I had an opportunity to comment today on the question of how a company ought to respond to bloggers who have damaged their reputation. Below are my thoughts. I'd love to read yours, too.

The best thing that companies can do in response to bloggers who have done their reputation harm is to take the bloggers' complaints as seriously as is appropriate. Readers will determine the validity of blogger criticism for themselves, but if the criticism is valid then there's no hiding from it any more. It's best to be publicly responsive, on the critical blogs and on a blog of your own if you're that concerned about it. You may need to change your practices, just like you'd have to if a journalist in the traditional press criticized you in a way that you take seriously.

You may have to just agree to disagree. That's ok. It's good to presume that all parties involved are adults.

One way or the other, if you can engage and win over bloggers with honest communication then you'll become the darling of the blogosphere among your competitors and you'll be in a better place than you were before any of it ever happened. Imagine it's the dawn of cable TV and a young CNN criticizes you publicly. Are you going to say that no one consumes that media so it's not significant or are you going to try to trick CNN into believing you've changed your practices when you haven't? Probably not. You can act with the benefit of hindsight today since this isn't the first time that media has expanded dramatically to include new voices.

I've been asking PR people lately to send me an OPML file of their clients' blog feeds. One person sent me a list of links to their clients' blogs in an email tonight, but other than that no one has been brave enough to try. This is something that everyone could benefit from knowing how to do. That big blue icon is the proposed icon for OPML, which stands for Outline Processor Markup Language (stay with me here, non technical people!).

An OPML file is an outline. In this case, it's a bundle of RSS feeds that can be moved into and out of any RSS reader as a group. No matter what RSS reader you use, it can import and export OPML files. It's real handy. If PR people, for example, would send me one OPML file of all their clients' blogs and a news search feed for each of those clients' company names - I would throw it into my reader and have a long term connection with all their news. It would build name recognition if nothing else, but I'd likely find something in there someday to write about too. There's a billion other reasons to use OPML - just ask yourself in what circumstances you can imagine sending someone else one link or file that contains a collection of dynamic sources on any topic. I know these are the sorts of questions that keep me up at night.

Here's how you do it...
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I wear two hats. I consult for companies on usability, market intelligence and launch planning. I also blog about new web applications and internet industry news over at Read/WriteWeb. I don't write about my consulting clients, but after several years of experience working on both sides of the promotion game - I think I've got some pretty good advice. At least on what not to do!

I want to post here about some pitches I've gotten from PR people and I don't need to look back further than 24 hours to find most of them that I want to use as examples. I look at probably 30 pitches a day, sometimes more.
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This weekend will mark one month that I've been writing over at Read/WriteWeb and doing consulting. In my previous stints as an online news writer (which I missed very much) I was often able to break news faster than my tech blogging competitors primarily through some advanced use of RSS feeds, which I wrote about here. I'm still doing that in this job, but there's a new tool that's making a huge impact on my reporting - Twitter!

People laugh at Twitter, and they can go ahead and laugh for all I care, but I'm here to tell you that it can be invaluable. Aside from the personal connectedness and relationship maintenance it's good for, let's be honest - it's paying my rent. (Thanks Twitter!) I don't mean they've hired me as a consultant, though I would love that, I mean Twitter is great for news discovery. Read on for my thoughts on how you can use Twitter more effectively, but keep in mind that communication has its own inherent value - I swear that's what I like best about Twitter!
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In case you're interested in joining us for any of these, I recommend them all highly. Big thanks to organizers for the invites.

New Media for Nonprofits
Meyer Memorial Trust

I'll be leading a session on "the ROI of blogging." There will be 3 or 4 other sessions as well, about things like online video and RSS. If you're in Portland and into npo work, you might like to join us.

Friday, October 19th at PNCA in Portland

Sam Whitmore's Media Survey
mediasurvey.com

Sam Whitmore does weekly by-subscription teleconferences with media pros (including new media ones, apparently!) and has been one of my heroes for some time. It's a real honor to be a guest there. Sam's site is by subscription only (free trials available) but he does have a new, public blog that's worth subscribing to. If you're not familiar with Sam, you'll start noticing his name around some of the best tech podcasts on the web now that you've read it here.

Phone call is Tuesday, October 16th at 1:00 PST

Blog World Expo
blogworldexpo.com

I'm speaking a couple of times at the BlogWorldExpo on November 7th through 9th in Las Vegas. It's going to be a very good conference, judging from the speakers list and the background of organizer Rick Calvert, a long time trade show man who has dove in head first to social media.

November 7th - 9th in Vegas, flights and registration are inexpensive - you should really think about going. See http://blogworldexpo.com

My old friend Justin Kistner just relaunched his website with a hot new WordPress theme, an enviably beautiful description of his consulting services and an interview with me, his old high school debate rival. We've met back up ten years later in the tech world and he interviewed me about being a professional blogger. I hope you'll check it out if you're interested.

Justin's consulting services are also worth a look. He helps companies "understand your needs and define your project before you hire web design and/or programming talent." He's a very smart guy. I hope we can do some work together, in fact.

I'm excited to announce that my work life is changing; I've resigned as Director of Content at SplashCast and joined the team at the excellent web 2.0 industry news blog Read/WriteWeb. I'll also be putting a new level of time and energy into my consulting practice, something I haven't been able to give the time it deserves in recent months.
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AideRSS is a service I've wanted to make creative use of for some time. It's neat - you supply an RSS feed and it ranks posts in that feed in order of reader engagement. The company is Canadian, too, and Canadian internet stuff is totally hot.

AideRSS scores each post by the number of comments it received, number of times it's been tagged in del.icio.us, inbound links from a number of blogsearch engines, etc. Thankfully, it scores those posts relative only to other posts in the same feed. So while a post on TechCrunch with 20 comments might score a 5 out of 10, for example, a post on Marshallk.com with 20 comments would score a 10 out of 10! Unfortunately, and this is a big dissapointment, AideRSS is just plain wrong far too often - reporting, for example, completely inacurate numbers for several posts in my feed. Come on AideRSS team, fix these problems. So it's nothing to bet the bank on, but there's some real potential here and as a rough guide it could still be useful today. I've contacted AideRSS to ask why they are getting things wrong as often as they are.

That's all well and good, it's a good way to see which of your posts are getting the most reader engagement (at least via these gestures being measured) and the widget that AideRSS provides is a neat way to highlight your most popular posts - but I know there's a lot more that's possible here.

Tonight I tried something unusual, at least it seemed that way to me. I plugged the RSS feed for items I've tagged "toread" in del.cio.us into AideRSS. It worked! It appears that the service figured out which were the hottest items in my feed. What a handy way to prioritize! I could grab scored RSS feed from AideRSS, including "good posts", great posts or only the best posts. Here's a widget displaying the best posts currently in my "toread" feed, according to AideRSS.

Isn't that cool? Obviously it would be nice if users could define the number of characters and items displayed in that widget and the metrics used don't capture anything personalized - but nonetheless, I think there's some real potential here. (The numbers fetched aren't always accurate, either - hopefully that will improve.)

Here's an idea I thought of previously: say you're looking to identify some of the top blogs in real estate. (Woo hoo!?) I would recommend starting at http://technorati.com/blogs/real_estate and sorting from authority. There's an export in OPML link there, which unfortunately will not give you anything other than the top 10 blogs in that category no matter what you try to do, but you can import that OPML into AideRSS. You can then see the hottest posts in each blog, in other words: you can get a feel for what that blog's community of readers takes interest in. So Technorati+AideRSS = easy identification of the biggest interests of top niche bloggers' reading communities. Sounds invaluable to me.

These are the kinds of ideas I help come up with and implement with my consulting clients; though we wouldn't want to depend too much on a tool that's as loosely accurate as AideRSS is today.

If this general idea is of interest to you, perhaps more for personal use than marketing purposes, see also Rogers Cadenhead's recent post on APML - Attention Profiling Markup Language. I tagged it in my blog and shared items feed, which you might like to subscribe to.

Thanks for reading.

Remember the stories about YouTube being banned in various countries around the world? One of the most interesting cases was in Thailand, where after a long period when the Thai government blocked its citizens from accessing YouTube, the government lifted the block this week. It cited Google's willingness to censor videos that insulted Thai royalty, though I believe Google had said it was willing to block this content months ago. Now tonight it's reported that the Thai government has turned its attention to Veoh and Metacafe, two other video hosting sites. See Global Voices and the Committee to Protect Bloggers for reports.

How much more evidence do we need that when you cave to authoritarian demands, authority just makes more. What an awful precedent to set. I know that people more knowledgeable about Thailand assure critics that the Thai people themselves really do revere their king and want this censorship to be carried out, but since values are probably always arbitrary in the end, I reserve the right for mine to oppose such censorship anyway.

Allowing governments to silence unpopular voices is a bad idea for lots of reasons, not the least of which is this: people suffering at the hands of power must be supported in their efforts to contest that power, even if a large, other group of people would prefer that suffering to go on in silence.

See also the "self-discipline" pact signed by Yahoo and MSN in China this week, promising to report personal information on bloggers to the Chinese government on demand.

This stuff drives me nuts. What can we do about it? I'm try to do what I can to support the newly resurrected Committee to Protect Bloggers. Subscribe to their RSS feed, check out the "safer blogging" guides they link to and help spread the word. Everybody knows that injustices are less likely to occur the more light that's shined on them.

You can also help expand the reach of voices online outside of the dominant groups allready being heard from. Check out what my friend Beth is doing right now - she's in SE Asia training people to train others in video blogging. That's awesome. If you can do things like that, that's great - for the rest of us, we can support people like Beth.

The internet holds far too much potential for social change to let it go dark in some of the parts of the world where it's needed the most. Everyone, everywhere who seeks freedom using new media deserves our support and no one deserves the threat of imprisonment for challenging power online.

I've been so busy with day job and consulting work that I haven't been able to post here for some time but thought I'd cross post this write-up on the fantastic Blogher conference I just returned from in Chicago. It was so much fun! I got to meet a number of web pals face to face for the first time, including the super cool PR guy Jeremy Pepper. Jeremy, who's been to every Blogher since the conferences began, says of the Blogher scene - "You won't find a better community where stuff actually gets done."

I got to go to the 3rd annual Blogher conference on women bloggers in Chicago this weekend and it was awesome. Though this was the first time I was able to go, I'm told that year after year the conference doubles in attendance. I can see why - it was well worth the trip.

For my contribution to the discussions that went on there, I thought I'd post a few things here. To the right you can see I've built a very simple Blogher channel in SplashCast. I used the Blogher logo at a channel preview image, then put in two shows - one the most recent videos on YouTube tagged Blogher and the second the same tag on Flickr.

Some of the things I've been thinking about since returning home yesterday:

* Different rock stars. I was surprised that the session on blogging more efficiently was not packed with attendees despite being put on by Gina Trapani of Lifehacker and Barb Dybwad of AOL's Engadget and Joystiq. As Liz Henry pointed out to me on Twitter, though, the Blogher community has a different set of rock stars than the tech blogging community I'm most familiar with. Confessions of a Pioneer Woman gets more comments per post than any blog I've ever seen - and I'd never heard of it before! Did you know that Elise Bauer's Simply Recipes has over 232,000 (!) subscribers by RSS and email? Mommy bloggers have another community altogether still.

* Blog atmosphere. One classic dilemma on any web site that allows visitor comments is whether some comments should be deleted because they are offensive. People who feel they should not tend to think it's the most obvious thing in the world but I heard someone express another perspective at Blogher better than I had ever heard it expressed before. When you allow comments that are read as oppressive by people of color, women and others to remain on your blog it requires members of those communities to prepare themselves emotionally for a hostile environment before participating in conversation. That's not something I want to ask of people who are already outside the dominant power paradigm- so I'm going to make it a practice to delete comments like that if and when they appear on posts I write anywhere.

Though that opinion was expressed well at Blogher, there was hardly consensus around it. For example, I heard a number of women say things that I personally thought quite oppressive - from "retard" and "ching chong" jokes to shutting down question askers with "you just don't get it" arrogance. In other words, it was hardly one big perfect PC-fest.

* Powerful women. Blogher co-founder Lisa Stone is a great interviewer, keynoter Elizabeth Edwards was better though at answering her questions than she was at being interesting in response to audience questions. Hopefully the interview will be posted in video online so you can see one way to do a great interview. After hearing people talk all weekend about how much smarter Elizabeth is than her Presidential candidate husband John Edwards, I'm sure I wasn't the only one in the large audience that was grinding my teeth a bit every time she said "well, my husband's position is this..." It's not fun to listen to anyone use a phrase like that more than once or twice in a conversation.

* Blogher seemed very well sponsored. GM, Dove, Yahoo! and Google were all major sponsors. Butterball (yuck) sponsored the food sessions (food blogging is huge) and even PayPerPost was there. One of the recurring themes of the sessions, though, was the need for financial support in underrepresented online communities, women bloggers outside the US in particular. Perhaps they already have, but I think it would be nice to see some of these sponsorships come in the form of donations to international organizations in Blogher's name.

* Social media production. Blogher is not just a yearly conference, it's also a great place to read womens' blog posts throughout the year and an ad network for blogs all around the web. Judging from the photos and videos uploaded quickly to the web tagged Blogher, one outside organization has done a particularly good job of producing media content arround the conference. Check out the player above and you'll find a whole bunch of interviews with speakers from the conference produced by an organization called The Experience Project. Experience Project is a privacy-centric social networking service and anyone who is searching for Blogher video on YouTube in the days after the event will now be exposed to their company and their approach to engaging with related issues. It appears they are collaborating with podcast network Podtech. Way to go Experience Project!

Blogher was a great conference to go to and something I will do my best to go to next year. So many tech related conferences are completely imbalanced with 90% or more male attendees and speakers. It was fantastic to be at an event that was split the other way. Conversations were very friendly, the content was broader in concerns addressed than at many tech conferences and there were any number of psycho-social ways this conference was different that I as a man won't even try to describe. It was great and I highly recommend attending next year's conference to anyone able to do so.