Tim Yang’s Blog

Apparently, the Mac’s new built in dictionary defines a weblog as “Blogs run by twenty-something Americans with at least an unhealthy interest in computers“.

I wonder if there’s a blog broker agent out there yet? Someone who sources blogs with sales potential and matches them with buyers and vice versa. It wouldn’t be a difficult kind of business. It’s already fairly simple to judge the sales potential of a blog — based on the blog’s cache of loyal readers (RSS readers), blogosphere credibility (link-ins), current and projected traffic, current and projected Adsense earnings, size of archive and likeability of the blog. The seller would have to sign an exclusive contract with the agent. And the agent makes a sales commission from one party or both. Might be worth looking into now with so many marketers trying to break into blogs and so many bloggers wanting to make money.

You’ve all heard the current numbers of the blogs and the amount of growth per day. But from the blogger perspective, has it been that long? Well it has when people start sticking “blogging since” labels on their blogs.

Mary Hodder of Napsterization.org has produced an analysis of five popular blog content search services (Bloglines, Feedster, Technorati, Blogpulse, Pubsub). She examines what each of them searches, how they search, what sort of links they count and how long they keep those links counted. It gives us some idea of why the results from each of the search engines differs so greatly from the others. For example, Bloglines keeps all data on inbound links from Day One whereas Technorati keeps link data as long as it is on the front page of a blog, so their link count is much lower but much fresher.

Hodder has put her research into a table on a PDF file for easy reference. I’m sure many people will be using her table to produce more insights into the way each of these search engines work. I hope she’ll include Icerocket.com in that table when it becomes more popular.

If blogs are going to be an important part of the marketing and communications mix, then there must be some way of evaluating their returns. Heidi Cohen, a professor of Direct and Interactive Marketing at NYU has written some ideas on how to evaluate corporate blogs. The first step in the blog evaluation process must first of all be determining what the blog is expected to do. Cohen has a list of communication objectives for a corporate blog:

1. Establish expertise - Blogs can be used to raise credibility of a company in its field.
2. Create alternative media - Blogs can be established as a media outlet in their own right as a value-added corporate service or a product by itself.
3. Extend corporate communications - Blogs enable companies to present a human face and voice to the public.
4. Build community - Blogs can grow groups around a technology or issue related to the company’s product.

What Cohen leaves out at this point is the crucial part of first establishing the target of the blog communication. Without knowing that in clear terms, the objectives and their measurements lack meaning. Because blogs communicate on a personal level, they must show some return in terms of increase in brand awareness, brand prestige or credibility, likeability of the brand or understanding of the message. Cohen’s idea of return on investments revolves mostly around mainstream media effects.

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A few months ago, Kafkaesquí found that like myself the Wordpress Codex was missing a major section — a reference guide to template tags, like the ones in the addendum of most programming manuals. Luckily Kafkaesquí made the effort to rectify that mistake and published his list for everyone. Thanks, Kafkaesquí!

WordPress Template Tags (1.5) reference

Diaweblog.com allows people to create blogs from selected IRC channel logs. An IRC bot is activated to scan the logs and to re-post to a weblog whatever message follows a simple b, or b:. Right now, Diaweblog is in beta so it isn’t ready to open new weblogs, but you can partipate in the ten active weblogs that are open right now.

http://www.diaweblog.com/

The Spam weblog by Weblogs Inc is looking for people who want to be paid contributors. Their criteria:

Are you passionate about spam, viruses, worms, and all things unsolicited and electronic? Do you keep files of all your spam subject lines so you can create haikus to amuse your friends? Do you wish you could make a little money off your obsessions?

Just send in a couple of samples on the topic (100-400 words).

http://spam.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000717049482/

My hosting account got flushed again. Happened around the same time last year. This time for completely different reasons. But it just feels the same — it’s been a crappy few days. Lost all my archives and I’m completely exhausted from fighting fires. But the good thing is, I have no excuse not to switch from Pmachine Pro to Wordpress. It will take some time to rebuild this blog again, so please excuse the mess. I’ll probably be posting a few more Wordpress related posts than I did before while I learn this new system.