WiredSafety

WiredSafety, Is A 501(c)(3) Program and the largest online safety, education and help group in the world. We are a cyber-neighborhood watch and operate worldwide in cyberspace through our more than 9,000 volunteers worldwide. (WiredSafety is run entirely by volunteers.)

Yesterday I gave another presentation about blog marketing together with Qris. With this topic there are always two options:

• Get trusted by influential blogs which will talk your product (the Nokia NSeries strategy)
• Open your own blog and create compelling content

In 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006 there is a good list what to do and what to avoid.

Two excerpts:

What will happen to the way search algorithms score links is already happening. The Google algo has become much more elegant and advanced, devaluing staggering amount of links that shouldn't count, and placing more emphasis on trusted links. And the trust and juice given by those links is then verified by elements like user data, domain age, and other relatively hard-to-spoof factors.

And concerning blogs:

Start a blog. Not just for the sake of having one. Post regularly and post great content. Good execution is what gets the links.

Web Logs Are Fertile New Territory for Introducing Products, Welcome or Not (Washington Post)

Via Picturephoning

Donna Bogatin writes about the Top five social risks list in Web 2.0. I don't like very much how she writes it, but I still think that it's good thing to address the emerging problems with current social networking sites. This will help to find better solutions in the near future.

Donna Bogatin sees these flaws:

• SOCIAL FREELOADERS: User Generated Content Sustainability
• SOCIAL “A” LISTERS: Validity of Democratic Platforms
• SOCIAL NON-TRANSPARENCY: Anonymity and Hidden Agendas
• SOCIAL GOSSIP: Idle and Malicious Talk
• SOCIAL DEVIANCY: Anti-Social Behavior

Related:
The Virtues of Knowing Less: Justifying Privacy Protections Against Disclosure
Moguls of New Media
Surviving or Thriving: Beta Business Models in the New World
Social Dreaming and Blogging

France's mysterious embrace of blogs by Thomas

Sixty percent of French Internet users visited a blog in May, ahead of Britain with 40 percent and little more than a third in the United States, according to Comscore, an Internet ratings service.

Likewise, French bloggers spent more than an hour in June visiting France's top-rated blog site, far ahead of the 12 minutes spent by Americans doing the same and less than 3 minutes for Germans, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

More than three million Internet users, or more than 12 percent of those online in France, have created a blog, according a study released in June by the ratings agency Médiamétrie

This is somewhat similar to the Romandie as opposed to the Alemanic blogoshpere.

Wolfgang Lünenbürger-Reidenbach, Chief Blogging Officer bei Edelmann ab 1. August im Artikel "Bürger verlieren das Vertrauen in professionelle Kommunikation":

• Aus der Fülle der verteilten Veröffentlichungen entsteht insgesamt ein Medium, das erhebliche Durchschlagskraft entfalten kann."
• "Das Weblog ist mein Wohnzimmer. Da sorge ich dafür, daß Gäste nicht auf den Teppich kotzen", formuliert Lünenbürger. Das heißt: "Auch wenn 95 Prozent der Inhalte in Weblogs belanglos sein mögen - die Debatten sind seriöser geworden und für professionelle Kommunikatoren ernster zu nehmen."
• Der Boom der Weblogs und anderer Bürgermedien sei Ausdruck für tiefere gesellschaftliche Tendenzen. "Verbraucher haben heute mehr Vertrauen in Menschen wie du und ich als in professionelle Kommunikation.

Da treffen wir uns bei den Metaphern;)

German
Filmblog just started.
Klappe!
Film by Michael Bodmer
Cinema (Buch)

French
Contrechamp
Intimedia
le weblog de J (...)-S (...)

Italian
Cinemino

After having filled out the first swiss blogsurvey, you can now compare with the findings of the new PEW Study: Bloggers, A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers (July 19, 2006)

• Blogging is bringing new voices to the online world.
• Contrary to the impression created by the press attention on political blogging, just 11% of bloggers say they focus mainly on government or politics.
• The blogging population is young, evenly split between women and men, and racially diverse. Relatively small groups of bloggers view blogging as a public endeavor.
• The main reasons for keeping a blog are creative expression and sharing personal experiences.
• Only one-third of bloggers see blogging as a form of journalism. Yet many check facts and cite original sources.
• Bloggers are avid consumers and creators of online content. They are also heavy users of the internet in general.
• Bloggers are major consumers of political news and about half prefer sources without a particular political viewpoint.
• Bloggers often utilize community and readership-enhancing features available on their blogs.

Forbes.com together with HP created an RSS course (Instructor: Abbi Perets):

RSS Basics: How It Can Help Your Business
An RSS feed offers an easy way to provide useful information to your customers and to keep your brand visible. Discover just how you can take advantage of this simple, effective technology to boost site traffic, keep clients informed, and maintain your Web site's freshness without constantly redoing your home page.

1. Introduction to RSS
2. What RSS Can Do for Your Business
3. Get Started with RSS
4. Update and Troubleshoot RSS Feeds

As a lot of people seem to fear to loose site traffic by fragmenting their audience (see quote below), I wanted to quote Abbi here. Naturally this is only fully true, if you use uncomplete feeds as more and more people read their feeds in their reader. But then what is more important: page views or that your content is widely read?

The web ecosystem 1.0. (e.g. WEMF page views) will soon have to change anyway, just think about AJaX on the one hand or on the other newspapers which use photo galleries extensively to get more pageviews.

A common worry of RSS newcomers is that by making feeds available, you lose Web site traffic. In fact, the opposite is true. Users will see headlines that describe your content, but they'll click back to your site to read the article.

But we should quickly add two more things:

1. Your headline resp. your title must be precise, explicit and enticing enough so that your target audience wants to continue reading
2. the content following the title must be to the point and relevant for your audience

Last advice from Abbi which I fully agree with:

You can't understand RSS just by reading about it. You've got to get out and use it.