john keegan dot org

Des Walsh has just released his 7 Step Business Blog book and website. I got to read an advance copy and provided Des with some feedback prior to publication. I am quoted:

This excellent introduction to business blogging explains to business owners how blogs can benefit their business, and does it in plain English without getting bogged down in insider-only jargon. If your business is not blogging, then you need to read this book to find out how your competitors are already adopting blogs and blogging technologies to grow their businesses.

And I really did say that. It’s a great book for small business owners who are lookin for an answer to the question, So what is this blog thing all about anyway? If you’re already blogging, you “get it” already so you’re probably not the market for this book, but if you’re running a business, group, or organization and are not yet clear on what the benefits to blogging are, then you should probably take a look at Des’ ebook.

Des wrote an interesting post yeasterday called Why My 7 Step Business Blog Book Recommends BlogHarbor. Des says he “raised a few eyebrows among blogging colleagues by making Blogware, as provided by BlogHarbor, the recommended platform for business bloggers in the book.” Apparently, some of his colleagues felt it was curious that Des recommended BlogHarbor and not one of the other platforms that a higher proportion of the blogosphere uses… Perhaps the reason was something that Des said later in his post:

I’m also providing some bonuses with the book, including a secure, book purchasers only, section (category) on the new 7 Step Business Blog blogsite, where members will be able to get more information and leave questions.

That statement should give some clue to Des’ blogging colleagues about what makes BlogHarbor different, and yes, much better for some needs, than those other platforms. I don’t even think Des realized that not all blogging platforms offer things like:

• multiple categories with security on a per category basis
• customizable templates per category
• RSS generation per category
• secure RSS based on category security
• multiple author support at all pricing levels

So Des can offer exclusive access to content on private categories via his blog, with a full User/Group permission model which allows him to not only provide access to restricted categories but to provide authorship privileges to any user or group. If you’re interested in reading more about this powerful security model, check out some of our help pages:

• Multiple Authors
• Using Categories
• Giving Individual Readers Access to Restricted Categories
• Change the “Restricted” Status of Categories
• Add and Delete Trusted Posters
• Add and Delete Trusted Readers
• Add and Delete Users With Custom Permissions
• Manage Permissions and Security for Groups

Or maybe it’s for none of those reasons. Des himself says it was just about the great support…

Audioblog, which is not just for audio, announced unmetered bandwidth pricing last week.

This is a really great service for podcasters and video bloggers. Audioblog makes it easy for your visitors to consume your audio and video content by wrapping it up in a customizable player that can be embedded right into your blog content. You can record to your Audioblog account right through a web browser, or upload files you created on your own. Even cooler is the fact that you can call a special telephone number and create recordings that will be automatically posted to your blog - podcasts on the go! It's easy to use and compatible with almost all major blog platforms; we first documented how to use Audioblog on BlogHarbor back in May 2004.

So the big news here is that Audioblog is offering pricing based on unmetered bandwidth plans from at $9.95 per month with 500 MB of disk space storage. This is a fantastic value for podcasters or videocasters who were concerned about the affordability of popularity. Highly recommended, free trials are available.

Yeah, this reads like an ad. It's not, I'm just a fan and we have lots of podcasters at BlogHarbor who have been looking for something like this for a long time. They're creating podcasts but are hesitant to get serious about it out of concerns that they can't afford the cost of bandwidth of even a moderately popular podcast or video blog, and are hesitant to use one of the free file downloading services, since they understand there's probably a legitimate reason that the phrase You get what you pay for was coined. Now there's a real player out there, one that knows this space better than any other, that has a solution for them.

MP3 File

News about Edgeio is trickling out, Business Week says the following about this upcoming service:

…Edgeio is doing just what its tagline says: gathering “listings from the edge”–classified-ad listings in blogs, and even online product content in newspapers and Web stores, and creating a new metasite that organizes those items for potential buyers.

The way Edgeio works is that bloggers would post items they want to sell right on their blogs, tagging them with the word “listing” (and eventually other descriptive tags). Then, Edgeio will pluck them as it constantly crawls millions of blogs looking for the “listing” tag and index them on Edgeio.com.

Sounds great. Exciting and cool in fact. But reread that last line there: constantly crawls millions of blogs looking for the “listing” tag. When will the weight of all these search engines indexing blogs start to affect the price of blogging?

Yesterday on this obscure blog 15% of the access was from RSS readers and aggregators, 28% from search engine robots. 18 different crawlers visited yesterday alone. There are more than a few of these robots that come in daily and hit 60-80 pages whether anything’s been updated or not, and I’m sure there are bloggers who are seeing higher ratios of access from robots and crawlers.

If as Dave Sifry of Technorati says, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 5-6 months, will services requiring blog indexing grow at the same rate? Will 70+ crawlers be visiting this site daily in a year’s time? 300 crawlers a day 2 years from now?

Bloggers pay the cost for the bandwidth consumed by all of this search engine indexing either directly or indirectly. Bandwidth is not free, a blog hosting provider has to pay for it and must recoup the cost of bandwidth (and the other costs associated with blog hosting) either by subscription fees or by placing advertising on their blogs.

Doesn’t it seem inevitable that the explosion of blog indexing services will eventually have an effect on the price of blog hosting services?

Maybe there’s a better way to do this… Bob Wyman said the following last year on this post:

I’m hoping that Yahoo!’s support for the FeedMesh will convince folk that services that might otherwise compete can see clear advantage in cooperating to ensure that the task of discovering blogs and updates to blogs is shared among all parties. We’ll still compete… It’s just that we’ll compete based on the quality of the services we provide rather than just on how many blogs we monitor.

If this idea was extended to not only the discovery of blogs and updates, but the nature of those updates, perhaps the bandwidth pressure on blogs can be alleviated? What if there were a mirroring service, a Blog Cacher, that monitored the FeedMesh for update notfications and stored a copy of the blog pages and feeds for use exclusively by the blog search services?

Access to the cached or mirrored copy would be restricted to blog indexing services, ensuring that the general public only sees the “original”. Make it opt-in, let the blog owner choose to request that search engines access the cached copy, maybe via a simple file uploaded to the root directory of the blog, a robots.txt style service.

And how would this Blog Cacher service pay for itself… How would it monetize itself? Hmmm… That’s a good question, I can see a few different models… And I’m sure you can too… I’d be surprised if we didn’t see such a service by the end of the year.

Update: Blog Cacher sounded pretty cool, I couldn’t resist registering blogcacher.com.

Update 2005/02/24: Looks like there’s been some work done on an API called the RSS Cloud interface, which would allow updates to an RSS feed to be sent to “interested parties.”  Would be a great place to start for blog caching service…

There you have it, my Super Bowl prediction: Seahawks will win 31-28. I am not predicting any major wardrobe malfunctions.

Update 2/6: Good thing I didn’t put any money on the game. One thing: Is it just me or has there been an outbreak in the use of the phrase “perfect storm”?

Via the Blog Herald, I came across this article Imagining the Google Future on CNNMoney:

U.S. companies still devote more ad dollars to the Yellow Pages than to the Internet (which accounts for less than 5 percent of overall ad spending). Yet Americans now spend more than 30 percent of their media-consuming time surfing the Web. When the ad dollars catch up to the trend, a mountain of cash awaits, and Google is positioned like no one else to scoop it up.

Hmmm… According to this research, total US spending on advertising in 2006 is expected to be around $152 billion, with Internet ads taking about 9.1% of that which would be around $14 billion.

Online: Where The Growth Is from BusinessWeek on Dec. 26, 2005 called the Yellow Pages market “among the hottest media bets” and noted it was $15 billion a year market. The article noted:

Analysts at Kelsey Group forecast that $5 billion of locally targeted, small-business advertising will move online by 2009. But Yellow Pages companies have two things Web companies like: Internet-like margins of 40% or more and armies of local sales reps — which portals don’t have — to sell advertising to small companies that lack tech savvy.

So it looks like the market size of the two is similar at this point in time, with Yellow Pages having a slight edge. Will the presence of sales reps be enough to transform Yellow Pages into a gateway to online advertising?