Category Archives: Blogging

More examples of big internal corporate blogs

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I like to keep track of good examples of Web 2.0 tools being adopted by anyone and everyone. When the corporate world offers a new example, I imagine that probably gives the tools all the more credence. Sally Falkow has a write up on two good examples: French pharmaceutical company Ipsen is using blogging as a reputation management and competitive intelligence tool and financial giants Ernst & Young are using what they call “pages” and internal teams working on clients and projects use the system to collaborate and share knowledge. Both of these examples leverage the heck out of RSS, I’m sure.

Falkow’s write up has some more details and says that the Blogsite platform, which she uses on her blog and I write with as well for one of my clients, would be a good solution in both of these circumstances. I agree wholeheartedly, the Blogsite platform is very good in many ways.

Carnival of the Green is worth checking out

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Are you familiar with the Blog Carnival phenomenon? It’s interesting. Different blogs take turns periodically summarizing and linking out to other blogs writing about the same topic. Yesterday saw Carnival of the Green #23. It’s a good way to discover new blogs and get some human editorial vision on highlights in a given space. There’s a directory of a huge variety of Blog Carnivals at BlogCarnival.com. I just subscribed to the feed so I can highlight interesting new ones when they appear.

Enough is Enough Zimbabwe unveiled

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A project I’ve been working on for several months, called Enough is Enough Zimbabwe, has just been opened to the public. It’s a blog about the struggle against the tyrannical government of Zimbabwe, a country with a very active blogosphere. Conceived of by the Committee to Protect Bloggers, set up by myself and it is now to be edited by one of the country’s most popular bloggers, a person who goes by the name The Zimbabwean Pundit (http://zimpundit.blogspot.com/). The blog is politically independent and not associated with any particular political movement there.

In addition to original writing, the site is a hub for aggregated multimedia on the topic. As you can imagine, I’ve souped it up (and will continue to do so) with as many features above and below the hood as make sense to me. Make sure you visit the links on the top of the site, where you’ll find the most recent posts from other Zimbabwean blogs, international news coverage and reader submitted audio and video.

I hope you’ll check it out, subscribe and let other people know about it. The struggle in Zimbabwe is an inspiring one and the people there really need for the rest of the world to know about what they are experiencing and how they are responding to it. We hope that the blogosphere will be a useful part of the larger effort there.

Please visit Enough is Enough Zimbabwe.

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Feed Digest improves search, adds OPML export

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FeedDigest.com is my favorite way to turn RSS feeds into HTML for display on your site. I think it’s the most well supported, most sophisticated and best funded of all the tools for this purpose that I’ve seen. Many other services are just not something you’d want to use in a quality- demanding context. FeedDigest is fantastic. This week Peter Cooper, the man behind the awesome service, announced some new features worth noting.

Improved search/filtering. If you want to syndicate the feeds for say the nptech attention stream, the Net Squared blogs and items tagged “podcast” in del.icio.us all mashed into one newswire and displayed on your blog or website – that’s something you’ve always been able to do with FeedDigest. But if you want only display items that include the phrase “environmental justice” – well now you can do that. Cool.

Export by OPML (feeds bundled in outline form) and clean URLs. These features are just going to make the Feed Digest environment easier to work in.

I love this tool and can’t recommend it highly enough.

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Promoting yourself by praising your competitor

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Hugh at Gaping Void, a hugely popular marketing blog, makes a really nice point….

Not only is a great story, full of local history and color, it does a superb job of pulling off what has become my favorite thing to do as a marketer:

i.e. Praising one’s competition to the hilt:

If you fancy a new suit, he’s one of the best. Hardcore old school.
Brian Staples: +44 (0) 207 734 5069.

Of course, you can only do that when [A] your praise is sincere and [B] your own product is up to snuff. Otherwise you just sound obsequious.

This is so different from traditional promotional communication! I had a client freak out last week because I posted a link to a competitor on their web site. I mean freak out. My response was: yes, your readers will find out about this resource your competitor offers (that I linked to) but they’ll remember you as the place to consistantly find the best resources from around the web. Information can’t be hidden from people anymore, it can only be gardened gracefully – that’s were your value proposition should be. Though a very nice and supportive man, this he didn’t buy. (I’m subcontracted with him and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t read this blog, but if you are reading here – there’s another piece of the discussion.)