john keegan dot org

Maybe the greatest benefit I get from running BlogHarbor is that we have such great customers and I have the privelege of meeting with them from time to time. Rajesh Setty is a passionate, intelligent, generous, insightful, and inspirational man who started blogging with us just prior to the release of his book Life Beyond Code. I had the opportunity to meet Rajesh for lunch on a gorgeous afternoon during the fall ISPCon show last year, and learned a lot from him in a very short time.

Rajesh has just released a free 40-page eBook called Personal Branding for Technology Professionals, the subtitle of which is Distinguish Yourself and Thrive!. This book, not only free but released under a Creative Commons license, outlines the 12 personal branding challenges which might be preventing you from developing your personal brand in this increasingly competitive industry. I was struck by this passage in the book:

…I still remember that date. On February 14th, I started blogging at Life Beyond Code. John Keegan at BlogHarbor helped set up the blog, and he continues to provide me with all the support on the technology-front related to the blog, so that I can just focus on my writing.

Thanks for reminding me what a blessing it is to be involved in a business that can have such positive influences on people’s lives. I looked it up, yes it was February 14, 2005…

Read this book!

I did a short email interview last month with Carl Burnham, author of WEB HOSTING, A Complete Strategy on the topic of blogs in the web hosting industry. Carl’s article Blogging for Business was just published in the April 2006 edition of Web Host Industry Review and I am very grateful that some of our exchange appeared in the magazine. One of our very forward looking BlogHarbor customers, Perceptric Media, got a great mention in the article. Here’s some of what I wrote to Carl:

How are you currently utilizing blogs as part of your hosting solutions (especially businesses)?

Absolutely, we’re utilizing blogs as part of our hosting solutions for businesses. Your question in fact brings to mind the approach of one of our more visionary customers, Perceptric Media. This company launched in November 2005 and in their statement here they noted the following:

With a focus on areas where the first tectonic shifts of change are taking place, the Perceptric company website is built entirely as a blog; www.perceptric.com. That’s a change Perceptric is advising every company to implement immediately.

The company decided to forego the traditional static website and implement their site as a blog right from the start. Of course we were there to provide them with the typical ancillary hosting services such as email and DNS to pull it all together, but the real insight here is that they did not view a blog as a supplement to their website, they saw the blog as a way to communicate more directly with their market. One of the founders wrote on that announcement:

“Intimate conversations between companies and markets are accelerating. Every company has to answer a binary question - Do they ignore what is being said about them, or tell their side of the story. The only way to be in the conversation is to use the tools - pods, vlogs, and blogs. Marketing and customer relationships experience deep change because it true transparency emerges.”

So we do see that more businesses are choosing to implement blogs for a variety of reasons.

What are the most popular features/functions requested by customers?

We like to say that weblogs are the “content management systems for the rest of us.” So when it comes to weblogs, there are a pretty standard set of CMS-like features that our customers are looking for: easy to use rich text editing, categories, file uploads, photo albums, RSS syndication, disk space, design customizability, etc. But when they learn that in this price range there is multiple author support, restricted categories, and a user- and group-based permissions system, that is really the big surprise, especially for businesses. The ability for users to create intranet and extranet style websites based on weblogging technology really changes the web hosting landscape.