First amendment protection for bloggers A California appeals court ruled last Friday that Apple can't force website operators to divulge sources that gave them details of an unannounced product. The decision overturns an earlier ruling that gave Apple the power to force the disclosure.

One interesting aspect of the ruling is that the court specifically deals with blogging, declaring that constitutional free-press protections do apply to bloggers. See the footnotes on page 44 for a discussion of the definition of blogging and the similarity of blogs to other forms of publishing. I'm not familiar with a precedent to this case that deals with first amendment issues around blogging, but maybe somebody could set me straight.

I was also surprised to note extensive references to Wikipedia in the court's footnotes. Given that there is ongoing debate over the reliability of information on Wikipedia, I thought it was interesting that a state appellate court considers the source reliable enough to cite extensively in a legal decision.

Thanks to Alice LaPlante for pointing out this story on the Informationweek Blog.  ¶ 4:58 AM 2 Comments

  A study in contrasting headlines Two revealing headlines, both from BtoB Magazine:

First-quarter online ad spending hits record $3.9 billion - Internet advertising revenue totaled $3.9 billion in the first quarter, a record high that was up 38% from $2.8 billion a year earlier, according to a report released Tuesday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Merrill Lynch lowers estimates for newspaper ad spending - Investment bank Merrill Lynch has lowered its projection for U.S. newspaper ad spending growth this year to 1.2%, down from a February forecast of 1.8%. Merrill Lynch media analyst Lauren Rich Fine adjusted the company’s newspaper ad revenue projection for next year down to 1.1%, from a February forecast of 1.4%.

The Merrill report was actually entitled "Deep Depressing Dive."

Could it get any worse for the newspaper business? Even if you believe that newspapers are going the way of the dodo bird, the rate of decline in the business is shocking. It's not like circulation is plummeting. It's more drifting down with a change in demographics.

Ironically, another survey I read recently said mainstream media gets more citations from blog posts than any other source by a wide margin. So as mainstream media become more important to the dissemination of useful information for discussion in the blogosphere, its business starts to go off a clifff.

The good news: The NY Times will do more than $60 million in online advertising this year. Newspapers that are changing their business models are seeing results, but reinvention is a long, painful process.  ¶ 2:32 PM 1 Comments

  Larry Weber on the future of media For some great insight on what social media means to marketers, listen to this podcast of a speech by Larry Weber to last December's Syndicate conference.

Larry is a marketing genius, the founder of one of the world's largest PR agencies and a guy who is always on the leading edge of the media business. A few gems from this talk:

*He draws a wonderful analogy between the blogosphere and the newspaper business in the use in the late 18th century. At one point, Pittsburgh had 24 newspapers and nearly everything they published was opinion. A distant mirror?

*"The mainstream media is going through the greatest transformation in its history...The primary function of mainstream media in the future will be aggregating consumer generated content.”

*“I think in five years we will be meeting here and talking about the Wall Street Journal’s and USAToday's circulations dipping below 1 million. “

*The number of blogs will actually decrease, much as the number of newspapers decreased after the initial surge in the late 18th century. This isn't a sign of weakness; it's a sign of maturity.

*The job of marketers will increasingly be to listen to the conversations going on in the community of customers. The days of "delivering a message" are over.

*$90 billion a year is spent on advertising in the US. Two-thirds of that is spent on TV advertising. That is going to change in a big way.

  ¶ 8:20 AM 1 Comments

  Do you know any corporate bloggers? Wow, so much great advice on the survey. Thanks to everyone. Now I need to bear down and try to incorporate all these good suggestions.

Now I'm looking for corporate bloggers. Do you know any? These would be people who blog on behalf of mid-sized or large companies or who blog on a company domain. I have some restrictions, though:

No high-tech companies (tech firms are not representative of the state of the blogosphere)

No marketers (they're doing this to understand the phenomenon)

No consultants who work for companies (different motivations)

I'll devote a chapter of the book to corporate bloggers, so if you are one or know of one, I'd appreicate the reference.  ¶ 8:03 AM 1 Comments

  Input appreciated for blogger survey As part of research for my book, I want to survey bloggers about their motivations and opinions about blogging. Here's a survey I created. I'd appreciate any comments or suggestions you care to contribute before I launch it. If you're willing to help direct bloggers to the survey form, please note that in a comment. Thank you!

Clarification (5/22). This is just a draft survey that I'm posting for input. Several people have asked about how they can take the survey with no input forms. I guess I did a lousy job of explaining that this is just a draft :-). The final survey will be posted on a commercial service soon. Thanks!


This survey is being conducted as part of research for a book on social media. It is intended to measure bloggers’ attitudes toward blogging and their motivations for contributing to blogs. Results will be posted at www.paulgillin.com and regularly updated once a sufficient number of responses has been received.

1. Do you contribute to one or more weblogs?
Yes
No (terminate)

2. How long have you been blogging?
Less than one year
One to two years
More than two years

3. To what types of blogs do you regularly contribute? Please check all that apply.
Business
Corporate
Entertainment
Hobbyist
Literary/art
Personal
Political
Reference
Sports
Technical
Other

4. How many blogs do you regularly contribute to?
1
2
3
More than 3

5. Approximately how many hours do you spend writing for blogs every week?
Less than one
One to three
Three to five
More than five

6. Approximately how many blog entries do you post in an average week across all blogs to which you contribute?
Less than one
One or two
Three to five
More than five

7. Why do you blog? Please check all that apply
Capture memories
Career advancement
Connect with people with similar interests
Employer requires it
Influence market or discussion of a topic
It just feels good
Keep in touch with family/friends
Make money/hope to make money
Other


8. How many blogs do you read at least once per week?
Fewer than five
Six to ten
11 to 20
21 to 30
More than 30

9. Do you subscribe to RSS feeds?
Yes
No
Don’t know

10. How do you believe your reading of blogs has affected your consumption of mainstream media such as television, radio and newspapers? Has your use of mainstream media:
Increased substantially
Increased somewhat
Neither increased or decreased
Decreased somewhat
Decreased substantially
Don’t know


11. In your opinion, how credible are the blogs that you read regularly?
Very credible
Somewhat credible
Not very credible
Not at all credible
Don’t know


12. In your opinion, how credible are blogs in general?
Very credible
Somewhat credible
Not very credible
Not at all credible
Don’t know


13. In which of the following social media activities or services do you also regularly participate ?

File sharing
Instant messaging
Multiplayer games
Photo sharing
Podcasting
Social bookmarking
Social networks
Video blogging
Wikis
Other

14. In which ways do you derive income from your blog? Please check all that apply
I don’t derive income from blogging
Affiliate commissions (ex: Commission Junction)
Consulting
Contextual advertising (ex: Google AdSense)
Donations
Paid writing assignments
Product sales
Speaking
Other

15. In the space below, please describe your most important motivations for blogging

Tell us about yourself.

16. Are you male or female?
Female
Male

17. How old are you?
Under 18
18-25
26-35
36-45
46-55
56-65
Over 65

18. Where do you live?
North America
South America
Europe
Asia
Australia/New Zealand
Africa


[Optional] Please list the URLs of all blogs to which you regularly contribute

[Optional]If you would like to be notified when results are available, please enter your e-mail address. This address will be used only to notify you of the availability of survey results.  ¶ 7:44 AM 16 Comments

  The power of tagging I had the good fortune to spend some time with David Weinberger at Syndicate. David is the author of Joho, as well as several other blogs, and is at work on a book about tagging.

I'll admit that I never gave tagging much thought before speaking to David, but after hearing his perspectives on the potential of this very simple yet powerful technology, I am kind of bowled over.

Think of the Internet as a vast collection of information about very specific topics. For the most part, we have limited information about how to find and identify these topics. Authors tag - or self-classify - their own information because they have to tell people where they think that information should be stored. Publishers and sellers may add to or modify those classifications, but the reality is that they probably don't change much from what the author intially defined.

In a world bounded by physical limitations, these rigid and very inflexible classifications were necessary. The Dewey Decimal System, for example, dictated that a work of non-fiction had to occupy a single physical space on a shelf, even if that book covered a broad variety of topics. You had to do that in a physical world. But in a virtual world, there's no need for that kind of rigidity. A book or an article about the Civil War, for example, may belong in the history, military, sociology, anthropology, government and geography sections of a library. You couldn't possibly classify it that way with a conventional library system. But you can do that - and much more - with tags.

Tags allow authors to self-classify their work - whether it be a book or a blog post - in multiple categories. But what's cool about services like del.icio.us, digg, TagWorld and many others is that they enable the community to also tag content. So not only authors but readers can classify what an article or other work is about. That means that over time, content can be indexed by what the readers think it is and not just by what the author believes it is.

Think about this, because it's very powerful. Tags will eventually enable us to subscribe to people, not just to content. I'll be able to read about what you're saying about a very specific topic while ignoring what you say about everything else. No offense, but that's how I'd rather consume information.

Tagging can be applied to anything because anyone can tag any content. So the New York Times can put out an article on Iraq, for example, but if readers decide it's really an article about Bush's political agenda, they'll tag it that way and the classification of that article will change. Over the long term, tagging takes classification out of the hands of the authors and puts it in the hands of the readers. There are plenty of pros and cons to that. I'm not sure I entirely like it, but I'm intrigued by its potential.

David Weinberger has a book coming out on this topic next spring. I'm know it's going to be on my reading list.  ¶ 9:11 PM 4 Comments

  Sky may be the limit for Mommycast
The two hosts of Mommycast - Gretchen Vogelzang and Paige Heninger - were on my podcast panel at Syndicate yesterday. Later, they generously gave me 45 minutes for an interview. It wasn't hard to see why their program has been successful.

The secret of a co-hosted program is chemistry. The Mommycast formula is straight out of the comedy team mold. Gretchen is the reserved one. She's had a 25-year career in dance instruction and has owned her own dance studio. She has that Germanic disciplined demeanor that belies a planner

Paige makes up life as she goes along. She admits she hasn't held any one job for more than four years. That one was as a school bus driver, an incongruous image for one so petite. She's impulsive, irreverent and chatty, even bubbly. Gretchen is the wise mom. Paige (despite having five kids) comes is the irreverent teenager. They're perfect together.

Everything has gone right for Mommycast. They're being approached by terrestrial radio networks that want to take Mommycast to the airwaves. They've had inquiries about books and paid endorsements. Dixie, their main sponsor, wants to align as closely as possible with this duo, who bring the dual benefits of family values and Internet coolness. Gretchen and Paige are featured on a back-to-school CD package Dixie is preparing for the fall and the cup maker wants to do more. They have endorsement requests. Movie studios, smitten by the pair's impact on March of the Penguins (Warner has attributed 25% of the film's revenues to Mommycast's recommendations) are inviting them to preview new films.

Paige and Gretchen can take this as far as they want to take it. They may turn out to be the first podcasters to become pop culture icons. It couldn't happen to two nicer people.  ¶ 2:47 PM 13 Comments

  Where are the marketers? There's a bit of a preaching-to-the-choir quality to Syndicate. Most of the attendees appear to be bloggers or social media companies. A lot of people are asking where the marketers and ad agency people are. It's a good question, since Syndicate was sited in Manhattan presumably to reach these people.

I suspect this deficit is indicative of the head-in-the-sand attitude of mainstream marketing toward social media. One possibility is that marketers are scared. They're deer in the headlights of a fundamental change in the way business and consumer customers want to be reached. So instead of dealing with the change, they're denying it and simply hoping it'll go away. A lot of these people will lose their jobs, in the same way that hundreds of CIOs were fired in the 80s and 90s because they refused to make the transition to end-user computing. The value proposition of direct-to-customer marketing is too compelling for this industry not to grow a lot. Marketers who aren't embracing this change are signing their own walking papers.

A more cynical theory I've heard here is that marketers and agencies don't want to embrace this media because it's so cost-efficient. A three-month viral marketing campaign can cost less than a single 30-second TV commercial. If you define your value to an organization in terms of the size of your budget, are you going to embrace a new approach that promises to substantially reduce that budget? It doesn't matter that you're delivering greater efficiency and lower cost. Budget-cutting is a sign of weakness in most organizations. And ad agencies are hardly going to support a strategy that reduces their commissions.

An agency that gets it is NightAgency. Check out this new viral campaign they did for Symantec called SafetyTown.  ¶ 10:29 AM 4 Comments

  Edelman: PR agencies must change Richard Edelman is championing the need for PR agencies to completely change the way they work and has some sharp words for corporate marketers, most of whom are still focused on controlling the message. "You cannot control the message. You have to accept that fact." He cites the GM chevyapprentice.com campaign as an example of how a company took a chance, got some flack, admitted there were some negative results and moved on.

He says corporations that don't accept the need for a conversation-based approach to the business are burying their heads on the sand. "Only 30 of the Fortune 500 companies are blogging. That's pathetic."

"You cannot just have a top-down conversation where you buy a certian number of impressions," he said of conventional marketing wisdom. "It's a horizontal conversation. It's top down, peer-to-peer and an open discussion."

Conversation-based marketing is scaring advertisers "The ad guys are terrified. This is ruining their revenue model." He's clearly positioning PR agencies as being competitive with advertising agencies in social media and having a chance of stealing away some ad business.  ¶ 4:13 PM 0 Comments

  Tagging standards debated
There's a lot of discussion at Syndicate about tagging, with the first session with Jeff Jarvis evolving into an extended debate over Technorati's tag-reading algorithms. Technorati's David Sifry was in the room to defend his company but people were using the wireless network to point out Technorati's inadequacies in real time. It was lively but a little out of hand.

There were some interesting points on the lack of tagging standards or metadata for blogs. One is that there are too many standards, some open, some proprietary. Standards are needed. Second problem is that too few bloggers even use tags because they don't understand them or don't see value in them. One audience member put it well: "It's like a giant Tower of Babel populated by mutes. We've got multiple languages but nobody's using them. "  ¶ 8:52 AM 0 Comments

  Blogging from Syndicate I'll be blogging from the Syndicate conference in NYC for the next two days. Lots of great speakers: Jeff Jarvis, Richard Edelman, Scott Sigler, Steve Gillmor, Doc Searls and on and on. Should be fun. Will try to post photos!  ¶ 6:39 AM 0 Comments

  Podcasting case study: Rightlook Radio Rightlook Radio is an example of a small business that's using podcasting to grow its profile and establish leadership in its field. The San Diego-based company provides education, training and materials to support people in the auto reconditioning business. It has 20 employees and has been growing between 30% and 50% each year since its founding in 1998.

Stephen Powers is the founder and president. He has been reconditioning cars since he was 17. Powers is savvy about technology and he’s a born marketer. Rightlook’s slick website is a cut above anything else in his business.

When Powers was introduced to podcasting last year, he immediately saw its potential for his business. He spoke to some experts in this field and then invested about $5,000 in good quality equipment. This is important because podcast quality is a differentiator. Rightlook had some experience in multimedia, since it already produced videos for its own training programs.

Rightlook Radio launched early this year. The format is talk show style, with extensive first party interviews with customers. Its purpose is to demonstrate the potential of auto reconditioning as a career and convince people that Rightlook services can help them grow their business.

Format decisions are important. Rightlook could have gone with more of an instructional approach but chose to highlight the founder’s personality and customer successes. This works for Rightlook because Powers has an engaging, friendly style and he’s a natural for radio. Interviews with customers help reinforce the message that auto reconditioning is a great way to make a living. The interviewer is a female employee, which is a good choice because it infers that this is a good business for women, too. In fact, one of the shows spotlighted a reconditioning business run by women.

Powers is clearly a born marketer. Rightlook has promoted the podcast in full page ads in a Professional Car Washing & Detailing magazine (yes, there really is one!) as well as including it in other advertising, both print and online. The company published press releases and made t-shirts. When clients come to visit, they get a tour of the professional-looking studio. Rightlook looks hip and in step with technology.

Powers doesn’t have any hard statistics on the podcast’s success, but says downloads have been in the thousands. It doesn’t really matter. The whole program paid for itself after one customer signed a $24,000 deal after following a salesman’s recommendation that he listened to the podcast. Another show about ozone machines resulted in the sale of several machines in the days after the podcast launched.

Continuing the series is a no-brainer. Operational costs are next to nothing, and the buzz and visibility that the program generates in its industry is well worth the effort, Powers says. “Without question, we're going to continue to do this for a long time," he says. Podcast are also an interesting potential channel for delivery of training and marketing materials.

Thanks for Michael Geoghegan for the referral to Rightlook.  ¶ 8:52 AM 0 Comments

  Why podcasting threatens mainstream radio
Did you catch the quote from Howard Stern that the Associated Press reported this week? It was in response to reports that terrestrial radio networks were trying to get Stern to ditch the satellite show and come back to poppa.

"'I'm very flattered terrestrial radio can't let go of me,' Stern said Wednesday on his morning radio show. 'But I would throw up if I had to go back. I'm never going back.'"

The quote sounded so familiar to me, so I went back to the notes from my January interview with Adam Curry, the former MTV VJ who's one of the pioneers of podcasting. Here's what he said:

"When you’re in a “professional” broadcast environment you’re always thinking about rules you have to adhere to, such as language, corporate rules. With podcasts, your filters are all self-imposed....This is why I’m doing this stuff. I’ve always had the man above me telling me what I can and can’t say...Listeners get tuned in and they love [podcasts]. They’re walking away from radio and turning to podcasts because radio has been relegated by marketing and packaging into something that’s very tightly formatted. It’s so homogenized that people just said 'screw it.'"

So here you've got two notable, successful, in-demand broadcast personalities who are saying no to big bucks and big audiences because they don't want to deal with the hassles of sponsor pressure, corporate suits and the FCC. If you were a mainstream media executive, do you think this would make you just a tiny bit nervous?

I'm not a zealot about social media and I don't believe mainstream broadcasting is going away, not now and not ever. But it is going to have to change if it's going to continue to attract the kind of talent that will keep it innovative and in-touch with its audience. A lot of that talent is bleeding away to alternative outlets.

Just as a kicker, last week I spoke to Paige Heninger and Gretchen Vogelzang, hosts of the phenomenally successful Mommycast podcast program. They have also been approached by commercial radio about taking their program to the airwaves and they are resisting. The reason? They don't want to lose control.  ¶ 4:04 PM 0 Comments

  Progress toward monetizing podcasts Lots of people are trying to figure out how to make money with podcasting, a medium that has some structural barriers to audience tracking. Media Post's excellent OMMA Magazine notes a couple of interesting efforts in the latest issue.

Kiptronic has a service that connects podcasters with advertisers interested in reaching their audience. The service inserts a short ad at the beginning and/or end of a podcast at download time. The podcaster doesn't have to do anything and the actual podcast file isn't altered. The service is only four months old, so the company isn't referencing customers yet, but it's an interesting approach to making audio advertising as Adsense-like as possible.

Perhaps an even more intriguing idea comes from Podbridge, which claims to have technology that can tell who has actually listened to a podcast, not just who has downloaded it. Users provide demographic information (anonymously) when they first sign up for the service and then the Podbridge software tracks which podcasts they listen to and shoots that information back to the advertisers.

If Podbridge has really solved the problem of monitoring which podcasts get heard, then it has achieved a major breakthrough. However, the site has no detail that I could find on how this game-changing technology works. Not to mention why users would choose to sign up for a service, the main purpose of which is to devliver ads to them. The company is brand new, so it'll be a while before we know whether its delivery matches up to its promises.  ¶ 3:41 PM 0 Comments

  Wanted: Social media stories I'm writing a book about social media to be published by Quill Driver Books in early 2007. The working title is The New Influencers and it's a book for marketers about how bloggers and podcasters are influencing markets and what makes them tick. It's a book about humans, not technology.

I'm looking for people who are willing to share stories. In particular, I'm interested in stories about people have used personal publishing to make a difference in a market they really care about. The change doesn't have to be seismic and you don't even have to be the one doing publishing. Maybe you work in a marketing department that had to react to a blog swarm or used a viral marketing campaign to great success. Or maybe you were just a bystander watching an conversation play out in the blogosphere that advanced the cause of a company or its customers. The Dell Hells of the world have been well documented. I'm looking for some of the thousands of other ongoing stories of how people are making a difference in markets by expressing their opinions.

If you have a story to tell, please post a summary here and include your contact information. Or e-mail me a quick description. I'll be in active research mode for next couple of months, so any good ideas are welcome. Thank you!  ¶ 3:17 PM 0 Comments

  Hacking RFID If you, like me, tend to put your faith in technology a wee bit too much, this article on RFID hacking from Wired will freak you out just a bit.  ¶ 8:24 AM 2 Comments

  Podcast-ready MP3 players MobilBLU (now there's a terrible company name for you!) says its new $130 MP3 player gets 150 hours of battery life and is preconfigured to download podcasts with one click, according to this story in InformationWeek. This the first device I'm aware of that was designed specifically for podcasts and I'm sure we'll see more innovation in this area.

BTW, the story quotes In-Stat research forecasting that digital audio player sales will reach 286 million units in 2010. If you do the math, that figures out to about one unit per U.S. resident. Hmmm. I dunno about that. Unless they're giving away MP3 players in cereal boxes by then. But not everyone likes cereal...  ¶ 7:11 AM 3 Comments