Blog Posts About: Weblogs and Business

On the heels of the entry about the Scobleizer, a friend sends me the story of how this Weblog post "Even Microsoft Wants G5s", caused a guy to lose his job at Microsoft. I wonder if it's the particularly sticky subject of his pointing out, and posting a picture of, Microsoft getting 3 palettes of Mac G5s in its receiving area?

It's sad that he lost his job and I'm a fan of free speech, but I think this was a case of poor judgment in the case of the weblogger.

MarketingProfs.com - Blogging for Business

Another article heralding all the opportunities for using Weblogs in Business. It includes pluses, potentials and concerns.

I like the idea of salespeople using blogs to connect with and educate potential ad current customers.

One of the most common concerns I've heard is fear of losing control of the corporate message. I like the way the article addressed the issue:

Remember… your salespeople are out there with your customers every day�??in their offices and plants and at conferences and in hotels. You have even less control over what they say in those situations than you do in a blog, so think trust.

If it were only so easy.

Like many folks out there, I'm suffering from these comment spammer leaches.

For those of you unaware, there are desperate people out there leaving (or using technology to leave) worthless comments in weblogs to promote their products. They comment on an entry and place a link on the comment to their site- which gives their site higher results in Google.

One (flawed and inefficient) way of dealing with these folks is to ban their IP address. I've only started to ban IPs recently, but I thought it would be a good idea to illustrate how to ban an IP and then post my banned IPs for others to use. If you have a list of banned IPs, post them on your site and trackback to this entry.

Here are the IPs I've banned so far:

209.210.176.21
219.95.14.69
203.167.109.92
209.210.176.22
209.210.176.21
66.144.41.233
66.144.41.232

Here's how to ban an IP using Movable Type:

First, you need to find the IP of the commenter. Go the Editing Menu of your Movable Type blog and notice the "5 most recent comments" on the lower right. By clicking on each comment, you'll see their IP address. Copy it.

Then, click "Weblog Config" on the left navigation bar in Movable Type.
At the top of the page, you should see a link to "IP Banning" on the right side- click it.

Paste the IP address into the field and click "Add" for each one you want to ban.

See Also:

Six Apart's Recent Post about comment spam

Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist A downloadable tool that scans comments and trackbacks for spam and bans them- very promising.

Dan Gillmor's eJournal pointed me to an article about Robert Scoble, a Microsoft employee that has a Weblog called The Scobleizer Weblog.

It's about the use of Weblogs in business settings like Microsoft, where Robert Scoble works and how it can be more powerful than PR and Marketing. I liked this quote:

His daily ramblings, unedited by corporate brass or media handlers, give the world a window into Microsoft, building buzz for its products such as Office 2003 and creating a human face for a company that needs all the humanizing it can get.

"I've gotten email from people telling me they have changed their attitude about Microsoft because of my blog," says Scoble. "It helps me share the company's beliefs." It also helps Microsoft hear what the market is saying, both good and bad. "I link to everyone who hates Microsoft, and I send the negative stuff to the executives," he says.

...

Almost anything is fair game. "That is the first Apple marketing in a long time that makes me want to buy an Apple product," he wrote recently about an ad for the iPod music player.

I think the "humanizing" of companies (communicating like a person instead of press release) will be an increasing more valid and valuable strategy in the years to come and weblogs will be one tool that will make it happen.

EdTechPost: B.C. Educational Technology Users Group 'Blogtalk' Archives

Scott Leslie has been working with 4 other educators in B.C. to evaluate the possibilities of using weblogs as educational tools through the Educational Technologies Users Group.

This group has about 400 members and had been using an email list. They started a group blog using TypePad as an experiment in how a blog could be used for the group's interaction.

...the facilitators were the only ones with 'author' access to the blog and the rest of the discussion participants could only use the comments facility. Because of this, it seemed like right off the bat the focus became the fact that blogs were lacking as a mechanism to facilitate discussions like this or as replacements to mailing lists or threaded discussions.

Like Scott found, I don't think a weblog should be seen as a replacement for a mailing list. Apples and Oranges, Push vs. Pull- just two different things with different purposes.

Instead, something that could be interesting is using a weblog as an add-on to the mailing list. The blog would highlight pertinent threads, members and events. It would preserve the accessability and push of the mailing list and aggregate the highlights of the group's mailing list interactions on the blog.

I'd agree with Scott's predictions here:

And as further steps unfold, I think we will see some of the lessons and models from blogs be adopted into other technologies (e.g. it is no big step for existing CMS to adopt 'personal journals' or 'eportfolios,' we're already seeing steps in that direction, and this is less a technology issue and more an acknowledgement that a 'content-centric' view of education with the students as empty vessels is wrong and will not suffice.

EdTechPost: B.C. Educational Technology Users Group 'Blogtalk' Archives

Via: Online Facilitation

Guardian Unlimited | Online | Why blogs could be bad for business

While blogging's earliest advocates operate on the "information wants to be free" principle, many businesses would shudder at the very thought.

I think there are some good thoughts here. He doesn't poo-poo everything weblog in business- just asserts some of the well-known risks and obstacles.