Ok, so this was a funny post to read first thing this morning and got my day started off right with a laugh. Suw has a great blog called Strange Attractor over at Corante. I met her at Northern Voice and I can almost hear her charming British accent tearing into these guys in her post. I checked out the magazine too and it is over-the-top, ugly, and reeks of marketing.

“Rip & Burn – the music magazine for the download generation”

Isn’t that an oxymoron? I particularly like their “Free tunes! Downloads… coming soon”. But wahey, they’ve got a blog! With no permalinks, no trackbacks, no blogroll, virtually no content and possibly the crappest navigation I’ve seen in ages.

Come on, where’s the podcasting? Where are the enclosures? The mash-ups? The free Creative Commons content? Honestly, this blog is so pathetic, I can’t even be bothered to explain why.

Still, I suppose it’s what one should expect from Haymarket Consumer, a company which thinks that the hip young kids who rip, mix and burn are going to be out at the news stands thinking ‘My, I just can’t wait to spend some of my hard-earned cash on a magazine covering stuff I can get for free online’.

Great thinking, guys. Keep it up.

Yesterday I posted about how I think there is a niche in the public relations world for a service that blends photography, design, blogging, and information technology specifically packaged for those looking to drive media awareness and attendance at special events like conferences, tours, seminars, and trade shows. I’ve gotten a ton of feedback from my friends in the blogosphere about that post and had several conversations about the topic today. I wanted to follow-up tonight with a few links to the people that I’ve been chatting with about the idea and their posts related to the what I was talking about last night.

What Conference Organizers Need to Know About Weblogs – Lee LeFever
Recommendations for Conference Organizers

1. Identify the bloggers, especially the influential ones. Of the thousands that may attend a conference, there are a handful of folks that have the influence to impact the overall perceptions of the event in the weblog world. Look at recent conferences like yours and who blogged what. Look for a community of bloggers that will feed off one another’s posts. You might even ask attendees if they will be blogging the event ahead of time.

2. Get an RSS reader and start subscribing. Don’t waste your time jumping from site to site looking for insights. Once you’ve found a group of bloggers, subscribe via RSS feeds so you can be notified when they post something new. You’ll find that RSS lets you browse a wide variety of blogs quickly. More on RSS here.

3. Use Feedster. Feedster allows you to search RSS feeds based on a search word or phrase. For instance, a Feedster search for “SXSW” returns weblogs that have most recently posted with the word “SXSW” in the post. The same would work for your conference.

4. Use Technorati. Technorati shows you the influence or popularity of a blog or blog post in terms of how many (and which) other weblogs are linking to it. This gives you an idea of the reach of a particular post.

For instance, Joi Ito (an A-list blogger) posted that “SXSW is blogger unfriendly”. Technorati can tell you that 7 other weblogs have linked to that single post from Joi. Technorati shows you conversations across blogs.

5. Get involved. Conference blogging is not going away- so you need to consider how you are going to work with the bloggers. First, don’t plan to overtly influence what you think they should blog. This could easily backfire and word of your actions will travel fast. The best thing you could do is create a weblog that is authored by the conference organizers- or at least those that represent the organizers. Use this weblog to post official news and information about the event as it is happening, using a personal tone.

I’ve been thinking a lot about event blogging since I photoblogged and aggregated notes and podcasts from Northern Voice on my site. It was fast paced and kinda stressful but actually a lot of fun and I think we collectively did an amazing job. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a live conference or event covered quite like that before other than huge national things like the Repulican and Democratic National Conventions.

I really think there is a growing niche here for someone like me with graphic design, photography, writing, web development and IT skills to offer corporate event blogging as a service to companies putting on special events. What kind of events? Oh I don’t know… XBox2 launch party? Trade shows? Seminars? Maybe Bono wants to hire me to photoblog and write from backstage at on the How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb tour? The possiblites are endless. Corporate user conferences? Employee training offsites? NASA Lauches? Fundraisers? I spoke to several friends and contacts they agree that this is probably a hot idea. Anyone out there who wants to help me come up with some services and a site to address this space?

Here’s what I’m thinking. We can offer anything from basic packages where we show up and take photos, record speakers on MP3 players, take notes, aggrate other people notes and build a blog or we can do it all pre and post show… consult the conference organizers help set up connectivity and a blogging friendly envirnoment, set up a Podcast feed for all presenations/sessions and do the recording/encoding/posting, set up Technorati/Flickr/Delicious tags for the event and publicize them to attendees, identify bloggers who cover the space and reach out to them post event with links, downloads and other microcontent from the event as well as write shoot photos and post on their behalf.

This is a great way for companies to attract authentic and inexpensive PR that has a better chance of getting into the mainstream media. Read Seth Godin’s the Ideavirus – that is what blogging like this is – the dissemination of that virus. I really think there will be growing demand for someone to do publishing like this at all types of corporate and company events in the near future.

What do you think? Are there companies or individuals who are doing something like this already? How would you bill it? Do you have an event you want blogged/wiki’ed/photoblogged? Do you want to collaborate with me to turn this into a business? Drop me a note.

Here is an important message to corporate marketers via Blogging Planet… Enter the Conversation! This article is a great setup to some ideas I’ll be posting here soon.

“Your customers are talking about you. They talk to their friends, their colleagues, your competitors, the press. Generally, except perhaps in the last case, what they say doesn’t make it into the public sphere.

But what happens when they start writing about you on their blogs? Do you know what they are saying? Are they your best advocate? Or, are they frustrated and, unable to find an effective communications channel into your organization, blogging their frustrations? Are they forming fan clubs? Or are they running yourcompanysucks.com?

Your customers can be your best friend and your worst enemy. They can spread word of your product, increasing sales. They can provide valuable input into future products.

They can also destroy your brand.

Here are 8 great tips from the worlds most famous KK, Kevin Kelly, cofounder of Wired and author of Cool Tools. Kill Kool Records has the Black Tories CD coming out in March and am going to put it up for sale on Amazon there using this guide. Thanks KK.

PANEL: Promoting Your Blog and Building Traffic
uploaded by kk+.

PANEL: Promoting Your Blog and Building Traffic

• Moderator: Darren Barefoot. Participants: Jeremy Wright, Suw Charman, Derek K. Miller, Chris Pirillo

Web icon Seth Godin argues today that ‘this whole Internet thing is just getting started’. Below are his 10 reasons why he thinks the future is so bright.

1. Penetration. There are 50 times as many people using the Net as there were then. 50x is a multiple you don’t see every day.

2. Bandwidth. It’s easy to forget how horrible modem surfing was. The prevalence of high bandwidth connectivity means that surfing is far more natural, more frequent and that the experience is better as well.

3. Tools. You can launch most any online service with almost no custom programming. Changethis.com demonstrated to me how straightforward this has become. It also means that finding the world’s greatest programmer is no longer a critical component for most services.

4. Servers. When google can offer a gig of storage for free, it’s proof that server space is essentially free. You may recall that just three ten years ago, a one three gig hard drive cost $3000.

5. Wifi. The next generation of wifi will be faster, but more important, have a vastly improved range. Which means, for example, that all of downtown Philadelphia will offer free wifi. With ubiquity will come cheap machines that dramatically increase the number of surfers, and put those surfers most everywhere.

6. Multimedia. The web is still stuck in ASCII world, but not for long. Add a few million video cameras, fifty million cell phone cameras, every song ever recorded, every TV show and movie ever made and the contents of most any scholarly book and it gets interesting fast. Sure, the lunkheads at the RIAA and MPAA will make up lies to try to stop it, but the cosmic jukebox meets the realtime surveillance camera is going to happen.

7. Grandmothers. It is no longer necessary to explain to the average American (of any generation) what this “Internet thing” is. Google has made the world safe for entrepreneurs. Don’t underestimate how important this is.

8. Teenagers. The Yahoo generation is now getting driver’s licenses!! These are kids who have grown up without encyclopedias or videocassettes or lps. These are kids who have completely and permanently integrated the Net into their lives and are about to go to work and to college.

9. VC. Fred Wilson (Link: A VC.) has more than a hundred million dollars to invest in great Net companies. So do a dozen or more other (less talented) venture capitalists. Given that it takes far less money today (see #10 and #3) than ever, this means the search for money is not the challenge.

10. The death of TV. (It wouldn’t be a Seth Godin post if I didn’t mention the death of TV, would it?) You know what killed the first crop of stupid $100 million Internet consumer service startups? Advertising. They all believed that they need to spend millions to build a brand. Today, we’ve got proof–every single (no exceptions!) Internet success is a success because of Unleashing the ideavirus. It’s not TV ads. It’s word of mouse.

I love these end of the year best and worsts. Here’s a good one from Laura Ries‘ The Origin of Brands blog with the world of brandings big winner and loser from 2004.

BIGGEST BRAND WINNER of 2004: Apple iPod

Ipod – The brilliantly branded, designed, and advertised iPod is my clear choice for Brand Winner of the year. The product is brand divergence at its best. A single focused device that was conceived to be the very best music player period. It also helped pioneer the hard-disk-drive-music player category. Today’s music player of choice, thanks to Apple, is the iPod.

Through the third quarter of 2004, Apple has sold 6 million iPods, since they were introduced in 2001. The last quarter alone, they moved two million units. Estimates indicate that Apple could sell up to 3 million iPod in the fourth quarter of 2004. And the number would be higher if Apple could just make the hot-selling Apple Mini fast enough. Currently, 65% of all MP3 players are iPods, while 92% of all hard-disk-drive players are iPods.

Why did Apple succeed music players where so many others failed in?

In a word focus.

You know I don’t favor advertising for brand building. And when advertising is used, it should reinforce the brand message. And that is exactly what Apple did. They first used PR and a slow roll out of the iPod brand. Then Apple used advertising to accelerate the wild success of the iPod. The campaign was brilliant in its simplicity. Just silhouettes of people and an iPod. Over and over again in print and television advertising. There is nothing more to say. Except here is the iPod. People already knew what it was and how cool it was from word of mouth and PR. The advertising just reminded people. Perfect!

What should Apple do in 2005. Well they might consider getting out of the PC business and focus the whole company on iPod.

BIGGEST BRAND LOSER of 2004: Coca-Cola’s C2

Cokec2 – What were they thinking? Second only to the lunacy of launching New Coke back in 1986 was this year’s introduction of C2. C2 is a mid-calorie soda which has half the sugar and calories as regular Coke, C2 was Coca-Cola’s major new product of the year. The thinking goes that there are some people who enjoy a regular Coke sometimes, but also are trying to lose weight on low-carb diets, and don’t really like the taste of Diet Coke. So Coke makes a half-and-half product called C2. Mix one part real Coke with one part Diet Coke and there you have it.

What must have seemed like a bright idea in the boardroom has fizzled on the market. Consumers didn’t get it, didn’t want it, didn’t need it and rejected the whole idea. Note too, that Pepsi is not immune from stupidity and this year introduced Pepsi Edge, their mid-calorie soda to the same dismal results. According to recent statistics from Beverage Digest, C2’s share of supermarket soft drink sales was 0.4 percent though early October. Pepsi Edge was 0.3 percent.

But it’s Coke that deserves the title of Biggest Brand Loser of 2004. The most valuable brand in the world (according to Interbrand.com) should know better. Coke is a company in trouble. They have line extended Coke to death and have not had a successful new brand launch in 40 years since the introduction on Sprite. They have been line extending and introducing me-too products that have been unable to compete with the first and leading brand in the category:

Dr Pepper, the first spicy soda, is a success, Mr. Pibb from Coke is not.

Mountain Dew, the first high-caffeine citrus soda, is a success, Surge from Coke is not.

Gatorade, the first sports drink, is a success, PowerAde from Coke is not.

Snapple, the first all-natural beverage, is a success, Fruitopia from Coke is not.

Red Bull, the first energy drink, is a success, KMX is not.

John Battelle, search engine guru and interweb godfather, has released 17 predictions for how the online landscape may change in 2005. I see some of the same signs John does regarding Google (number 5) and Firefox (number 9). Should be an interesting year as the web continues to evolve and blogs, search, rss, tags, etc continue to increase in popularity and sophistication. Thx John.

A Look Ahead

Here we are again, the end of the year. Last year I did pretty well with my prognostications, mainly because I chose carefully. This time, I’m feeling a bit more reckless. A year from now, I am sure I’ll bescratching my head – what was I thinking? – but then again, that’s not such a bad place to be.

So in no particular order, here are some things that I believe have a reasonable chance of occurring in 2005 with regard to the intersection of media, technology, and search.

1. We will have a goat rodeo of sorts in the blogging/micropublishing/RSS world as commercial interests push into what many consider a “pure medium.” I’ve seen thi movie before, and it ends OK. But it’s important that the debate be full throated, and so far it looks to be shaping up that way. I’m already seeing these forces
at work over at Boing Boing, and I am sure they will continue. We’ll all work on figuring out ways to stick to our principles and get paid at the same time, however, I
expect that things might get more contentious before they get better, and 2005 may be a more fractious year in the blogosphere as we evolve through this process.

2. Along those lines, things will not go as swimmingly as we’d like with regard to “monetization.” As the majors get into the space and start throwing around their weight and lucre, some folks will make bad decisions, and others will freeze
and make no decisions at all. It will get harder to innovate before it gets easier. We’ll all be surprised by the lack of what we consider “progress” in the RSS/Blogging world, and expectations of major publishing revenues will not materialize as quickly as perhaps we think they should. However, we’ll in fact be making huge strides in understanding the path forward, it just won’t seem like it. By the end of the year, the world will begin to realize that “blogs” are in fact an extraordinarily heterogeneous ecosystem comprised of scores, if not hundreds, of different “types” of sites.

3. There will be two to five major new sites that emerge from “nowhere” to become major cultural influencers along the lines of the political bloggers of 2004. One of them will be sold to a major publisher/aggregator for what seems like a large sum of money, driving the abovementioned #2 and #1.

4. Meanwhile, the long tail will become the talk of the “old line” media world. To capture some of that value, we’ll see a slew of deals and new publishing projects from the established brands that seek to capture the idea of communityjournalism, affiliate commerce sales, and collaborative content creation.

5. Google will do something major with Blogger. I really have no idea what, but it’s overdue. Six Apart will grow quickly but face a crisis in its implementation as its core users demand more features that are “unbloglike” like customer databases and robust publishing support tools. This (and other things) may drive Six Apart or one of its competitors into the arms of Yahoo or AOL or even – gasp – Quark or Adobe or Marcomedia.

6. Ask will continue to consolidate traffic by buying smaller search sites.

7. Yahoo and Google will both test systems that combine local merchant inventory information with search, so that merchants can use search as a direct sales channel. By the end of the year, there will be no question that the search companies are in direct competition with the ecommerce companies, but it won’t matter – there’s room for them all. Paul Ford will continue to get droves ofreaders to his related, and very prescient, three year old post on how Google takes over the world.

8. Microsoft will lose search share before they gain it back later in the year when the integration of MSN search starts to scale with new versions of Office and IE . Net net, however, MSFT will gain total in total search sessions from last year, and its technology will get much, much better.

9. Firefox will near 15% of total browser share. Firefox faithful will wonder why it’s not much much higher. But MSFT will release a very good upgrade of IE, see #8.10. A third party platform player with major economies of scale (ie eBay or Amazon) will release a search related innovation that blows everyone’s mind, and has everyone buzzing about how it redefines what’s possible in search.

11. The China question will become a critical issue to the search community. Defining the China question will in itself be a major task of 2005. How do search companies go in without being “evil”? Is the tradeoff worth it?

12. By the end of the year, there will be no question that search is a media business, and that the major players in search are major players in the content business.

13. Something major will finally happen at Tivo. We all hope that it’s a sale to Apple, but if it is a sale, it will more likely be to Comcast or DirecTv.

14. All year, Apple will be rumored to launch a video iPod, but it won’t – it’s still too early. By the end of 2005, we will just be starting to see traction in the video over IP market and itsconnection to search. Google will introduce Video search at some point in 05, but it will stay in Labs.

15. Mobile will finally be plugged into the web in a way that makes sense for the average user and a major mobile innovation – the kind that makes us all say – Jeez that was obvious – will occur. At the core of this innovation will be the concept of
search. The outlines of such an innovation: it’ll be a way for mobile users to gather the unstructured data they leverage every day while talking on the phone and make it useful to their personal web (including email and RSS, in particular). And it will be a business that looks and feels like a Web 2.0 business – leveraging iterative web development practices, open APIs, and innovation in assembly – that makes the leap. (More on this when I start posting again).

16. Perhaps most recklessly…I will finish my book. The reviews will be mixed, as my attempt to satisfy both the exacting audience of Searchbloggers and the more general audience of a major trade hardcover may fall flat. Many will say I tried to do too much, others that I didn’t do nearly enough (how’s that for airing my deepest
fears in public?!). However, I’ll be happy with the effort, and the book will do OK, thanks mainly to the support of this community. So, ahead of time, thanks for your support this past year. I learned more from this process than I ever thought possible, and I owe it all to you, who grace my site with your time and input.

17. Lastly, I will be involved in starting a new business in the field of media and technology. It will start very slowly, and I’ll screw up as much as I possibly can in the early stages, before imposing it on the rest of the world. Hopefully, you’ll all be there to keep me honest as I try to figure out a few ideas I’ve been simmering
for the past year or so.

Watch this great online documentary by Douglas Rushkoff – The Persuaders.

FRONTLINE takes an in-depth look at the multi-billion dollar “persuasion industries” of advertising, market research, and political campaigning. To cut through mass-media clutter and to overcome consumers’ growing resistance to their pitches, marketers have developed new ways of integrating their messages deeper into the fabric of our lives. Correspondent Douglas Rushkoff explores how the culture of marketing has come to shape the way Americans understand the world and themselves, and how the influence of marketing on politics has profoundly impacted our political culture and our democracy.

With my company going through an acquisition and my future uncertain I decided that now is a good time to update my CV. I’ve gathered a fair amount of feedback from my friends and colleagues and finally feel like its in good enough shape to post. Please take a look and pass it on to anyone who you know may be hiring or to recruiters who have brought you high quality positions in the past. I’ll have .pdf, .txt. and .doc versions available in the near future.

It’s a long resume and there is a ton of detail including screen-shots of almost all the major projects I’ve worked on in my career, but you can really boil it down to a few simple ideas.

1. I’m a communications and marketing expert with a track-record of great results.
2. I’m fun to work with and bring out the best in people.
3. I work hard, have big ideas, and love to execute them.

Another great way to find out more about my background and what the people I’ve worked with say about me, create a free LinkedIn account and do a search for my name.