After yesterday’s Blog Business Summit, it seems appropriate to link to this free Guide to Business Blogging. Unlike most PDFs, this one can be read on-screen without an excess of scrolling, or you can print it out (41 pages) and take it with you. The document is being offered by ChangeThis, and today is the last day to get it for free.

I will not be at the Summit today. I need to return to the real world, and travel to Salt Lake City on behalf of my employer. I am going there to attend a career fair and to give a “tech talk” on the Amazon Web Services to those young, impressionable students.

By the way, I find that travel time is perfect for reading documents like this guide. I have a pile of stuff here that I can read then discard. I can then return with less paper than I started with.

Topic is writing for blogs, we’ll hear from Halley Suitt and Stowe Boyd. Halley is also editor of Worthwhile magazine. Stowe runs Corante.

Halley started blogging about sexy stuff, wrote about death for 18 months, then back to sexy stuff. HBR asked her to write a fictional horror story about corporate blogging. Most important thing about blog writing is good writing. There are probably some wonderful passionate writers in your organization. You have to find them. Get them, balance rebelliousness with good information.

Need good stories. Here are some catchwords to make your blog something people want to read. Use stories, read Gladwell’s Blink book.

Go for truth, watch out for the CEO who wants to write everything. Writing must have passion or nobody will care. Passion for industry, subject, or for whatever is going around the blogosphere. What’s the news, watch the news aggregator. Writing and ethics, know what is going on, take a stand.

Talk about things of this world. Don’t be too abstract, it is boring. (pops out an umbrella). Don’t just talk. Boring blogs have no passionate language.

Go for brevity, write 12 posts not 12 paragraphs.

Go for freshness, post a lot, every day. Scoble is the marathon runner blogger. At least 1 thing per day, better is many things per day, people will come back. If you are prolific, take 2 days off, make you audience worry about you. Play with them, see if they are really reading.

Have a voice. Sound like your blog. Fortune Magazine, Mena Trott is on the cover as part of this year’s “10 trends”. Reads some of Mena’s old posts, crisp clean authentic writing. 2001, its a girly kind of blog. 2004, the product and the company has grown, now she has Mena’s Corner. She will be the friendly, intelligent voice of the company. Read lots of entries and you can get a good sense of who she is.

The things she is doing so well: good at telling stories, she tells the truth, she is passionate, and she loves her company. She uses the things of this world, tangible stuff, she’s not brief, very fresh in writing and perspective, great voice. A great writer. Good example of how a corporate blog should sound.

Q (from Stow): Can this be learned? A: If you want to learn how to paint, go to museums and study the paintings. Study the master writers, the masters of corporate blog-writing. With blogging you are writing all the time, so to help your writing, just blog.

Ok, over to Stow. He’s on a “mission from God”, his True Voice tour, 12-15 conferences over the next year to spread his gospel. From Zuboff and Maxmin, the Support Economy. . Legitimacy based on inclusion is replacing legitimacy based on hierarchical authority.

Find your true voice. How?

Good writing. You need a strong emotional commitment to the stance that you are taking on the subject.

Art & science to blog writing. Science is analyzing length of blog posts from those who you think are good writers, and following what you find. Art is the intuitive, dark part. You need to break your own guidelines, get on your hobby horse, and rant on occasion. The devils have to be there with your angels.

This is a social media. Comment on and reply to discussions with the really smart people out there. Corante is a confederation of thought leaders. Not just because they have great thoughts but because they are involved in smart conversations with 50-80-100 others, to comment on, riff on, and develop an interaction with the inner circle. This is a critical aspect of developing good blog writing. Getting good comments.

Read first, then write. You can’t step in and just write, you have to know what you are stepping in to.

Authenticity and authority. Its nice to be old, occasionally (he’s 52). You get the sense of understanding and people will give it to you.

Draw a line, howl at the moon when someone crosses them. For him, flu vaccine shortage set him off.

Scribble, scribble, scribble. Do it every day. Get up every day and write before breakfast (Hemingway). Just write all the time, solicit feedback and advice.

Halley, sometimes you need to rewrite your life, story of her divorce, restyling who she is, becoming who you have become.

Don’t rewrite your posts, even if they stink. Fix your spelling errors, maybe. Don’t go back and change your opinion. Stow: 15 second rule on dropped food, you can tweak it a bit right after you post, but that’s it.

Finally, by their tags shall ye know them. FlickR, Technorati, Del.icio.us. Empowers users, once again.

Mostly, write things in one sitting.

Q: (Anil: My typos don’t show up until I hit publish). If you publish something you don’t like, write more and scroll the old stuff away. Refine, and people can see your increasing focus.

Q: (Marc Canter): What about aggregators? A: Most people are very individual in the way they use aggregators. The way your blog looks shows if you are using other sources. Bill Kearney points out that people will use things in very different ways. If you publish items 1..10, you think that 1 & 3 are the good ones, and 6, 7, and 8 get people to your site, that’s worth knowing.

Discussion about changing your mind, and how to do it, link back, say why, etc.

Stow: Forgot to talk about having a sense of humor, it is important. Halley says she gets a 9 AM Monday morning traffic spike, and she writes her silly, sexy, crazy stuff aimed at that time. Fun, fast, dirty.

Permalinks and deleting posts, does it leave a scar behind.

Halley: Know when not to write, because it all stays there forever!

Topic is picking a Platform: Blogging Engines Compared.

DL Byron of clip-n-seal, innovative product. A blogging success story Also built the Blog Business Summit web site.

Molly has a book on Movable Type coming out, and an instructional video.

Survey: Who runs a blog using a hosted solution? 25% Survey: Who uses something more robust like WordPress or Movable Type? 25%

Blogging engine is the software that drives your weblog. Numerous admin features. Types are: Commercial, hosted, server-side, roll your own.

Commercial solutions — AOL Hometown, MSN Spaces. Pros: Free or low cost, basic templating options, no high-tech experience required. Probably integrated with other stuff. Cons: Very little in the way of customization features. Not scalable to professional level. Companies can sometimes own content, you loose IP rights to your own info. Association with strong brand weakens your own brand. Limited (if any) export. Not great for the long term. Good way to get started and to test out the concept and your ideas.

Hosted systems. Demo blogger, and DL showed some old blogs he’d written, abandoned, and forgotten about. Demo TypePad, which has some rich templating options. Overall, pros are that they are low cost or free, easy to set up, feature rich, including comments and photoblogs, include import and export features, good for new bloggers or bloggers without high-tech experience. Anil Dash notes that the better ones can create a staging server to let you build stuff, test it, and then roll it out. [Note: I have learned that the ability to do this can be important given that there are often timing considerations when you need to coordinate with a product launch or traditional PR.]

Q: Hosting photos on blogger? A: On blogger, can tie in to Picasa, FlickR, and something called Hello.

Q: Right-click “blog this” favelet? A: Yes, there are lots of favelets around.

Note to crowd, be careful to turn pinging off or people will find you before you are ready. Make things private until you are ready.

Note from audience, Blogware is a good, low-profile hosted service. They use a reseller model, and the brand is kept in the background.

Q: Speak a bit more about the concept of a staging environment? A: Keep stuff off of public servers until you are ready; this is a common thing we’ve done for years in the web development space. Marc Canter chimes in, use a separate private blog, never publish, while you get the requisite corporate approvals. Anil follows up, Washington Post created a blog using a server on a laptop, do it all locally, test out workflow, get it ready to go, then copy & paste to get the stuff over to the production blog. Scoble notes that these staged delay-blogs can be sensed, they are never current. Molly agrees, you can’t catch the wave of a topic that’s of the moment. She doesn’t do any staging on her blog; it is all spontaneous. She notes that these are all nascent technologies, that this stuff is all brand new and that it will be years before real best practices emerge.

Q: Take us out into the future, what will it look like? Where is it trending, what might we expect? A: From DL, RSS workflow. Got newsreader, find the posts about something, automate the blogging process. Drop it into a box, get Google to auto-populate it with links to the stuff you are writing. [I could go for this; adding outside links while blogging live is hard]. From Molly: TBL and the semantic web, social layer and technical layer. More interaction between a variety of devices: PDA, phone, pager, web. This is the harbinger of that vision. DL: It may be a blog but not called one, just part of the web site. From Bill Kearney, a lot of this is reinventing the wheels that the KM (Knowledge Management) invented a decade ago, including workflow and staging. You need to try a couple of tools along the way, figure out the right direction before you spend a ton of money on a full-scale solution like Vignette. Molly notes that CMS is getting easier, Bill replies that more choices are always better. Molly notes that the user doesn’t and shouldn’t care what technology you are using. DL notes that most CMS implementations fail, but blogging is rock and roll, phenomenal.

Molly talks about Jeff Veen, CMS’s and why we don’t need one.

Back to pros of hosted service. Great for new bloggers. Now the cons: Perhaps limited in where you can host, some feature limitations, extensibility can be limited. Reliance on templates can create a less professional result. Less scalable.

Ok, on to server-side solutions. Movable Type from Six Apart and WordPress. Molly notes that she gets a lot of Word Press comment spam; I already fixed that. Open source or licensed, complete customization, db-drive, scalable.

Cons: need technical knowledge, template customization is hard, vulnerable for comment spam, mixed quality of tech support, exxcellent for long term scalable professional blog (that’s a pro, not a con). She would recommend either one for her clients.

Getting started, try commercial or hosted first. Prime time, look into server-side hosting solutions.

DL, first you pine for comments, then you get some only to find that they are all spam. Demo of comment moderation.

Ok, that’s a wrap we are running late!

Glenn is about to get started, along with Steve.

Steve starts out with a story of how he used a Google ad to shame the Muse hotel into admitting that the so-called free wireless wasn’t in fact free. He spent $4.20 on the ad, and then the manager called him up, admitted to the problem, and changed the site. He’ll walk us through the use of AdSense. Started with a site, rawformat.typepad.com. Applied to Google, got approval within 24 hours. On the AdSense site, choose how to style and display the ad. He gets money when someone clicks. At this point he gets “a dinner out” each month (Google prohibits people from saying what they make). Matt Haughey (pvrblog.com) documented earnings in late 2003.

To blog and make money, find intersection of two circles. What you like and can blog about, and what you can make money at. So, he cares about digital cameras. Get a list of top digital cameras, go into AdWords account and walk through creating a new ad, to see how valuable the ads and keywords are. Enter the list of cameras as potential keywords, then see how much you are willing to pay for a click, in slot #1. Look at CPC (Cost-Per-Click), that’s all you care about. Past into Excel, choose. Analyze, pivot. Multiply average CPC by clicks/day, create an index to judge value. Nikon and Canon come out on top. Find connections, decide to focus on Canon. Build canonupdate.com .

Ok, over to Glenn. He’ll talk about “The Entrepreneurial Blog”. He does wifinetnews.com and droxy.com. The fun is figuring out a way to transfer the obsession into a way to make a living.

So, start with obsession, find a topic, and perhaps a network of people who care about that topic. Figure out obsession and then tap into it. Archives build up and are very valuable. Basically an obsession integrated over time. Example, 802.11N, upcoming standard. It is his #3 page getter right now.

First, obsess. 802.*, WEP, WPA, etc.

Exhaust the space, fill the zone. Broaden focus, cover anything that happens, e.g., in WiFi, for him. Be omnipresent, tracked using Technorati and trackbacks. Sifry at Technorati used this to be omnipresent when Technorati was getting started. Glenn watches what is written about him and responds in a similarly obsessive fashion. Cultivate cross-links, as long as relevant and germane. Show that you are all-encompassing. Be helpful to colleagues and readers. Submit to Slashdot and BoingBoing. Create a voice that makes you sound exhaustive and authoritative.

Report. He started by putting overflow from an interview online. Do real reportage. Links don’t bring bucks, you must do analysis. Bring in your authentic experience to make real revenue. How to break news? Scoops he has done: WPA broken, AMD postering, Broadcom interference.

Choose. Find some empty space. Harder, with things like weblogsinc.com and grokker media. Hint: Find a site that you like, that’s not syndicating, do some Google tests and keyword tests, and see if there’s something worth doing. Stick with what you do, sometimes things look like they have dried up for a while, and then come back. For example, satellite radio. Sirius pays $60 for affiliate signups.

Sell sponsorships instead of / in addition to AdSense, fill some space with higher revenue ads. This can happen as your traffic and notoriety grows.

Contact companies in the space, get to the CEO. He gets 4000 visitors per weekday, and hears directly from the people involved. Perservere. WiFi blog took a while to get rolling. Memes can suddenly explode, so the longer you stay in the space the better, as long as it is growing.

Expand. After filling the zone, launch more blogs. WiMax blog coming, and another for European WiFi. Do a good job on one topic, others can follow. Add more, get more traffic, cross-promote, cross-link, get overall traffic increase. Rise of the divided blog. Engadget needs to be divided; the space is now too big. So crowded that nobody goes there anymore.

Example: Om Malik, brand of one. Gets 350,000 page views per month.

Many voices, with more blogs you can involve more writers.

Use special coverage to your advantage. Trade show can draw people in, huge spikes, e.g. an auto trade show or the CES, with original coverage from the show floor.

His spawn: Alan Reiter, Steve Stroh, Om Malik, Sam Sellers.

Earnings. Unlabeled graph of AdSense earnings, no real trend up. Some spikes when there’s some high ad spending, others correlated against big news and traffic days. Sponsorships and partnerships work well for him, cross-linked. Many ads, are more Google ads better? Look at wifinetworkingnews.com, partner ad in top right. Partner search, AdSense, Google Search, banner ad. RSS feed, mailing list, a lot going on. All for monetizing and increasing subscribers. Content in center, the stuff around the edges is set dressing. 1-line bar on droxy.com for woot.com, RSS, multiple Google ad blocks (and it boosts revenue).

Affiliate Marketing has worked well for him with non-blog sites. Find companies that work about products and services that work. Sirius, $60/signup. Amazon Associates. Sell stuff with a high value. Satellite radio has a lot of money in the system, so that works well. Half.com bounties, $10, and eBay.com bounty, $12. Both work well on his isbn.nu site. Distinguish editorial from advertorial. Track performance, percentage of sales from different vendors.

Perform. Blog like you don’t need the money.

Steve’s AdSense stats come out to around 1.3 cents per visit.

Comment from the audience, dumb traffic vs. smart traffic. Dumb traffic comes in from search engines and follows more outbound revenue-oriented links. Smart traffic follows the site, come for the content. So suppressing ads for non-searchers might improve the site without having an adverse effect on revenue.

Molly Holzschlag is the next speaker. Her talk title is: Building Traffic: Posting Isn’t Enough

15 years in IT, 10 years doing, speaking, teaching, training about web stuff.

Start with quick audience survey:

Q: How many came her from companies just looking to blog? About half. Q: How many already run corporate blogs? Pehaps 1/4th. Q: How many have a personal blog? About half. Q: How many have no clue? No one.

Is content king, or is it enough? No, you need to make sure that people find you and you need to interact.

Basic principle: A blog is updated regularly. Hourly, every day, even weekly. The critical issue is regular updating. But just blogging doesn’t mean that people are going to find you. Blog technology can help, using affordances built in to the software.

Define your goals, know specifically what you want to do with your blog, put your main idea in a few sentences. Make it succinct, it you can’t you are in trouble. You may be trying to be too many things to too many people. If a business, have a business plan. Clearly defined intent and complete idea of demographics, competitors.

Know your audience, get demographics from existing business data. Know your existing traffic stats. Have a plan, know who you are working with and for.

Know, then go. Choose best blogging tool (later session will cover this). Brand site and content thoroughly. Don’t rely on templates, hire a professional designer. Brand relationship is critical. Be sure that you are up to posting regularly, or your blog will die. Don’t do it unless you can commit to it. Letting it will look bad to your clients. Don’t jump in until you have done your research.

Q: What about doing a throwaway blog to get started? A: Fantastic idea, use it to experiment and to measure effectiveness.

Holy trinity: Comments, trackback / pingback, aggregation.

Comments Can be controversial, give it a lot of thought. Powerful way to build community very easily. Regular comments on topics will broaden your blogging scope (the “accidental blogger” effect). Easy with most blogging tools. Be aware of comment spam (Note: this is what I did). Don’t use them if you can’t moderate them or otherwise moderate spam.

Q: What about libel? A: Not an attorney, look back to company’s policies. See what recourse you have once you have opened the door.

Q: What about small new blogs that get no comments? Does it imply anything? A: Maybe you are not engaging your audience, session on this later today, be persuasive, don’t just post press releases, dialog with your community

Example of accidental blogging. A post of hers contained the phrase “racing frogs” and became the de facto location for discussion. Lesson: Get results by creating community. This is why spammers spam, in the absence of nofollow.

Trackback / Ping Blogs ping each other to spread the word around. Track posts, bring stuff to the masses. Most blog software does this by default. Pingomatic.com is a good place to ping, and it pings other places (including Syndic8). It will be used for other things in the future. In her blog she used WinAmp to create a blog sidebar; people would come back every minute to see what she was listening to.

Lots of Q&A about trackback and ping. Trackback spam could be the next thing. One issue is page rebuild time when a Movable Type blog gets lots of trackbacks. Use trackbacks to connect with and get attention from other like-minded people.

Content Aggregation & Feeds Old days of push technology, feeds are the new push, but they are here to stay. All professional blogs should offer feeds. Decide to publish excerpt or full article.

Vote: Excerpts or full posts. More people wanted full posts.

If you need people to come to your site, then do excerpts. If you want to spread the information, use full articles. Learn how to tease. Scoble: You have to be more persuasive to do excerpts, someone like news.com. Important point: Many influencers download content then read it offline, if you do excerpts you run the risk of alienating or missing out on attention from these folks. Most visited page on her site is her RSS feed. Categories help a lot, since some people follow just part of what she blogs about.

Optimize your blog for search engines, meta tags still important to web servers, but less so. Pick your titles well and create keyword-rich pages. Use friendly URLs, create lots of link love.

Marc Canter starts out by singing opera. He’s better than Don Box.

Marc, ourmedia.org , Broadband Mechanics, Bryght, Drupal. Vlog, Video Logging.

Artists can upload video, text, graphics into the Internet Archive for free, get unlimited storage & unlimited bandwidth. This is not business as usual. Sorry all flacks and former flacks, your business model is gone. Cut through the BS, read the Cluetrain Manifesto, honesty and transparency.

Trends: blogosphere, guerilla marketing, get rid of your internal team and outsource.

Battle of attrition, it is a when question, not an if question. Caution about taking VC money for this reason. Everyone has their own angle to combine blogging, consulting, open source, etc. Nodes in a distributed mesh.

How do you do it yourself?

World will be a better place with everyone send out their own messages. Blogosphere as agent of change for corporate messages. Every enterprise needs change.

Blogging is the first kind of micro-content; there will be many others.

Broadband Mechanics – Digital Lifestyle Aggregators. Create & promote open standards. Social networking. FOAFNet, ourmedia.org. FOAFNet didn’t take off but he didn’t go home and cry. You have to stick with it, leave that stake in the ground. He’ll build things atop these open standards. Amazon, Google, eBay as infrastructure for web 2.0.

DLA, lots of ways to make money. Hardware, ISPs, existing software entities, major brands and media companies.

Sharing: flickr, del.icio.us, webjay, etc.

At Broadband Mechanics, will be a registry of repositories, not just a storage mechanism.

Open APIs and schemas, everyone can hook up and jack in. Open source photo albums, juke boxes, slide shows.

Provide infrastructure, don’t step on anyone’s toes. Use Creative Commons licenses.

Humans sneak technology in the side door at companies. IM, Mac, etc. Enterprise technology getting in to the home. LAN, DVD burning, WiFi.

Blogging is about getting the message out, regardless of the tools.

Ok, on to Chris Pirillo. Manifesto written a couple of years ago, email is dead, RSS is the future.

Started with lockergnome.com site back in 1996, when he was in Iowa. Email newsletters in 1996, for several years. 1998 or 1999 wrote a book about it, for-pay PDF download. Webcam interview for a TV show, next day he was asked to be on a TV show, hired on for Tech TV, moved to San Francisco, then on to LA. Realized that email was not working, partnering with Jake Ludington. Making money with RSS, he does it, there is a business model for all that he does. He now lives in Seattle.

Do a live feedster search, feedster’s been flakey lately, he says. He’s the #1 Chris on Google.

He likes doing stuff more than just sitting around talking about it. Monetize, monetize, monetize. How? Google AdSense. Blogged Scoble’s birthday using Muvee, compresses it down to desired size, on Chris Pirillo Show. Show is 3 hours live, on Thursday nights, interviews and mini-interviews. Sponsors like Windows Media.

Lockergnome, where’s the money in content? Send press releases that are of interest to his users, he’ll take them and make money from them. He tracks thousands of feeds, people, interpersonal relationships. Email is good for P2P, but not for mass mailings.

RSS, here’s some raw data, just a web page, some codes. Sucked in by a news aggregator such as NewsGator or BlogLines, organized.

His pages, big AdSense in the middle, bring people back to his universe. He’ll be doing a seminar on how to make $500/day using free content. Look for his seminar coming up in June in conjunction with Gnomedex 4.5. Infuses advertising in with the feed, and at the end of the feed links to the other parts of the Lockergnome universe.

Building the web on APIs, download site built by Jake. Stuff from Amazon, lots of books. Links, but he doesn’t like the Amazon Affiliate program at all. Blog ads. He is AdSense’s best friend. How much? I can cover everyone’s house payment with what I am making.

Also pulling in eBay data, attaching to their affiliate program. He doesn’t like affiliates since the advertiser gets free branding. He’ll never hire another ad sales person as long as he lives, “you all suck.” Speak to me as a human being, have transparency.

Copernic desktop search, better than Google’s or MSN’s. New version supports Mozilla and Firefox.

New term “dooced“, getting fired for blogging. Get ahead by taking risk, sometimes get arrow in the back.

If someone says something disparaging, take it like a human, respond!

Robert’s topic is “The Blog Advantage”

Brought in wine, cheese, and food, all bought over the internet, showing its importance.

Bootstrapping, blogging is a tool to build momentum, to create movement. MSN spaces has 1.7 million blogs.

How did he get started? 4 years ago Dave Winer and Dori Smith suggested that he cover blogging at a conference that he was planning. Original page at weblogs.com. Dave was refreshing the page every 15 minutes, looking for things to write about. During 9/11, everyone was watching that page, lots of linking happened, network built. Same for recent tsunami.

What’s a blog? Just a web page in reverse chronological order, any stronger definition would cause lots of problems. FrontPage, DreamWeaver would be way too hard for “Mom.” With a blogging tool you sign in, type, hit Post, and it is live. It is easy to publish and this is bringing millions of people in to the blogging world. This is changing how we relate to each other, and how we build networks.

Write text, publish it, pings happen, everyone knows about it. Discovery happens by connectors, journalists, others looking for information.

Death of distance. Buzz Bruggeman blogged about being in a tornado, was then called upon for live reports by 3 different journalists.

Linking behaviors, building momentum, avoiding PR crises.

Why? Permalinking. In old days you would go to a page at, say, CNET, full of micro-stories; they had no URLs.

Syndication, 1020 feeds in Outlook. We used to watch just a few sites, but syndication lets us watch many more, listen to more voices. Netscape, Winer, others invented RSS. His aggregator loads a bunch of stuff automatically, then he starts reading, all the data is local. he only reads changed sites, which makes things a lot faster. So he only reads 200-400 sites per night, not 1000. The reader doesn’t have to parse and scan the page to see what’s changed. His aggregator shows the new stuff in bold.

Passion concentrator. Watched Howard Dean build a movement. People concentrated on the candidate’s blogs. Blogs build concentrations of passionate people. Press watches this little world for ideas, and sees them spin up. Podcasting. When something happens and a lot of people go “oh, that’s cool”, the journalists can spin that idea out into the mainstream. Passionate people chose a product. iPod. Cycle between early adopters getting shorter and shorter. This portends some change for companies, including his employer. Within a few hours you know if the product is good or if it sucks. Halo 2, 2 hours after release, aready hundreds of blog posts. 6 million copies sold.

Why should I blog? Reach! 3 hours / day on blog and he gets to talk to 10,000+ people, don’t need to go to a conference. This is the way that new business is done. How do you get known, how do you differentiate yourself?

Channel 9, using Technorati to quantify his results to his boss. Lots of wine blogs.

Needed a plumber, looked for people who have the passion and the knowledge, and who is authoritative. Are there many plumbing blogs?

Share your knowledge publicly, get good Google ranking, people will find you. Link out to stuff, even to competitors. Raise their profile, but use nofollow to avoid giving them any “search juice.”

Hoaxes are found out quickly, there are always smarter people in the audience. Referenced his corporate weblogging manifesto, don’t lie.

Building momentum around technologies. Most of what Winer invents isn’t fully baked, he’s full of it. But he evangelized and bootstrapped. He’s a connector. Don’t just pitch one person, pitch the people around him, the people who he reads and who he trusts. That’s the way to get on EnGadget. It takes just 5 blogs talking about something to get Robert’s attention. Repetition works; use this to build a movement. NY Times or press tour works for Apple or Microsoft, but not for everyone else. Build that movement. ICQ, TypePad, Firefox. Word of mouth makes stuff successful, even before email, IM, and blogging. Now they are more efficient and it takes a lot less time to build a movement, a new store, a new product.

Fear of blogging. Could get fired, could look stupid (“Hasn’t hurt me yet,” he says). Fear of being ignored. Shel Israel, working to get some attention, it will happen some day. The long tail is important. Fear of being too transparent. Sonoma Winery wine evangelist buying wine futures. Fear of being embarrassed by stuff you did in the past. He told Bill Gates to split up the company a few years ago. Being provocative is a good way to get traffic. Conflict between two opposing viewpoints can make a good story.

Get the right buzz, get the exponential sales growth. Word of mouth networks, e.g. for the Incredibles.