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:
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.
A few months ago, Kafkaesquà 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 Kafkaesquà made the effort to rectify that mistake and published his list for everyone. Thanks, KafkaesquÃ!
London’s bombed again. For news of the latest London bombing, I still have the Crisis Feed from two weeks ago ready. It has all the latest news from news sources around the world and from bloggers via Technorati and Flickr.
Does anyone else find it really ironic that a game for minors that advocates the wanton theft of cars, killing of cops and unarmed civilians and the selling of drugs only gets an adult rating in the US when it has sex in it?
Online word processing holds a particular interest for me. To think that whatever I had to do with a desktop application, I can now do within my browser is a clear sign of progress into Web 2.0. The new GOffice is a good example of this. After you set up an account on it, you can word process a document on an interface similar to Microsoft Word’s (which I think must be using Fckeditor or something similar since it can output the document as HTML) and save it as a PDF file. You can also upload your own letterheads in graphic files for customised outputs. In the future, Goffice says they’ll support spreadsheets and presentations too.
Your documents are saved in your account on Goffice, but nothing on the site suggests how much space you can use. I don’t think the owners of Goffice are too fussed over that since word processed documents by and large don’t take up much space. Goffice has a decent business plan — it partners with Amazon for hard copy print-outs and sells subscriptions for commercial use. So I don’t think they’ll go out of business.
The ad hoc nature of tags appeals to me more than categories as a taxonomy system. I’d rather not have my posts conform to a pre-set list of pigeon-holes, but rather flow with whatever’s in fashion. However the tagging plugins written for Wordpress are not recognised by Technorati and the use of Technorati tags is a big traffic driver for me.
Fortunately, Technorati does recognise the internal categorisation system of Wordpress as an alternative to Technorati tags. So I’ve decided on a hybrid system. After much testing of alternative plugins, I’ve installed Jerome’s Keywords plugin to satisfy my taxonomy needs. And I set up broad categories in Wordpress using popular search keywords like ‘Google’ and ‘RSS’. The Wordpress categories will not be visible, but Technorati will still pick them up in my RSS feed. And since it is not my primary taxonomy system, it won’t be a priority to always keep it up to date. When a search keyword falls out of fashion, I can simply delete the whole category without much of a loss.
Simone Carletti of RSS World has done a very nice thing and is maintaining an Italian translated copy of the wiki article Things you can do with RSS. He’ll be keeping it up-to-date as new additions to the wiki are added. Thanks, Simone!
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.
David Goldenberg of Gelf Magazine has an interesting report about how Google News chooses sources to get its news from. Satire sites like Axis of Logic and Unconfirmed Sources are finding their way into Google News. Problems of misinterpretation obviously arise when they’re presented by Google in the same manner as straight news. Even when Google News applies the satire tag to the news sources, it isn’t always accurate — Goldenberg cites the case of Wonkette which is labelled as satire, yet a similar site like Gawker doesn’t carry such a label.
Some of the reasons why Google News excludes some sites are obvious (foul language, extremist political views), but the criteria for site selection is obfuscated. However, it is clear that reader input into Google News has something to do with it. Goldenberg cites a few cases where Google News has listed or de-listed sites because of emails from readers. So that may be why satire sites and fake-news sites are included at all — because people like them. While Google News arranges their scraped content by algorithm, inclusion is still a popularity contest.
Here’s an interesting discussion on