Tag Archives: Blogging

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March 31, 2009

Comparing TypePad and WordPress for blogging

Both services are versatile, but WP has pulled ahead

Matt Mullenweg, CC photo by Robert Scoble

Matt Mullenweg, CC photo by Robert Scoble

JD LasicaPeople still ask us all the time which blogging platform they should use. (Micro-answer: It depends on what’s important to you.) A few weeks back the team here stared down the issue ourselves when we made the decision to switch Socialmedia.biz from TypePad to WordPress.

Why did we do it? Let me explain.

First, a word of praise for TypePad. I began blogging in May 2001 after interviewing Dave Winer, Doc Searls and Dan Gillmor on the subject for this piece in OJR. They looked like they were not only having fun but doing something that mattered. So I started on a Manila blog, switched to MovableType, and then became one of TypePad’s early customers when Ben and Mena Trott of Six Apart rolled out what was then the Mercedes Benz of blogging platforms.

By that time I was fairly comfortable with CSS and Advanced Templates, so the cookie-cutter offerings of Blogger or LiveJournal never appealed to me. Besides, my blog was evolving from personal commentary about media to a business focus on social media, and I rechristened New Media Musings as Socialmedia.biz in 2005. TypePad gave me the ability to design a slick-looking blog with rich, archived content and even some third-party doohickeys in the sidebar.

But over at WordPress, a revolution was brewing — and finally reached the point where I could no longer ignore its pull. In WordPress.org, Matt Mullenweg (pictured above) offered a free, open source platform that thousands of developers were coding for. (We opted for self-hosting rather than the hosted wordpress.com version.) Somewhere between 2007 and 2008, WP became not only comparable to TypePad, but better. Not because of Matt’s coding prowess, but because of the power of crowdsourced development. I now find myself attending WordPress Camps, alongside BarCamps, Social Media Camps and other open media efforts born of my involvement with Ourmedia.org.

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February 26, 2009

Does McKinsey indicate a social media tipping point?

Chris AbrahamThe advance guard of the blogosphere were afraid that they missed the blogging and social media wave back in 2006 when I wrote Surfing as a Metaphor for the State of the Blogosphere and Don’t Worry You Didn’t Miss the Height of the Blogosphere, which assured folks that the height was nowhere in sight (forgive me, I am from Hawaii):

Truth is, in terms of the height of the blogosphere, it isn’t even a wave yet. A few people have caught the wave already, but it is just forming. It certainly hasn’t crested! It is far from curling. The wave is still only accessible to the top 10%, but the real market is always in that 80%.

Well, maybe we have come upon the tipping point, according to Jay Deragon in his article, Has McKinsey Created A Tipping Point?

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February 19, 2009

Bloggersbase: Where readers have influence

Ayelet NoffWith so much information on the internet today and the content continuously growing, it can be very difficult to discover an online media site where your voice can be heard.  Uncovering a place where you can make a difference and have an influence is even more difficult. A new Israeli start-up, BloggersBase.com hopes to fill that void.  This unique blogging platform is an online citizen journalism magazine that is powered by its readers. Here, readers and bloggers alike can discover top quality content while simultaneously influencing the magazine.

1BloggersBase.com is a competition-based content discovery platform where bloggers submit content on a variety of topics, and based on readers’ ratings, the highest quality content is discovered and featured on the site. The magazine consists of multi-authored blogs, each on a different subject.  There are four main topics categories: Entertainment, Technology, Lifestyle and World Affairs, containing together ten different blogs. Based on reader ratings and responses, the highest quality content is discovered and featured on the site.  The rating system is not the standard vote “up or down/yes or no” as seen on other social networks such as Digg or Mixx, but rather is on a scale of 1-10 and is based on a variety of criteria from professionalism and relevance to writing style and creativity.

The more accurately you rate, the higher your influence becomes in deciding which content makes it to the main blog.  This reader influence is one of the things that make BloggersBase such a unique platform.
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January 13, 2009

McCann Digital turns to social media to tout Samsung Omnia

Omnia

Samsung has been dipping its toe into the social media waters of late. Last year they sent me the Samsung SC HMX10 high-def camcorder to blog about and try out for a year. My interviews with author Sarah Lacy and the co-founder of Breaking the Silence were conducted with the ultra-portable HMX10, which I reviewed here.

Now my good friend Ayelet Noff, aka Blonde 2.0, tells me that Samsung is working with McCann
Digital on a campaign to promote their new phone, the Samsung Omnia i900 . (The i900 is the latest “it” phone; see a review here and specs here.) As a big part of their campaign, they are giving the phone to bloggers for free — that’s right, to keep, not as a loan — to try out the features and use in their everyday lives. (If you’re interested, post a comment to Ayelet’s blog.)

One of the things Ayelet, Chris Heuer, I and others are doing at AdHocnium is to help companies turn to bloggers and other social media influencers to establish a real, genuine connection with the users of their products. We’re seeing firms like McCann Digital increasingly turn to the tools of the social Web to help advance their campaign by recruiting bloggers to become customers and in turn potentially reach millions of users. I’ll be watching to see how McCann Digital’s effort progresses.

August 29, 2004

Business use of blogs

One of the things we’ll look at on SocialMedia.biz is the use of weblogs (and other social media) in the workplace. Here’s an update on corporate uses of weblogs.

Companies that have launched blogs include:

• Microsoft, whose Channel 9 community weblog features 1,000 Microsoft employees using text and video blog tools. The blog drew 700,000 unique users a month as of July 2004.

• Sun Microsystems president and chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz started a blog in June 2004, reasoning in his first entry, “Why shouldn’t an officer of a public company start a blog? Hey, life is short.”

• At Verizon, Paul Perry, a director in the company’s eServices division, started a blog to keep up with news about competitors. Using a news aggregator, a popular blog-world tool that grabs and assembles syndicated “feeds” of content from Web sites and other blogs, people in his group can quickly post news they find on those feeds to the internal blog.

• Software maker Macromedia, one of the first companies to adopt blogs for customer service, saved tens of thousands of dollars in call-center support when it released a crop of new products for software developers in 2002. A trusted group of employees started blogs to answer users’ questions, and the blogs have grown into online communities that give Macromedia valuable customer feedback.

• DaimlerChrysler employs weblogs at a few of its U.S. plants; managers discuss problems and keep a record of their solutions.

• The Hartford Financial Services Group is already finding success using blogs in one of its mobile groups. A team of 40 field technology managers, who serve as links between The Hartford’s network of insurance agents and the home office, set up a blog in August 2004. They use it to share information about e-commerce features and solutions to technology problems. Before, email and voice mail sufficed, but email threads would die, and there was no way to search past shared information. “We don’t get a chance to talk with each other as often as we’d like,” says Steve Grebner, one of The Hartford’s field managers, who thinks of the blog a little like a town square.

• Nokia has a photo phone blog.

• IBM began blogging in December 2003, and by February, some 500 employees in more than 30 countries were using it to discuss software development projects and business strategies. And while blogs’ inherently open, anarchic nature may be unsettling, Mike Wing, IBM’s vice president of intranet strategy, believes their simplicity and informality could give them an edge. “It may be an easy, comfortable medium for people to be given permission to publish what they feel like publishing,” he says.

• Dr Pepper is using blogging both as a medium to market products and monitor brands and as an internal knowledge-management tool.

• American Airlines, where only 20% of the company’s highly mobile workforce has corporate email, is considering blogs as a way to give employees more channels to management.

• To help companies find bloggers who fit their target, Internet marketing firm Richards Interactive has started ProjectBlog.com, a database of bloggers who’ve completed demographic surveys.

• StonyField Farm (maker of yogurt and other dairy products) has a customer-facing weblog.

• Jones Soda weblog

• Richards Interactive invited bloggers to participate in product launches.

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