Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®

The truth is, not all businesses need to have a blog. Blogevangelists might have you believe otherwise, but there are always enthusiasts that make blanket endorsements for up and coming technologies.

The back and forth between blog pundits and critics reminds me of all the noise people used to make in the mid nineties about web sites. There were as many critics on the need for a web site then as there are about blogs now. Half of all SMBs still don’t have web sites today, but does anyone question the value of a web site?

Blogs are tools. People are keen to criticize things they don’t understand. Most people that blog don’t understand the potential uses of blogs and RSS, let alone blog critics.

During the Google Factory tour yesterday Marissa Mayer pitched a personalization option for the Google home page. A Google blog post suggests the new portal looking, customization feature was developed as a way to assembled the various features of Google in one place: Gmail, news, weather, etc.

This initial version offers links to various Google services as well as RSS feeds from several major news sites (BBC, the New York Times, Slashdot, Wired). Some nice features include drag and drop editing and dynamic sizing.

Mayer commented, “We’ve seen that there were users who wanted more on their home page… and this is a way to give them more access to their information. I feel this is different my MyYahoo!. The fact that some people may say it looks like it’s aimed at MyYahoo! was not the reason.”

I just received an email from the long dormant Google Friends group.

“We didn’t plan on having such a long hiatus from this newsletter, and for that we apologize. Aside from other projects we’ve worked on lately, we’ve revamped this newsletter. Each month from now on you’ll see an insider’s roundup of Google tips, insights into our products, plus stuff that inspires us.”

This discussion group was previously hosted with Yahoo Groups but moved last year. Now it’s hosted with Google Groups (beta). If you want to keep up to date with happenings at Google you can subscribe to Google Friends here.

Yahoo today posted in their blog about Tag Soup du Jour From YSDN. It’s a creation from the Yahoo! Search Developer Network (YSDN). What this shows you is how popular a tag is. The more it’s being used, the bigger the font size. It’s a quick overview of the most popular news stories on Yahoo News currently. Unfortunately it just grabs tags from Yahoo news at the moment, however these tag maps are popping up all over the internet. I was hoping that this was a Yahoo creation as the main search engines have pretty much ignored tagging. I’m hoping that Yahoo or Google can create a better, more relevant, searching system with tags someday.

MSN blog posted an entry with links to the start.com/1 RSS aggregator and start.com/2 bookmarking tools. I first noticed these Online Marketing Blog/2005/03/msn-rss-aggregator-startcom.html”>earlier in the year and it was interesting to see what would come out of it. The urls have been dead for a while but are now back online.

As a web based RSS feed aggregator, start.com/1 actually works pretty well – allowing you to add individual RSS feeds or import an OPML file easily or you can click on the preselected feeds on the left that are organized according to tabbed categories along the top.

However, to “start” using it, you need to click the “show” link. I don’t know why that is, the options should display first.

eMarketer has issued a new report on blogging for businesses: “The Business of Blogging”

The report “looks at the implications of the blogging phenomenon for businesses, scans the corporate world’s blogging activity, and offers recommendations for business users.”

Interestingly, “just 4% of major US corporations have blogs available to the public ¬ó and even fewer produce active sites with the link and feedback features that most readers associate with true blogs.”

The rate of blog readership in general is not growing as fast as it was during the political race last year, but as a business communication tool, business blog creation and readership is definitely growing. Read Anita Campbell’s post, 10% of Small Business Marketing Plans Include Blogs where she describes a study by HP on small business owners.

There has been a lot of talk in the web world about RSS lately and there are lots of web sites that tell you what it is, however I’m going to try and explain it in an easy to understand way.

RSS means “Really Simple Syndication” which is basically a way for a web site or blog to provide content in a standard format that you can subscribe to using a RSS reader. There are hundreds of RSS readers out there for Mac and PC. Some are based online, like Bloglines, others are programs you run from your computer. [Mac Readers] [PC Readers] [More Readers] Some free, some cost a little. I use Sage RSS reader as part of my FireFox web browser. It’s free and works on both Mac and PC.

I’ll be honest, I had not heard of Dodgeball.com before and they offer the service here in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Google has acquired Dodgeball as of today. Basically, it’s a mobile social networking service using your text-messaging-enabled cell phone/pda/whatever.

Here’s a description of Dodgeball from New York Magazine:

“When Dodgeball users “check in” at a given locale by sending out a text message, it goes to all their preselected friends, as well as any friends of friends within a ten-block radius. A photo is sent along with the alert-which helps with identifying near strangers. Introductions are made, beer is poured, and then hookups can occur-casually, and in a low-pressure environment, all under the guise of knowing someone in common. It’s Friendster, except in real time and in the real world.”

A recent article in InfoWorld references an interview with Blogger’s Biz Stone regarding enhancements to the Blogger service.

Updates may include:

• Enterprise blogging
• Create private groups
• Image uploading directly to blogger.com
• Integration with Gmail

The article also mentions efforts made to improve the performance of blogger as well as the recent moblogging enhancement.

There are a lot of enhancements I’d love to see in blogger. Fortunately, I’ve been able to use 3rd party tools to compensate including Haloscan for trackback, Bloglet for email subscriptions, Feedburner for an RSS feed and Hitslink for site visitor statistics. Another welcome improvement would be the ability to associated posts with one or more topical categories.

With enhancements like these, I would be a lot more inclined to recommend Blogger as a blogging platform.

These folks are doing some great work for non-profits. Check them out:

The Taproot Foundation is a volunteer organization that builds teams of marketing and creative services professionals, human resources professionals, and information technology professionals to work on projects for local nonprofits. Taproot let’s you “give what you know” so that you can make the strongest impact on your local community while networking and growing professionally.

Taproot Foundation has new volunteer projects – called Service Grants – launching in the next several months in New York City and the San Francisco Bay Area. We are seeking experienced Web professionals to volunteer their skills on our upcoming Website volunteer projects Рcalled Service Grants. Talented Project Managers, Marketing Managers and Designers can apply with us to use their skills to help local nonprofits in the New York City and San Francisco Bay Area to develop websites to support their initiatives.

Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends posted recently about a recent survey conducted by HP. Some interesting findings include:

“Ten percent of small business owners in a recent study reported that they have included blogs in their marketing plans. And 16% plan to invest in blogs over the next 2 to 3 years.”

Which is pretty interesting considering less than half of all businesses have web sites. Additional comments from Anita on Blogs and SEO:

“SEO firms also figure in this mix. As the number of business blogs grows, it becomes harder to stand out. Search engine optimization (SEO) for blogs will become important just as it is for websites.”

Google launched Google Web Accelerator today. It’s an add-on to Internet Explorer or Firefox on a PC and supposedly speeds up the rendering time of web pages. It even comes with a built in timer to tell you how much time you’ve saved over all. It shaves just seconds or even milliseconds off rendering time, but it adds up after a while.How does Google Web Accelerator work? According to Google…

Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:

* Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
* Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
* Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
* Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
* Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
* Compressing data before sending it to your computer.