Marketing expert Max Blumberg conversed with Bob Bly, saying:

[…] Blogging is more likely to raise brand awareness, but that the impact on direct sales will be more difficult to assess. Blogging is akin to, and probably forms part of public relations whose direct impact on revenue is difficult to measure, but definitely exists.

Absolutely spot on. It seems like this and other conversations Bob has had about his previous dismissal of blogging have gone some way towards persuading him that blogs require at the very least some investigation. Indeed Bob has now started his own blog. In the first post, he says:

In this blog, I want to provide the blogosphere with a view from my side of the fence as a member of another “sphere” – old-fashioned direct marketers who still believe the main purpose of marketing is to get the cash register ringing and not just have “conversations.”

This is great. I applaud Bob’s willingness to experiment and explore a medium with which he is not familiar, but I hope that he tries to dig a bit deeper than many marketeers currently do to see the genuine usefulness of blogs, not just as a way to communicate with (and, in some unfortunate cases, broadcast to) a market, but also in other contexts. After all, which business tool is flexible enough to be employed as a CRM tool, for knowledge sharing, or as a lightweight CMS?

I’ll give you a hint. It ends in ‘-og’.

Bob Bly is meeting rather a lot of resistance at the moment for his piece Can Blogging Help Your Product? in which he fairly firmly decides that blogs have no value as a marketing tool. Unfortunately the article is rather flawed, illustrating more Bly’s lack of knowledge and understanding than potential problems with using blogs in marketing.

Bly’s initital error, and the one I want to address here, is an assumption I have come across repeatedly over the last couple of weeks. He quotes Debbie Weil:

“A blog is an online journal,” blogging expert Deb Weil explains in her Business Blogging Starter Kit (www.wordbiz.com). “It’s called a journal because every entry is time and date stamped and always presented in reverse chronological order.

In Weil’s response to Bly’s piece, she says that her quote was taken out of context, yet Bly’s use of it reinforces the mistaken characterisation of blogs as nothing more than personal diaries. This then blinds non-bloggers to the potential uses for blogging software because they write it off before fully exploring the possibilities.

Just recently I had a long conversation with a friend of mine who, despite working in IT, confessed that he didn’t ‘get’ blogs. He also sees only the personal diary aspect of blogs and because he sees no use for personal diaries in business he doesn’t see the relevance of blogs to his work.

At the root of this problem is the confusion between the blog tool and the blog content. A blog is no more a diary than an empty notebook is a diary. Blogs become a diary when people use them to publish diary entries in the same way that a notebook becomes a diary when you write a diary entry in it.

But an empty notebook can also be a sketch book, a novel, an exercise book, a dictionary, or an infinite variety of other things, depending entirely on content. Equally, a blog can also be a tool for disseminating important news, or a project log, or a team building tool, or a marketing tool, or whatever its user chooses to make it.

In fact, blogs are a lightweight content management system which are easy to use, have strong archiving, cross referencing and search facilities, and are cost effective and flexible. That is what they are. A diary is what some people make them.

This leads me on to another conversation with another friend who brought up familiar concerns about even using the words ‘blog’ or ‘weblog’ with clients. He finds it counter-productive because frequently they neither understand the terms nor do they wish to expend the effort to get to grips with what they consider to be new and unusual (therefore potentially threatening) concepts. In other cases, he suffers the same blog=diary misconception.

Instead, he advocates using any other words or phrases which is appropriate to the client’s existing paradigm, whether that is ‘e-newsletter’, ‘event logging tool’, or CMS, it doesn’t really matter. What’s important is to get the client using the blog software and seeing the value in it. Later on you can explain that what they’ve been doing is blogging, but by then they’re so familiar with the process that the label is irrelevant - it’s water off a duck’s back.

Of course, none of this is really news. Anyone who’s tried to explain blogging to a non-blogger has probably come up against it. But it does cause a problem for those of us who work with blogs in business - how does one explain what one does if one can’t use the word ‘blog’?

One thing’s for sure. I shan’t be saying ‘Oh, well, it’s like a diary…’.

Richard Giles takes a look at the history of the internet and why he thinks businesses should keep public-facing blogs. Possibly a bit too detailed, but an interesting take anyway.

I’m glad to say that my good friend and fellow blogger, Michael O’Connor Clarke, has finally been sucked into the Corante vortex with his new PR/marketing blog, Flackster.

I can say from experience that Michael knows his onions like no other flack I’ve ever met. He even knows a bit about PR and marketing too. Without doubt, Flackster is one for the aggregator - I can say with confidence that if you like my style here at Strange Attractor, you’ll love Michael’s writing.

So welcome aboard, Michael. Good to have another mad Brit around the place.

Back in August (see how behind I’ve been with my blog reading?!) Danny O’Brien chewed on a question that is very close to being a question that’s very close to my heart. Danny’s questions is ‘How famous do you want to be?’.

The fame question appeared in 1997. We were futzing around doing an NTK Live in Soho, and Stew Lee turned up to watch. He was very impressed with all the cabling and the recording equipment and the laptops we were using, and asked how many people were listening to the show online. Standing next to the streaming server, I could answer him instantly: maybe twenty or so (there were probably about seventy people watching the show at the venue). He looked very disappointed, and probably a bit defensively, I found myself asking him The First Question. How many people do you need to be famous for?

In a more recent update (thank god Danny doesn’t blog daily, otherwise I’d be way too far behind), Danny says:

The fame piece got a big reaction, and has been looking increasingly fascinating topic for me. Like Life Hacks, I’ve got this strong sense that this is rich new topic that may be too big for me to explore on my own. I’m doing my best.

I’m not surprised it got a big reaction. There are a lot of people kicking about who would like to be either famous or, in the very least, middling-to-famous. As one of those people, (and yes, I know you’re not supposed to admit it in public, but I have always made a crap fan, and would rather have them than be one), I am obviously very interested in Danny’s conclusions, as and when he draws them.

However, once Danny has answered his question, my question will remain. Once we can say ‘X is how many people you need to be famous for’, we will still need to answer ‘But how do I know how many people I am famous for?’.

In the blogosphere one could argue that such metrics are easily gathered by server stats, but that’s really not true. These days I get most of my referrals to Chocolate and Vodka from Google, so the chances are that most people who swing past there are on their way somewhere else. In particular the guys (and I assume that they are guys) looking for ‘hot messy chocolate fuck’ (yes, they’re being more selective in their search terms now) are not actually going to CnV because they know who I am, but because they think they’re gonna get to see some pr0n.

How terribly disappointing for them.

But my point is, visitor numbers can only give you a hint as to for how many people you are famous. It’s sort of a null hypothesis thing - if you have no visitors then you are likely not to be famous, but having lots of visitors doesn’t necessarily mean that they are visiting because they know who you are. It might just mean that Google throws up your blog for lots of different search terms.

So what are the markers of the 1500+ fans microfame?

YASN popularity? Ok, so the size of your Orkut friends pool is not going to give you any true indication of your microfame status because mostly people aren’t friends with their fans. Besides, some unscrupulous people have engaged in Orksluttery, befriending anyone who asked them, at least until the novelty wore off and the ‘no donut for you naughty server’ 404 messages ceased to be amusing and started to crawl up one’s nose like an earwig with a taste for mucous.

Having your own IRC channel? Ooh, laughable. Doesn’t take much to set one up, doesn’t mean you’re famous. Just that you have an ego the size of, er, well, mine.

Your own wiki? Cf. above.

Technorati rank? You might say that the people in Technorati Top 100 are pretty much guaranteed to be famous to some extent, but it doesn’t help the rest of us. One’s blog ranking might be interpreted to indicate relative fame, because one could argue that people are linking to you purposefully, but it doesn’t give you any absolute data about number of fans, just number of people linking to you.

PageRank doesn’t help - it says nothing about relative levels of fame, just how well you do in Google’s PageRank algorithm.

Although the above only refers to the blogosphere, the same issues are prevalent in other areas of our lives too.

Here’s an anecdote. I used to be really active amongst Welsh learners, trying very hard to improve the resources available online and to encourage people to not just take up the language but to persevere with their studies. When I went to the Eisteddfod (a big Welsh language festival), people would sometimes come up to me, knowing who I was because of what I’d done with Clwb Malu Cachu. Now, I may well have been microfamous then, but I really had no way of telling.

In a sense, it was not knowing where I stood, not knowing whether my efforts were being appreciated by anyone at all, that resulted in a feeling of isolation from the rest of the learning community. That feeling of isolation was exacerbated by geography and by the fact that I was a learner-turned-teacher who wasn’t completely fluent and couldn’t take part in monolingual Welsh discussions. Thus I was isolated by physical location and by language - rather ironic for one concerned with teaching languages online.

Ultimately, that feeling of isolation, and the failure to find out what my position within the Welsh community was, lead to my almost complete withdrawal from it.

I am starting, by this point in this post, to write myself into some understanding of why I am interested - concerned, even - in knowing what my level of microfame is, and why it’s important in terms of blogging. Status within the community always has been important to us human beings, and it doesn’t matter whether that community is online or offline, we want to know where we stand.

Whilst I was at BlogTalk 2 earlier this year, Stefan Glänzer presented a paper called Does Blogging Suck? Some of the reasons he gave for blogging sucking were:

- no readers
- no comments
- no trackbacks
- no attention

Blogs have a notoriously high churn rate, with people bailing out when they suffer from the above symptoms. According to Glänzer only 18% of new blogs survive their first month. Before giving up, many bloggers write epitaphs:

- Is anybody reading?
- test test test
- I think I need a break … I will be back …

These are all essentially pleas for feedback and for confirmation that one is not writing in isolation. The blogger is trying to find out what their status is in the community, and when they fail, they abandon the blog on the assumption (correct or otherwise) that they in fact are not a part of any community. In essence, they are attempting to climb onto the ladder which may at some point lead them to a pre-fame status, and thence onwards and upwards to microfame and beyond.

If we can understand how people feel about factors such as microfame, maybe we can better understand what drives people to both start and abandon blogging. Maybe then we can understand how to protect business blogging against the sort of churn rate that personal blogging suffers.

Technorati’s Dave Sifry takes a brief look at the state of the corporate blogosphere, which he defines as ‘people who blog in an official or semi-official capacity at a company, or are so affiliated with the company where they work that even though they are not officially spokespeople for the company, they are clearly affiliated’.

That’s a pretty broad definition of ‘corporate’ but one I’ll accept for now if only because to narrow down the definition might result in a single figure blog count. As it is, Technorati only identifies around 5000 blogs, which is only 0.1 of a percent of the blogs that the site tracks.

Although Sifry explains his criteria for judging what is or isn’t a corporate blog, he doesn’t say how he identified which blogs are corporate and which are not. It must be tricky for a spider to differentiate between a corporate blog and any other sort of blog, so I’d be interested to know how he performed the count.

Unsurprisingly, the main companies using blogs externally are tech companies like Microsoft, Sun Microsystems and Macromedia. Sifry also groups together ‘media sites’ and ‘blogging companies’ which, between them, account for a sizeable slice of the pie.

Again, I’d love to see more detail on this. How many of these blogs are official? How many unofficial? How do the media sites and blogging companies slices break down? How many official blogs are marketing a specific product or service? How many are simply about improving presence?

As it is, Sifry’s report barely scratches the surface in terms of providing meaningful information about the use of blogs in business. The obvious point to make is that it only discusses external blogs. All the dark blogs - the internal blogs that are hidden away on intranets - remain uncounted and unmeasured, yet these blogs are the ones that are the most important for most blog-using companies. They are the ones that are currently providing the value.

Despite this, Sifry’s conclusion is right - blogs are slowly being accepted as being a useful business tool, and we are very much at the beginning of this process. We do, however, need to find better information than this in order to be able to convert new clients to the Way of the Blog.

A couple of years ago I remember coming across the Traffic street teams site and thinking that if I had more time, it’d be a cool thing to do. In short, Traffic puts together teams of people who are fans of bands willing to help promote that band in return for ‘swag’ - gig tickets, merchandise and other desirable stuff. It’s a cheap, easy and appears to be effective.

As it happened, I didn’t have time and the swag on offer was not sufficiently valuable to me that I wanted to spend hours doing the tasks required to earn it. That’s no great surprise - street teams are set up appeal to students and rabid fans, not businesswomen with a new internet start-up to look after.

A few days ago, I was feeding my rabid obsession with Shaun of the Dead when I came across Shaun Squad, a street team site for fans to promote the film in America, where is has just got a limited theatrical release.

Having a look round Shaun Squad, I was somewhat surprised that a site as new as this hasn’t taken any notice of the lessons learnt by social networking sites, which is a shame because it means that the site is nowhere near as effective as it could be.

Compare and contrast
Before I start pointing out what Shaun Squad could have been, I think it’s worth looking at how it works, and how it differs from Traffic.

On Shaun Squad, you have to register before you get full access to the site. You can then do certain tasks which earn you ‘pints’ that you can swap for goodies. The various tasks include inviting a friend to the site, IMing your friends, posting a link on a relevant messageboard or website, creating banners and icons, and various offline tasks such as taking photos of yourself in front of a theatre showing Shaun of the Dead. The site also collects feedback on ads, trailers and other official promotional activity.

If you earn enough pints, you can swap them for goodies such as a signed copy of the script, signed posters, t-shirts and the soundtrack CD. Pretty good incentives, but when a signed script costs you 18,000 pints and the tasks start at 50 pints for the online stuff, going up to 700 pints for an opening weekend photo, that’s a lot of effort to go to.

(Actually, if these prizes were available for UK residents I might be tempted into it by the thought of getting hold of a script, signed or not, but it’s only for Americans, sadly.)

On Traffic, teams are expected to do work offline - they are supplied with “materials (which could include stickers, leaflets, posters, CDs, promotional items, vouchers, tickets, competition prizes, etc.)”, and then have to complete simple tasks and submit an online report form prior to a deadline.

Traffic describe their perks thusly:

In addition to the satisfaction that you will get from promoting your favourite bands, you will receive all kinds of perks depending on what the bands, record companies/other clients provide us with on your behalf. You will receive things like pre-release copies of new records, free merchandise, gig tickets and promo items for completing your assigned tasks. There will, on occasion, be competitions and opportunities to meet the bands. There are also potential rewards and job possibilities for the most committed team members.

The key difference is that Traffic deals with ongoing promotions - a band will have single releases, album releases, tours, festival appearances, in-shop appearances and all sort of other stuff going on almost year round. Traffic creates teams of individuals to work a given band or project, and once a team is full it accepts no further members. They have time to build a team, and for that team to create a presence for the band.

Shaun Squad deals with one event - the release of a film in the States. And it’s a limited release at that, showing in only 607 theatres. They don’t have time to waste, they need a quick hit now. Shaun Squad doesn’t create teams, instead encouraging individuals to compete for prizes.

With Traffic, the social side of their activities is limited online to forums. Considering the slow burn nature of their activities, I guess this is just about adequate. More social interaction would create stronger teams, but without actually being able to take part in a team it’s hard to see precisely how well it works as is.

Shaun Squad uses forums and chat to promote social interactivity amongst members, but you must be registered before you can do that, or access most of the rest of the site. Whilst I can see why forum/chat moderators prefer users to register, it is beyond me why you would hide the majority of a promotional site behind registration.

Getting more bang for your buck
The whole point of Shaun Squad is to promote Shaun of the Dead. It has no other purpose. Once Shaun of the Dead is no longer showing in cinemas in the States, it has no function. Shaun Squad has a limited lifespan so they really want to be getting as much bang for their buck as possible, and they’re not: Currently the site has only 5300 members, a number I find to be surprisingly small.

Let’s do some maths. According to IMDb, Shaun of the Dead took $3,330,781 in its first weekend. At an average cost of $9.50 per ticket, that works out to be around 350,000 people. Even if every single member of Shaun Squad went to the movies once, that would only be an extra $50,000 (and this is not taking into account the fact that many of the members of Shaun Squad are in fact in the UK).

So, if its remit is to promote Shaun of the Dead and get more bums on seats, then Shaun Squad isn’t really doing so well. The question has to be why?

Social Shaun
I know that the company behind Shaun Squad, FanPimp, has heard of at least one social tool, because they have a news blog which includes posts by Edgar Wright, the director. Sadly, they are totally underusing this tool - it lacks standard blog furniture, is hard to navigate and is hidden behind registration. What does this mean? I means you can’t start a meme with it.

The Shaun Squad site of itself is not a meme, and never could be a meme, because it is inherently unlinkable. An open, public official Shaun of the Dead blog could, however, produce a meme which could spread through the film blogosphere rapidly - precisely the behaviour that’s required for the promotion of a cult film.

Posts by Wright, Pegg or Frost would create enough interest in the fans that they would post about it, and these posts would reach pre-fans (people who aren’t yet fans, but might turn into one given the chance). And it’s the pre-fans you want to get because these are the people who are going to go to the cinema and cough up their 9 bucks and thence (hopefully) turn into fans who will continue the word-of-mouth promotion of the film.

Ultimately, you can’t force a meme - they just happen. But you can create conditions suitable for meme growth: by posting strong material you can increase the chances that meme-spawning will occur. Hide your blog and you ensure memelessness.

Human traffic
Far worse than stifling memes, hiding the blog very effectively prevents healthy traffic. Look at Zach Braff’s Garden State blog and you start to get a feel for how popular film blogs can be. Zach has left comments open on his blog and he gets anywhere from 1500 to 3000 on each post. Compare this to the 40 to 50 comments per entry on the Shaun Squad blog.

Now, some more maths, although maths that is admittedly based on a terrible assumption. Think of it more as a thought experiment than actual maths.

I get around 40,000 unique visitors a month on Chocolate and Vodka. I get around 80 comments a month, so for every comment I get 500 visitors. By that reckoning, Zach Braf must be getting around 1.5 million visitors to each post. OK, my logic may well be faulty here, but either which way you cut it, this blog’s popular and it’s doing its job - it’s promoting Garden State.

Hiding the Shaun Squad blog is possibly the stupidest thing that FanPimp could have done. It achieves absolutely nothing. If anything it is shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted - you need to be a committed fan in order to be bothered enough to register for the access to the site which will then allow you to read the blog.

The site should, however, be trying to convert pre-fans into fans and to do that you need to do two things: 1) reach your pre-fans and 2) persuade your pre-fans to go see the film. A blog can potentially do both of these things, something that FanPimp seem not to have realised.

In an ideal world
Any site that relies on word of mouth and networking to raise its profile needs to be thinking much harder about which social tools they can use, and how best to use them. Unfortunately, most aren’t. Whilst the fans are doing a pretty good job of promoting Shaun of the Dead themselves, it would be so much more effective if there had been a central hub which pulled all of that effort together.

If you couldn’t code a dedicated Shaun of the Dead Aggregator to pull in blog posts and spew them out again as a single RSS feed, then an official PubSub feed and/or TopicExchange channel would allow fans to find content more easily. A wiki would allow fans to collate trivia, a task currently performed by my very unofficial OpenZombie. And an open, official blog would be the perfect way for fans to find these resources.

But instead, and as usual, Shaun Squad tries to own the conversation, as well as the means of conversation. In pinning it all down, they kill it and the whole thing fails to achieve its potential.

I’ve no doubt that Shaun of the Dead will become a cult classic - it’s got the depth, the style, the laughs to succeed with or without Shaun Squad. But it would have been so nice to see it utilising social software to facilitate proper online support too.

Matthew Oliphant from BusinessLogs talks about companies who specify blogging as a core skill when hiring, in particularly The Robot Co-Op who have posted job vacancies on their blog.

I don’t think this is really that surprising a development. Blogs are a great window onto someone’s life and thought processes and it’s inevitable that they’ll increasingly be used as a tool for both people looking for jobs and companies seeking new employees. Blogs are, after all, just logical extensions of the traditional website jobs page and the online portfolio/CV.

Oliphant also points to Heather Leigh who asks, What is it going to take for (corporate) blogging to become a job skill? Heather outlines a number of key skills which she thinks contribute towards success as a blogger:

- An ability to gauge relevance
- Strong written communications skills
- An ability to filter for appropriateness
- Original opinions or an ability to contribute original thoughts to existing discussions
- Diplomacy skills

I agree with all of these points, but I think there are other barriers that need to be overcome before corporates accept blogging as a desirable skill, and they have little to do with what it takes to be a good blogger.

Getting buy-in
Good blogging, the sort of blogging that gives your company a good reputation, takes time. Anyone who is experienced in writing original posts understands this, but new bloggers may not and managers who haven’t ever blogged almost certainly will not. The blogger and manager need to be committed to the blog - the blogger in order to actually blog, the manager in order to provide the support required to blog.

The Invisible Work Problem
Much of our modern work ethic is based around the visibility of our tasks. We have open plan offices, public calendars, meetings, milestones, expectations. There is a need to be seen to be Doing Stuff. That’s why slacking off at work is easy if you’re pretending to actually work, but work that makes you look like you’re not working can create difficulties if managers and colleagues immediately assume the worst.

Blogging takes a lot of reading and thinking. These are non-visible activities, but they are essential to a good blog. If you can’t spent two hours just reading without raising suspicions, then your blog is going to suffer. Much of this is down to trust - you need your manager and your colleagues to trust that you’re getting on with stuff even if you look like you’re not. Surfing the net and reading RSS feeds are seen by many as skiving activities, but they are meat and drink to the blogger.

Clarifying the lines
What can and can’t you blog? This question needs to be answered very, very clearly in the blogger’s head. Mostly, one would hope that employees understand what they can and can’t talk about publicly, but that doesn’t stop people being fired for blogging. (Ostensibly, at least - we usually only get half the story when bloggers are fired, and that half is possibly the least rational of the two.) Clarity on this issue is essential - it’s not about trying to neuter the blog with a list of dos and don’ts, but of attempting to ensure that PR snafus never arise.

Prioritisation
How important is the blog to the company? Where does it sit within the blogger’s other responsibilities? Should they be blogging regularly or only when they have a light work load? How much of their time should they spend blogging?

Again, this comes back to issues of management buy-in, trust and time. Tacking a blog on to someone’s existing responsibilities without considering the impact of the additional work is only going to make life difficult for the blogger and will result in a poor blog. Expectations need to be set and managed. Again, clarity is important.

There are other issues to the acceptance of blogging as a core skill in business, but management and blogger alike must take into account these sorts of practical considerations in order for the bloggers to have the opportunity to blog well. It goes without saying that there is still a lot of suspicion about blogging in the business world, so attending to the practical and proving that you’ve thought these things through can go a long way towards helping overcome those barriers of unfamiliarity.

Phew!

At Corante, to the degree that we can be said to direct our various contributors at all, we certainly aren’t going to exhort them to produce more entries in the name of more entries alone — even if that technique naturally dupes the gullible. We are searching for a different path to influence the communities and markets we are involved in: true expertise and deep insight. And we may get talky at times too, but it won’t be for its own sake, or to pull the wool over people’s eyes.

Horst Prillinger explains trackbacks, and discusses when you should and should not trackback. This is something I’ve been thinking about lately too.

Horst’s first point is that you should not ping if your post does not have anything to do with the post you’re pinging, which is good common sense. He also advocates that you don’t trackback if you do nothing more than link to a post without adding to the conversation somehow.

My response to that second point is that some software automatically pings - i.e. if I link to you in a linklog style post, the software will ping you anyway. The software doesn’t differentiate between post styles, it just sees a link, derives a trackback uri and pings. I may be able to tell it not to, but I’ll probably forget.

I can see why Horst feels that a trackback from that sort of post is not worthwhile, as linklogs aren’t really adding to the conversation per se. But you do get some useful information from that sort of ping - it brings to your attention bloggers who are reading you and with whom you may have something in common.

That may seem like a very author-centric reason for accepting this sort of ping, but readers may also derive value from being able to follow the link trail to other blogs which, even though they don’t pass comment may also point to related posts that do.

There’s another circumstance where the value of trackbacks are debatable, and that’s when someone pings even though they are not quoting a post directly, but just talking about the same subject.

I had a trackback like that a while ago and initially I was rather miffed. I’d followed the link back to the referring blog, but there was no link to my blog there at all. In retrospect, I think my annoyance was down to my ego - here was someone implying they had mentioned me and they hadn’t.

On balance, this sort of trackback is no less useful than any other sort. It is, after all, extending the conversation and that is what trackbacks and comments are all about.

Mark over at Weblog Tools Collection asks How many posts are too many posts? and compares a selection of blogs with different posting frequencies. He doesn’t really come to a conclusion, other than that it depends quite a bit on post length and type.

For me, it also depends on how much time I have to catch up with updated blogs and how much I enjoy reading that particular writer. When time is short, I prefer blogs that don’t update too often and avoid those that do, simply because seeing too many unread posts in my aggregator can be a bit overwhelming. Instead of thinking “Cool! Lots to read!” I think “I’m never going to get through that lot in time” and so I never start on the backlog.

But let’s turn the question on its head and ask not “How many are posts are too many”, but “How many are not enough?” Given enough time, I would be posting on Strange Attractor at least once a day, preferably more, but as you may have noticed if you are a regular visitor either here or to Chocolate and Vodka, lately I haven’t had enough time.

I have a tendency towards writing longer, more considered posts with the occasional short linklog style post, and wherever possible I like to add to the conversation rather than just repeat what others are saying. Sometimes, of course, someone else has said it all so succinctly that all I can do is point to their post and say “Look at this!”.

However, although it seems like a bit of a cop out to convert to linklog style, to be a really good linklog you have to do a lot of reading and, as we have already established, time is short. So it seems that I’m stuck either way. Essayist or linklog, blogging takes time and lack of time means that I am posting a lot less here than I had originally hoped.

Mark also asks another question: “Is there such a thing as too much bloggage in a day?”

A couple of months ago, I would have said “No, there can never be too much bloggage” but now I have four blogs on the go and another in the pipeline I am understanding the nature of the overblogged. Don’t get me wrong, I love my blogs, but they’re like little kittens - fun to play with but very demanding. Where other people struggle with their work/life balance, I’m struggling with my work/blog balance, (having given up on the whole having a life thing a long time ago).

I was thinking this morning that I need to rearrange my life a bit to enable more quality blogging time, but then I realised that I’ve already cut out TV, I am barely on IRC anymore and I have pretty much stopped reading magazines (I have a huge stack of unread issues of New Scientist and Scientific American staring balefully at me from a shelf at this very moment). Other than cutting out sleeping and eating, I really can’t see that I have any ‘spare time’ to turn over to more blogging.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this. Firstly, I need to hope that you, my readers, prefer infrequent posts to hourly updates. Secondly, this issue of balance is a far bigger problem for business bloggers who are blogging at and for work - starting a business blog is a potentially time-consuming commitment, and that needs to be worked into the plan right from the start.

About a week ago, Complete Tosh drew my attention to Real’s ill-conceived Freedom of Music Choice blog. Intended to make Real’s RealNetwork online music shop look good by slagging off Apple’s iPod, iTunes and their proprietary music format, it includes such gems as:

Consumers are getting a raw deal with the status quo in digital music, which limits healthy, open competition that drives down prices and encourages innovation. Stand up for your right to Freedom of Music Choice!

And:

RealNetworks has launched the “Freedom of Music Choice” campaign to help consumers break the chains that tie their music devices to proprietary music downloads. We’re here to inform AND motivate.

Unsurprisingly, Freedom of Music Choice rapidly fell foul of Real’s own customers’ long memories. As Neil McIntosh says:

Someone should have told Real - hell, they should have known: pick a fight with Apple, and hoards of Mac lovers will pile in to support the company. All the harder if your own company has an utterly shitty record when it comes to looking after its own customers.

Well, now it seems that Warner Brothers Records have succumbed of the same brand of idiotic thinking that holds sway at Real.

According to the New York Times, earlier this month “Warners became the first major record label to ask MP3 blogs to play its music” when it emailed an MP3 by new band The Secret Machines out to a select group of around eight bloggers.

Initially, one might think that was a savvy move on Warners’ part. Get the bloggers on side, easily reach online audiences and give out the message that Warners understand the value of downloading.

Of course, it didn’t work out like that. The bloggers were understandably suspicious and wary of being seen as a publicity conduit for a major label, so in the end only one blog, Music For Robots, posted the MP3. That’s when it went from an idea that could go either way to a Rather Bad Idea ™.

Comments. Some say that blogs should not have comments, but without comments we wouldn’t get to enjoy the fawning stupidity of Warners staff pretending to be punters (punctuation/spelling as per original):

This track is amazing!! Thanks for letting us listen to it!! I never heard these guys before, but theyre awesome. I went to their website and you can listen to a lot of ther other stuff, very cool andvery good!

Of course, no one would have known that the comments weren’t from real punters if a) they hadn’t been so out of step with the rest of the comments and b) they hadn’t posted from the Warners IP address, identifiable as the same one from which the original email was sent.

Ah, IP addresses will always let the unwary spoofer down.

This is the sort of thing that makes me want to bang my head against a brick wall until the nasty voices stop. Really, guys, it’s so very, very simple. But here are a few pointers for the terminally hard of thinking:

1. Bloggers are independent people (usually). That means they think for themselves and don’t like being put on a lead. You can send a press release to a blogger, but you can’t make him blog.
   
2. Blogs are authentic (usually). That means that bloggers won’t post something because you asked them to, it has to be something they believe in. In order to get a blogger to blog, you have to give them something worth blogging about.
   
3. Bloggers are individuals (usually). On the whole, bloggers don’t do things en masse. Send a press release to a N bloggers, particularly bloggers with similar genre blogs, and you can expect to find that N-1 (or maybe N) won’t post it.
   
4. Bloggers are awkward buggers (usually). If you want to get on the right side of the blogosphere, treat bloggers with respect. Build relationships up over time. Earn your trust.
   
5. Don’t try to manipulate us. I don’t care how many meetings you sit in each week or how many besuited minions you control, you don’t control us. Not only will we fact check your ass, we will check your IP address too, and any other scraps of information that might give you away.

To paraphrase Mark Willett of Music for Robots, this is the blogosphere, not an AOL chat room.

Remember Tamagotchi? The little keyfob-dwelling virtual pet that you had to feed and care for in order for it to ‘survive’?

Blogs are Tamagotchi. If you don’t feed them, they die. If you don’t clear up their crap - comment spam, for example - they die. They’re more fun when there are other bloggers to play with, just like the new IR connected Tamagotchi are allegedly more fun because your little virtual pet can now interact with other little virtual pets.

But, like Tamagotchi, if your blog pet dies, nothing really bad happens. There’s no body to dispose of, no crying children to whom you have to explain that little Ginger went away and isn’t coming back, no real repercussions at all. And, like Tamagotchi, even if your blog does starve to death, it’s easily enough resurrected.

Let’s face it, a business blog could die and it probably wouldn’t have a fatal impact on the business. It wouldn’t be good PR, but I doubt that you’d be there six months later explaining to the receivers how failing to post to your blog destroyed your customer base.

Like a Tamagotchi, keeping a blog healthy requires time and effort. The question is, how much?

One important aspect is how your business blog fits in with the rest of your work. If your blog is a priority, then that makes it easier to judge how much of your time should be spent working on it. If your is just tacked on to other responsibilities then you are forced to blog shorter posts because you simply don’t have time for anything else.

Another influence on time spent blogging is what sort of blog you are keeping, and what you are intending to achieve with it. A basic linklog takes a lot less time to maintain than a collection of informed posts, but in terms of communicating your key messages it’s not going to be as effective because all you are doing is pointing to other people’s work rather than explaining your own stance to your readers. Conversely, blog of long essay-like posts which explore wider themes and crystallise out original thoughts is bound to take more time than a linklog but will communicate something of your experience and opinions to your audience, thus telling them something valuable about you and your business.

Also to be considered are the simple mechanics of writing. It is easy to underestimate the amount of time that writing can take. The actual putting of fingertips to keyboard is just end of a process that can involve a lot of reading, research and thinking. That last step, the thinking, can be a particularly thorny when working in a world where ‘work’ is expected to be an externalised, visible process.

Often thinking requires quietude, physical exercise or doing some non-cerebral task. The shower, for example, is a great place for a good think, but opportunities to take a quick shower in the workplace are, well, limited. This is one of the problems that arises when the creative clashes with the corporate - the way that the creative mind functions is often at odds with the work ethic, not to mention environment, of many companies.

Then comes probably the most important factor - the personality of the blogger and their perception of their blog. Some people are naturally more verbose, but if they are seen as spending too much time on their blog, conflict will ensue. Equally, if the bloggers sees the blog as something that deserves their best work, that will also result in more time spent blogging. After all, who wants to put their worst work on display?

Tamagotchi die when neglected, but you can’t get away with just randomly feeding your virtual pet and hoping for the best. It takes care. You have to learn when your Tamagotchi needs food, when it needs to sleep, when it wakes up.

Blogs are the same, you have to figure out the boundaries of your comfort zone - how often to post, what to post, what style, how that fits in with your job and the rest of your life. Failing to find out where you’re comfortable will almost certainly result in a decreased desire to post, neglect of your blog and ultimately, its untimely death.

And we wouldn’t want that, would we?

The line between business and personal blogs is not always a clear one. In Lumpers and Splitters I discussed five types of business blog, but I deliberately didn’t discuss blogs which are both business-related and personal.

Partly this is because they didn’t fit neatly into my categorisation, but mainly it’s because I am grappling with the implications of moving from blogging-as-a-hobby to blogging-as-a-job myself.

The last two months has seen blogging go from something I do for a laugh to something that, amongst other things, I do for a living. Whilst Strange Attractor is an important part of my professional life, Corante is complemented by two other clients for whom blogging is a key tool of their trade.

This aspect of blogging poses no problem - I know what is appropriate content for Strange Attractor the same way that I know how my clients view blogging and what they are looking to get out of it. The issue lies not with being employed to blog, (although that does have its own pitfalls), or advise about blogging, but with what has happened to Chocolate and Vodka because I am now employed to blog.

A year ago I would never have considered that I might wind up working as a professional blogger, or that I would end up having my very own metablog. I posted whatever I liked to Chocolate and Vodka because it didn’t matter. No one was really reading it anyway, and anyone who was reading it could take or leave my posts as they saw fit.

Then my business effectively closed and I had to move from being an entrepreneur to being a freelance again. I’ve been working as a freelance writer and web designer for some seven years, so whilst it was an unpleasant experience to watch my 18 month old business slip through my hands, I knew that at least I had useful skills to fall back on.

This is when the nature of Chocolate and Vodka began to change. I started to use my personal blog, in conjunction with IRC and a portfolio site, to get work. Whenever I met a potential client, I pointed them at my portfolio site and thence on to my blog. And it worked. I have three main clients, and all of them either found me online or were influenced by my blog.

When I was touting myself around, looking for work, I didn’t really consider the impact that this would have in the eventuality that I was successful at locating new clients. I continued to blog as per normal.

Then I started Strange Attractor and my more serious posts had found a new home, leaving Chocolate and Vodka to become my personal blog. Yet my clients still read it. So what is it? Is it a personal blog? Is it a professional blog? Certainly it’s a blog by a professional, but that doesn’t make it a professional blog.

My problems does not centre around talking about my clients on my blog, because I have a very keen sense for conflicts of interest and what is and isn’t appropriate. It’s not even about whether or not my clients read my blog. Instead, the issue is around what I feel comfortable confessing.

The event that brought this to the forefront of my mind happened last weekend. Whilst out on the town, something happened which I would normally have blogged about, (you’ll have to wait until I blog it on Chocolate and Vodka to find out what it is! If I blog it, that is…), but I suddenly fell prey to a moment of self-censorship: “Oh! I can’t blog that!”.

I have always had a confessional personality. Take me to the pub, ply me with a vodka or two, and I will tell you my life story, whether you like it or not. Stand-up comedy was, for a while, the arena in which I confessed. Then it was fiction. Now it is blogging.

The best sort of confession is, as the Catholics figured out, anonymous. Nothing on the web is anonymous, not even anonymous blogs. There is always the risk of being outed, always the risk that someone who is savvier than you can figure you out. And I’m crap at keeping my own secrets, so anonymous blogging never was an option.

Being a small, z-list blog is very much like being anonymous, though. The temptation to assume that no one is paying attention lulls you into a false sense of security which draws from you confessions that perhaps might be best left unsaid. Of course, nothing I’ve blogged has been as salacious as that last sentence implies, but people do get caught out, and fired.

I can ignore, though, the fact that I’m getting traffic. That’s easy. Until people mention blog posts in conversation. (The fact that people read me is something that never ceases to genuinely surprise me.) Finally I am getting to grips with the fact that my personal little scratchpad is no long so little, and no longer so personal.

I am not the only person to deal with the fact that, at some point, your personal blog ceases to appear personal and starts to appear professional. At the beginning of the year Michael O’Connor Clarke went through the same thought process that I am going through now. Journalist David Akin has more recently felt the need to explain who pays for his blog.

I think, upon reflection, that I have come to the same conclusion that Michael came to - my clients saw my blog before they hired me, they have been fully informed as to the sort of person that I am and anyone who doesn’t like my blog is not someone that I would want to be employed by. Thus self-censorship is essentially unnecessary.

Chocolate and Vodka is not a professional blog, it’s a professional’s blog. Big difference.

This is a hard line to draw in the sand because I have used my blog for professional purposes - getting work. But it is still not a business blog, not a professional blog. So if I choose to blog about cute guys in skirts, that really doesn’t matter. It’ll just make for some interesting chat the next time I’m in the office.

Not knocking. It’s a bad habit I have. But to be honest I think it’s a learned behaviour. It’s so consistently led to excitement and drama that I have to admit I’m probably intending to do it on some subconscious level. Bedroom locks were made for girls like me.

At first, as my eyes adjusted to the light, I thought Lilith was meditating. My last roommate was into yoga. But Lilith was on her knees, rather than cross-legged. And she was surrounded by candles, a thick circle of dozens and dozens of wax stubs. The window was open; it was cold in there, the light spastic.

So starts Roommate From Hell, a new blog by novelist Jim Munroe, who explains on his site:

When Kate discovers that her roommate identifies as a demoness, she figures it’s too sacrilicious a secret to keep to herself: she tells all on her blog, roommatefromhell.com.

This is the basic gist of my new book, An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil, a tale of the urban occult told entirely through Kate’s entries. Starting today, I’ll be posting one a day to the faux roommatefromhell.com blog until all 88 entries (the whole book) are up.

I love the idea of using blog to distribute creative works. Giving away stuff for free in order to allow people the opportunity to enjoy it, and then maybe buy it if they like it, appeals to me immensely. And if you’ve got the creative chops, it works too - both Cory Doctorow and Lawrence Lessig have simultaneously published books free online and in print which have sold out, going into additional print runs.

Of course, Doctorow’s and Lessig’s successes don’t guarantee that Munroe will sell a thing - that entirely depends on the quality of his work. But having the guts to put your stuff out there demands respect, particularly as he uses an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons licence so people can take his work and mash it up however they like.

The only thing that I would quibble about is his use of the word ‘faux’ in relationship to the blog. Looks like a blog, smells like a blog, is a blog. I don’t think it matters that the blog is pre-planned and fictional, that doesn’t make it a faux blog to me, it makes it a fictional blog. Does the fictional/factual nature of a book change whether or not it is a book?

Again with the format/form/story debate.

(Via Kevin on email, via BoingBoing)

According to the Online Journalism Review, news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal have started courting bloggers, sending out press releases and encouraging them to link to free news content.

“Many traditional journalists have come to see blogging as an either-or proposition — you’re either a blogger or you’re a conventional reporter or columnist,” [Bill Grueskin, managing editor of WSJ.com] told me via e-mail. “I see blogging as a nascent phenomenon that is a threat to journalism only to editors who treat it as such. I think the key is finding ways in which we can each do what we’re best at, and look for ways to cooperate. Truth is, bloggers depend a great deal on traditional media. But, I’m coming to find, we can depend on them.”

Marvellous! At last, we’re moving into more productive territory where bloggers and journalists (and some bloggers who are journalists) can benefit from each other’s strengths instead of attempting to draw lines in the sand.

When I started writing my first feature film script in July last year, I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I knew the story I wanted to tell, having lived with it lurking in my mind for over two years, but I didn’t know how I should tell it. What I did was just to start writing. I could make some guesses about how I should structure the document and what it should look like, but I was really just groping about in the dark.

A few weeks later I found Zoetrope, a website run by France Ford Coppola for aspiring film makers. On Zoetrope I met other writers, both experienced and newbies like myself, whom I could ask for advice about how to write my script. I rapidly came to realise that this was a topic that caused a lot of people quite a bit of grief, primarily because there was a lot of confusion about the difference between form and format.

Screenplays - particularly spec screenplays which are written on the off chance that they will be bought rather than to a commission – are subject to a strict set of formatting guidelines. These rules govern the width of the margins, the font style and size, the indentations for dialogue, the way that sluglines (the text telling you where a scene is taking place) are composed, everything down to the size, type and number of brads used to hold the script together when printed out. Although there is some leeway in terms of exactly how many millimetres wide your margins should be, for example, if you stray too far from the accepted conventions, your script is seen as amateurish.

Some people, however, would regularly rail against these rules, hating the way that anyone could possibly have the nerve to tell them what to do and how to do it. There would be huge discussions about precisely which version of Courier was the best, exactly how far from the edge of the page your dialogue should be indented, and whether all this was just another form of film industry idiocy.

Many of these discussions failed to grasp a basic, but important, point: Format has no impact on story. It governs only how that script looks, not what the script says. In terms of the film that would be made from the script, format is inconsequential. In terms of the act of typing in your script, it’s even more inconsequential because you can get good software that does it all for you.

On the other hand, the form of the script has huge consequences for the resulting film. Form, not format, was what many of these people should have been discussing, but often they mistook form for format, confusing structure with typography.

Form, when it comes to screenplays, is about structure. A film, like a play, is usually divided into acts. You can have as few as two or as many as five, but the usual number is three. There should be turning points in the plot, escalation of risk, and expectation gaps (the character does something, expects a given result, but ends up with a different outcome).

These structural points, this form, often strays over into the domain of story, but where story is specific, form is universal. When I talk about form I can say that by page 30 in a 120 page script should come the first turning point, where the heroine must irrevocably commit to a course of action. That is a point of form, or structure but it doesn’t tell you anything about the heroine, what her course is, what her commitment is. It has an impact on the story, but it isn’t the story.

There are those who think that too much emphasis on form, on structure, is detrimental – by sticking to the classic three act form wherein I can predict key scenes around pages 30 (end of the first act), 60 (mid point in the second act) and 90 (end of the second act), I create a formulaic and weak script. These people will point to all sorts of films that do not follow the standard three act form and claim that this just goes to show.

These people too are mistaken. Form provides a skeleton upon which the creative writer can hang her best writing. These forms have evolved over a century of film making, and they work. The reason they work is because humans have been telling stories for as long as we have walked the earth. We are all born storytellers. Almost instinctively we know a turning point when we see one because these are reflections of our real lives, not in the detail, but in the general.

When Will Turner throws in his lot with Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, we know that his life has changed irrevocably. We don’t need to be told that this is an important scene, we just know it. Whilst the detail of Will’s decision are unique to that character in that screenplay, we are more than capable of recognising the importance of that sort of life-changing decision from our own experiences: The job offer you accepted or the first time you asked your partner out on a date.

Form is not story, no more than format is. There’s overlap, yes, but it’s not the same. Format and form are meaningless constructs without story, without the writer’s expertise, skill and craft. The most beautifully formatted script is no better than toilet paper if the words on it are worthless. The most perfectly formed screenplay is no better than junk mail if the story doesn’t work.

(It not until this final aspect of story that we get to talk about issues such as genre. Genre – the ‘sort’ of film it is: thriller, comedy or action-adventure – is not the same as form, instead being entirely down to the story itself, the settings, the characters, the plot.)

At the end of the day, to be successful you need all three aspects of format, form and story. You need to be a skilled writer not just in your ability to turn a phrase, or create a character, but also in your ability to use form to your own advantage, to ensure that your script does not become some trite, formulaic waste of a dead tree.

The film industry has had some hundred years to develop. The blogosphere is but a three day old chick in comparison, yet we are grappling with the same issues.

We’ve all seen discussions over format – what makes a blog a blog? We can say that a blog should have permalinks, comments, trackbacks, be in reverse chronological order, have a blogroll, have archives, and all the other aspects that we instinctively recognise as being ‘bloggish’. But then, is a blog without permalinks still a blog? Is a blog without comments still a blog? How many of these attributes can be removed before a blog ceases to be a blog?

Like scripts, though, software is available to remove worries over format. Most blog software imbues the end result with a blog format purely by virtue of its use. The tool creates the format. The user doesn’t have to worry – and probably didn’t worry in the first place anyway – about format and whether what they are writing is a blog or not. It is only after the fact, or to other people, that the question of ‘what format does a blog have’ becomes important.

Blog form is about the structure of the content – is it a linklog, a diary, quoted or original content, essays or short posts, a moblog, a videoblog, a mixture of everything together? Just like scripts, the form of a blog has an impact on the content (the story) of the blog, but they are not the same thing.

(Indeed, it is not until we look at content, in this parallel set of parentheses, that we can talk about the genre of a blog. From klogs to warblogs to personal diaries, genre comes out of story, out of content, and is not imposed upon it by form or format.)

The success of a blog depends almost entirely, not on format or form, but on content. How well written is it? How interesting? How funny? How captivating? The successful blogs all have something we want – news, opinions or a good laugh. And just like scripts, good blogs are the product of the hard work of creative people.

Like screenwriters, bloggers must learn their art, they must learn about format and form and story in order to make the best of their blog. Unlike screenwriting, there are few books to tell you how to blog – the vast majority of bloggers learn through trial and error, through reading other people’s blogs and just writing and seeing how their audience (even if that audience is just them themselves) react to what they have done. We’re making it up as we go along, just like film makers a century ago.

Luckily for most bloggers, though, the object of their enterprise is not to make money by selling the resulting blog to the film industry. That, at the very least, makes life for bloggers much easier than for screenwriters: A blog post has achieved its aim when it has been published. It is a completed thing at that point.

A script is nothing but a blueprint for a film, requiring much more work (and not a little luck) before it reaches its full potential, if it ever does. A script isn’t finished until the film has been made, edited, released, re-edited for the director’s cut DVD, re-mastered for the Collectors Edition… You get the point.

But whether you blog for yourself and a small circle of friends, or for an audience of thousands, it is important to remember that form and format should always play second fiddle to story.

The Guardian, one of the few UK publications to understand blogging, is to launch a new games blog.

The blog, which will be available from Monday 2 August, will be written by Aleks Krotoski, former presenter of Channel 4’s “Thumb Bandits”; Greg Howson, Guardian Online’s games reviewer; and Keith Stuart, the mobile gaming expert. It will cover every game genre and every major gaming platform, including PCs, consoles, the net and mobile phones.

“Gaming is no longer just the preserve of the teenage boy. More and more of our users are taking it up and we want to provide an intelligent, interactive forum for them,” said Neil McIntosh, Assistant Editor, Guardian Unlimited.

The Guardian launched a news blog three years ago, following it up with the Online blog and then the US Elections 04 blog.

The addition of a new gaming blog marks the beginning of The Guardian’s expansion into the blog space as they intend to launch a series of new blogs over coming months.

However, as Jane Perrone, Deputy Editor for News and Politics, Guardian Unlimited, said during her presentation at BlogTalk in Vienna, there are bound to be some people who will not welcome this development, feeling that it is an intolerable ‘invasion’ of the blogosphere by big media.

A more constructive way to look at it is to realise that The Guardian’s blogs have a good record for linking to external sites, and by doing so they bring the blogosphere to the attention of a much wider audience. It’s easy to forget that blogging is not a mainstream activity yet, regardless of the rush on political blogs that is going on at the moment. Any move by a newspaper as well respected as The Guardian to familiarise more people with the high quality writing that’s being published on blogs it to be applauded.

When Carl Linnaeus started classifying plants and animals in his taxonomic Systema Naturae, he inadvertently gave birth to two new groups of people: Lumpers and Splitters. Lumpers are the sorts of people who look for similarities between things and group them according to what features they have in common. Splitters look for differences and create new classifications for things that don’t seem to fit in an existing pigeonhole.

The trouble with the classification of things is that we learn from a young age that things are what they are, without ever really considering why they are what they are.

Let’s take the example of a mammal with four legs, fur and a tail which goes ‘miaow’. Let’s call it a cat. Were a Lumper who knew about cats to see for the first time a mammal with three legs, fur and no tail which goes ‘miaow’ they will say ‘cat!’, but a Splitter would say ‘not cat!’. We, of course, instinctively know when a cat is a cat, without ever having to count legs or check for fur.

Of course, methodologies for classification of the natural world have developed significantly since 1735, but we’re now faced with similar issues of taxonomy and nomenclature in the blog world. Is a LiveJournal a blog? Must a blog have comments and trackbacks? Is a fictional blog still a blog? Must a cat have a tail?

These, though, aren’t the questions I’m going to tangle with right now. Instead, I’m going to posit the existence of five overarching types of business blog before I start considering them in more depth in future posts:

1. Marketing blogs - external, B2C blog, used to promote either the company or a product/service.

2. External blogs - used to communicate with the public, but not for sales purposes, for instance, in a consultation process.

3. Insider blogs - employee blogs, sanctioned but not controlled by the company they work for. (Sometimes disclaimed by the company they work for.)

4. Internal blogs - blogs used within a company to share knowledge, build communities, disseminate news.

5. Content blogs - public-facing blogs reliant on content to bring in either subscription or, more likely, advertising revenue.

Lumpers would probably look at the above list and label them all ‘enterprise blogs’ or somesuch. Splitters will say ‘Yes, but that doesn’t cover everything - what about…?’, or will argue that some blog types listed aren’t business blogs at all, but personal blogs.

There are benefits and problems to both the Lumping and the Splitting points of view. Lumpers have a tendency to miss the fine detail, which can lead to the erroneous assumption that all blogs are like their blogs, but they are good at looking at the wider implications of blogging. Splitters tend to get too caught up in the details of how and why blogs are different, so they miss out on the bigger picture.

But of course, categorising blogs is not always helpful: it detracts from the most important part of blogging - the people. The risk is that instead of understanding the people who write and read blogs, how they use blogs and what they gain from the experience, we will end up talking about semantics and software instead (cf. the LiveJournal vs., well, every other blogging tool debate).

This is what happened to Knowledge Management - it stopped being about the people and the knowledge and became a big discussion about software and IT.

On the other hand, classification is important for the efficient discussion and study of blogs. If I say ‘Marketing Blog’, I need to know that you understand what I mean, without having to pause and explain it every time. A common vocabulary is essential to meaningful conversation.

I don’t expect to have nailed in one shot the different sorts of business blog, but the comments are open. Let me know what you think.

UPDATE: Fredrik over at CorporateBlogging suggests that ‘internal blogs’ is a better phrase to use for No. 4, and I agree. Don’t know why I didn’t call it that in the first place.

I had long conversations with Steph whilst at BlogTalk about the implications of blogging bilingually. I have a Welsh language blog which I never update because I find it hard to get the enthusiasm together to go and open up Blogger. So, I’ve decided to experiment a bit and blog in both English and Welsh [on Chocolate and Vodka].

You won’t notice the Welsh posts on the main page (or the main RSS feed) because they’re all stuffed into a special category, Cymraeg, which has its own RSS feed.

I am not sure if this segregation is a good thing or not. The reason that I’ve done it is because the majority of my readers don’t speak Welsh, and I really don’t want to clutter up the blog or the feed with material that they can’t understand. On the other hand, I feel a bit bad marginalising Welsh. The alternative is for me to put everything in the feed and on the main page, either as full posts or using excerpts for the Welsh posts.

If you keep a bilingual blog, please let me know what you do and what you think as regards how I’ve got this set up. All comments and ideas welcome.

Previously posted on Chocolate and Vodka.