesson from Command Post: information in general, and news in particular, is now a flow, and not a stock.

When you have a billion people connected to each other, there is a supply and a demand for everything … and when you have search engines like Google, they actually have the ability to find each other.’

Read more at The Command Post – The Publisher’s Desk – Full Text Of My Speech To AP Managing Editors

“By most accounts, blogs — web logs to the uninitiated — scored a major coup last week when CBS News admitted that it couldn’t vouch for the authenticity of memos supposedly written by George W. Bush’s commander in the Texas Air National Guard. The conservative bloggers who led the charge against the CBS story were hailed as giant slayers. And yet it’s the blogging phenomenon itself that may need the last rites.

Even as it collectively achieves celebrity status for its anti-establishment views, blogging is already being domesticated by its success. What began as a spontaneous eruption of populist creativity is on the verge of being absorbed by the media-industrial complex it claims to despise….”



Read more at Blogging Sells, and Sells Out