December 2007

Nothing gets bloggers riled-up more than a secret cabal of corporate types forming yet another industry get-together to ‘understand’ how to talk to the public. Coca-Cola and General Motors, are two of the twelve founding members of the newly-created Blog Council.

Other founding members are AccuQuote, Cisco Systems, Dell, Gemstar-TV Guide, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, Nokia, SAP, and Wells Fargo.

One purpose for the private group is “how to use blogs and engage the blogosphere the right way,” said Sean O’Driscoll, General Manager, Community Support Services for Microsoft, in a statement. What the “right way” is is indicated in another goal of the group: “a united voice to provide the corporate perspective in the blogosphere.” In other words, message control.

The council, which meets in January, emphasized that while they’ll meet in private, nothing untoward is planned.

“Major corporations use blogs differently while abiding by the same rules and etiquette,” said Andy Sernovitz, Blog Council CEO.

“Individual and small-business bloggers don’t face the same issues. For example, we still need to deliver a responsible and effective corporate message, but we need to do it in the complicated environment of the blogosphere,” explained Sernovitz.

“I’ve done enough speaking to enough corporations now that if they don’t get why they should be talking with their customers already I don’t get how hanging out at yet another boring industry conference is going to help them to get it,” tech blogger and former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble writes at his site.

The TechCrunch site believes the group’s first mistake was its name.

“My natural reaction against the Council is based on its name; ‘The Blog Council’ sounds like it owns blogging or has some sort of superior position over the medium, where as it is nothing of the sort,” Duncan Riley wrote Friday.

Mashable’s Mark Hopkins, who once worked at Blog Council member Nokia, said those companies now involved don’t represent firms that actually ‘get’ corporate blogging. Hopkins nominated Yahoo, Brightcove, Southwest Airlines and Google as examples the Council should emulate.

In an ironic twist, the Blog Council violated the first foundational rule of blogging: community. The Council’s blog has public comments turned off.

Darren Rowse, the Australian blogger behind ProBlogger.net and the blogging network B5 Media, told readers Thursday he’s “working on a new resource for bloggers.” No details were provided, except a brief “stay tuned” tease.

What could the new ‘resource’ involve? Could ProBlogger.net spin off another site? Might Rowse use his marketing muscle for some advertising play? Does the new development involve B5 Media, where Rowse is a blogger trainer?

In a recent interview with Professional Blogging News, B5 CEO Jeremy Wright said the Canadian blog network wants to reshape itself as a media company, shifting its emphasis from blogs to marketing the company’s blogging platform and advertising engine. Rowse, like many other bloggers, has been experimenting with multimedia, offering video talks. No immediate comment was available.

Update: Rowse later said in an e-mail to Professional Blogging News that more details would be released “in months,” citing the involvement of others as why he could not say more.

(Hat tip to Michael Martine.)

Automattic was an early supporter of Facebook’s now-controversial ‘Beacon’ advertising program, but dropped out before the launch, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of the blog hosting company, said in an interview Wednesday.

“We pulled out because I had concerns about exposing all of that data to Facebook,” Mullenweg said during an interview with BlogTalk Radio host Alan Levy. The interview happened after Mullenweg skipped out of an earlier-scheduled November online talk.

Wednesday, Facebook’s founder apologized to the social hangout’s users upset that their off-site shopping habits could be tracked and broadcast as part of an advertising campaign. Facebook users can no opt-out of Beacon, rather than turn off multiple independent Facebook applications that used the Beacon system.

Although Automattic backed out of the Beacon program, Mullenweg remains confident some partnership between WordPress and Facebook is possible.

“We’d still love to do something, for example, you could leave a comment or a new post and it could go into your newsfeed,” he said.

However, Mullenweg believes incidents such as Beacon could cause social networks to come tumbling down.

“The inflection point is one of these social networks is going to do something really, really terrible. It’s going to mess-up in some way that causes a mass exodus,” Mullenweg explained.

Despite the dire prediction, social-networking leader MySpace seems incapable of doing anything that turns off its users, the WordPress software creator explained.

What’s in the future for WordPress?

Mullenweg said he wants to add e-mail posting and subscribing as an answer to users such as his mom who prefer to have everything come to them, rather than fire up an RSS reader. Mullenweg’s mom currently keeps track of his goings-on through a Google alert.

A hosted version of the WordPress forum software BBPress will be created, aimed at the millions of people using Yahoo Groups or Google Groups. The service will likely be renamed from the ungainly BBPress, Mullenweg said.

With a presidential election coming up and questions about voting technology, Mullenweg said he’d like to participate in or support an open-source election system. “We’re basing our voting on these buggy platforms,” the 23-year-old Houston, Texas millionaire said.

Despite having oodles of cash and the focus of repeated rumors of buyouts, Mullenweg sounded like the blogger’s Rodney Dangerfield.

“The worst is when I’m in a Best Buy and get disrespected,” he told interviewers. Mulenweg, who confessed he’s unable to grow facial hair, said some people in the business world are thrown by his youth, not taking him seriously. But the Mullenweg said he uses that reaction as a tool to decide who he will and won’t do business with.

Yesterday’s “Silicon Alley 100″ was more than an ego-boost for traditional Internet media types, but a sign of how blogs are quickly becoming the new media standard. While New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg topped the list, there were the familiar blogging names as well as confirmations of intriguing trends in professional blogging.

It’s a wonder New York City is big enough to accommodate the vast egos of blogging giants Nick Denton and his perpetual kicking-boy online entrepreneur Jason Calacanis. Denton, who leads a stable of acid-tongue Gawker Media blogs, arrived in the No. 7 spot. Denton recently lost several of his staffers and envisions a ‘more traditional’ future for his blogging empire. Calacanis, who Monday, decried Denton’s publishing style, landed farther back in No. 76.

Another sign of blogging adopting the traditional media model was borne out by Ken Lerer, co-founder and chairman of political news site The Huffington Post, appearing in the No. 12 slot. The Huffington Post’s CEO Betsy Morgan was described as an up-and-comer. Morgan was hired from Fox Interactive.

The New York Times, a traditional media outlet which has jumped head-first into blogging, scored two spots on the list. The NYT’s Andrew Sorkin was named for his “Dealbook” financial blog, while Saul Hansell was picked for his technology blog “Bits.”

The Wall Street Journal, a financial reporting powerhouse, came away empty-handed.

Two pure-play financial blogs were also mentioned. Wallstrip creator Howard Lindzon and Seeking Alpha CEO and creator David Jackson were named No. 61 and No. 82, respectively. Lindsay Campbell, the actress turned Wallstrip video host, also turns up on the Silicon Alley 100.

Tracking social sites such as Facebook and MySpace is the domain of Caroline McCarthy, the reporter and CNET’s “The Social ” blog. Along with breaking the news of this year’s list, McCarthy is among the industry’s up-and-comers.

Okay, that’s who was included on the list, but what names were notably missing?

Let’s start with Michael Arrington. Arrington, like him or not, is a blogging power-house, using his TechCrunch dynasty to break news of startups. Maybe he’ll show up on a left coast version of the list.

Automattic creator and WordPress chief Matt Mullenweg was also not among the luminaries. Automattic is quickly becoming the choice for blog hosting, challenging Google’s Blogger for top spot.

Can you think of other names that should be included in a list of top professional bloggers? Let me know.

As we earlier reported Gawker is seeking to replace its Managing Editor and a writer. Now add Gawker writer Joshua David Stein to the list of staff who’ve jumped ship. The departures equate to half of Nick Denton’s Gawker masthead.

The reaction has been varied. For Jason Calacanis, who is regularly pilloried at Gawker Media’s Valleywag, there is no love lost.

“Nick, it won’t be easy to recruit someone better than Emily and Choire; as the months march on, the pool of creative youngsters who are willing to turn themselves into professional ***holes will shrink,” Calacanis wrote at his blog.

LiveJournal, one of the original blogging platforms, has been sold by SixApart to SUP, a Russian media company. Financial details were not disclosed. The move comes as LJ sees its users drifting off to other blogging destinations, such as WordPress, Facebook and elsewhere.

SUP, which already runs LJ as part of a licensing agreement, will open a San Francisco, Calif. office.  Nine SixApart employees who worked on LJ will move to the new office. According to PaidContent.org, SUP hopes to breathe life into the blogging platform by investing between $10 million to $100 million in the service, plus add Live Journal found Brad Fitzpatrick and others to an advisory board.

The sale of LiveJournal leaves Six Apart with TypePad and Vox. In September, the company gained Chris Alden as a new CEO.

Earlier this month, the Automattic-owned WordPress.com passed SixApart as the No. 2 blogging site.

Gawker, the media gossip site that is the crown jewel of Nick Denton’s stable of snarky blogs, is looking for new editors. Both managing editor Choire Sicha and editor Emily Gould have resigned. Their decision to leave didn’t take anyone by surprise. “Not a week goes by I don’t want to quit this job,” Sicha wrote in New York Magazine’s article entitled “Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass.”

In announcing its search for a replacement, Gawker pointed to Sicha’s NY Mag piece, calling it a sign of an “existential crisis” on his part. The new managing editor will need to be more than a blogger, as the site has grown beyond its origins. “Gawker is becoming a larger and more complex operation, and frankly, a more traditional one,” according to a statement.

The take-away: attitude can get you only so far. As a number of blogs, such as TechCrunch, Read/Write Web and Om Malik have found, the traditional media style often derided is also frequently the best answer.

This is the most recent departure from the Gawker helm for Sicha. As Rachel Sklar of Huffington Post’s Eat the Press media column reports, Sicha first left to become a New York Observer senior writer, then returned to Gawker in January.

Other Gawker’s who left the next prior to Sicha’s swan song: co-editor Alex Balk and associate editor Doree Shafrir resigned earlier this year.

In comments left at Silicon Alley Insider, talk was that the resignations were the result of what “John C. Smith” termed “Gawker’s slave-labor practices on the editorial side of the business.” However, that thinking was countered by SAI’s Peter Kafka, who wrote that word was Gawker now pays editorial workers living wages. “At least by online editorial standards,” Kafka noted.

Many bloggers change their site’s themes more often than their clothes. Often, a blog theme is used like a ‘comb over,’ pretending to hide something no longer there … content. However, in rare instances, a theme perfectly suits a blog’s goals. For the past few days, Professional Blogging News has tangled with the right mix of design and content. As so often in life, the answer was right before us.

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