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I spent part of last night poking my nose through various books in Barnes and Noble, including All Marketers are Liars, which will probably end up being the first Seth Godin book I actually buy (I never get tired of his blog).

One of the themes that I see recurring in Seth’s writing is this idea that a good marketer will tell stories, and a better marketer will tell authentic stories.

For any given business, this is so much easier than it ever was before. Blogging as a medium conveys a different feel than a press release or a television commercial. Viral YouTube videos have an aesthetic that no prime-time spot can ever hope to emulate.

What if the Blair Witch Project had come out as a series of YouTube videos? The medium affects the content.

Remember that when you blog, you’re not crafting a reality for your docile viewers, you’re sharing your reality with other people. And that can be a powerful story.

Newsweek recently ran a piece on companies that do online reputation management.

The idea being that pretty much any employer nowadays is going to type your name into Google before making you an offer, and you want that presentation to be as pretty, white, and clean as your actual resume. When you boil it all down, what these companies are essentially trying to sell is SEO for the individual.

If you’re not careful as a company, other sites can creep above your home page as a result in a Google search for the terms that you want to own, even if they’re searching for something that matches your exact domain. I’ve seen it happen.

For example (and no, it’s not a business), if you search for Jason Preston on Google, hoping to find Jason-Preston.com, you get a bunch of profiles and posts about some other Jason Preston, who apparently needs to have his Marc Jacobs tattoo removed. It looks like this:

My point is this: simply owning a domain doesn’t mean you’re going to own the search result.

There are several factors that affect your results, some of which you have a lot of control over, and some of which you really don’t have control over.

Here are some tricks you can use on your blog to improve your showing:

1. Make sure you write descriptive post headlines that include the keywords you’d like to see rank high in Google. If I posted more about myself, or at least shoved my name into my headlines more often, I’d have a better spread of the Google results page.
2. Use the SEO Title Tag WordPress plug-in to put extra keywords into your permalink post page headers. This means that Google has an extra set of keywords, aside from your post headline itself, to associate with a page.
3. Include outbound links in your posts. It makes Google notice your site more, and it makes other people notice your site more, which can get you inbound links, which makes Google notice your site more…
4. If you have multiple blogs at multiple domains, link between them, and use the terms you want associated with your site as a link, the way I’ve used my name to link to my site in this post.

That’s what Jeff Jarvis is asking on BuzzMachine.

I’ve written before (yes, I know the page formatting is broken) about why I think Big Media as a collective is going to stick around a while longer, and while the piece is pretty outdated by now, I still stand by my conclusion: I would love to own a newspaper right now.

It’s not what the property is inherently, it’s what you can do with it. I think that big media stands to gain so much from the internet and newer, digital media technologies. By now, many papers are embracing blogs as new tools for news and commentary…and finding them successful.

The problem that old media faces is not that the fundamental demand for news has gone down, but that the fundamental desire for personal touch has gone up.

First thing I’d do with a newspaper is experiment. Tell all my reporters to start writing in first person. I understand the sanctity of impartial news, but I think there’s a difference between bad reporting and personal reporting. Lord knows I see right through the phrase “When one reporter tried to…”

Let’s shake it up, newspapers. Let’s make it more personal.

What would you do?

By now it’s almost common knowledge that an unbelievably large portion of your traffic is coming from Google, followed by the rest of the search engines combined, and then finally, you have a few referrals from other sites.

One of those other search engines is actually often overlooked, because it’s search database is filled, tagged, and categorized voluntarily by everyone as they surf the web: del.icio.us.

Fred Wilson posted recently about how you can get a surprisingly large amount of traffic from del.icio.us search if your posts are being tagged on their system. Here’s the traffic chart he posted:

So make a habit of tagging your posts in del.icio.us with relevant tags, and you could see your traffic take a jump.

Yes I did just fit that all into a post headline. I don’t think it’s news to anyone at this point that Microsoft has proposed a buyout of Yahoo! for $44.6 billion.

I do happen to think that Robert Scoble has called exactly what Google is doing in it’s work to oppose the bid:

Google stands to gain HUGE by slowing down this deal. Every month longer that this deal takes is tens of millions in Google’s pockets. Why? Well, the real race today isn’t for search. Isn’t for email. Isn’t for IM. It’s for ownership of your mobile phone. I met the guy who runs China’s telecom last week in Davos. He’s seeing six million new people get a cell phone in China every month. So, every month that Microsoft and Yahoo will be stuck in some courtroom arguing out why this is a good deal means money in the bank for Google as they close mobile phone deal after mobile phone deal.

Scoble’s absolutely right, the place you want to be right now is in mobile phones. Between the iPhone and Google’s phone operating system, Windows Mobile is going to start facing some tough competition.

I also think that Fred Wilson is right about what Yahoo! should do: break into little pieces.

There’s another reason why I don’t think a purchase of Yahoo! makes much sense for Microsoft. I suspect that many of Yahoo!’s best services will languish under Microsoft’s ownership and that users will leave. It’s happening already under Yahoo!’s ownership to services like Flickr and Delicious and MyBlogLog. It will be worse under Microsoft’s ownership.

There’s a definite lack of innovation in the innovative services that Yahoo! gobbled up recently that Fred lists there. It’s disappointing, and I think it’s in some ways an inevitable side effect of being part of a larger company that needs more “organization.”

Things get done faster when there are fewer barriers, period.

ProBlogger Darren Rowse says he’s got a contest going for people to win a copy of Web Design for ROI, a book that he’s been enjoying in the past few weeks.

The book is called Web Design for ROI, and I have not read it, but I know that there’s plenty of research out there showing that web (and blog) design can have very significant impact on your ROI. I would be surprised if this book turned out to be a waste of time.

The funny sound bite that turns up most often on this subject is “the uglier your site, the more money you make.” Often this can be true, and while it’s a bit baffling at time, I chalk up a lot of the revenue to mis-clicked PPC ads. If you’re not paying for your site with AdSense, you might want to look a little bit further.

When I’m sitting down to sketch out a new blog or web site layout, I always ask myself two questions before I start, and the answers guide the layout and structure of the page. I suggest you do the same with your web site, and it might just improve your ROI:

1. Where is the user most likely to arrive at my domain?
2. What is the most important thing for them to see on my site?

In a lot of cases the answers will be, respectively: individual blog pages, and google ads. That’s what gives rise to “ugly” sites (permalink pages plastered with ads). But in your case the answers might be “Users land on FAQ answer pages and I want them to see our accessories store.”

That right there informs your web design. Check your pages - do they make a sensible path for the user?

The contest at ProBlogger is pretty easy to enter - just go leave a comment on that post letting him know what your favorite blog design is and why. Give it a shot.

One of the truly brilliant aspects of blogging is the ability to put humans into a place where previously no humans existed. I bet that if you ask practically any average traveler today whether or not there are actual humans working at the TSA, most of them will say “probably not.”

In several months, that number will be lower. Jake McKee, an outstanding community guy and a speaker at our last Web Community Forum conference, posted about the TSA blog’s launch today.

He has some good advice for the budding bloggers over at the TSA:

Introduce the team and the objective

A blog is a conversation and the first step in a conversation is an introduction. Before you jump into the content, introduce the concept of the blog, introduce the team members we’ll be hearing from. What do they do? Where do they work? What’s their background? Why is the blog titled “Evolution of Security”?

This is a really good point. I think that a lot of what the TSA is trying to do with this blog is get some sort of a human connection between travelers and what has traditionally been a faceless government entity with terrible marketing.

In order to accomplish that, they’re going to need to make sure we know who’s blogging. Some of that should certainly be some introductory posts.

I disagree with Jake about jumping into the content - I generally don’t think there’s any reason to hold out on good content if you’ve got it ready to go, but there’s no reason you can’t sprinkle the blog with some self-reflection.

A blog isn’t going to fix everything of course - people are still going to have bad experiences at the airport, and not every TSA employee is going to be nice to every passenger, but if the blog helps travelers walk into the security line with a more tolerant attitude, it could make things go more smoothly for everyone.

In any case, it’s good that the TSA is blogging. I’m sure they’ll learn quickly.

The news is out today that Google has launched a Social Graph API - basically an open tool for charting social connections on the open web. They say it best themselves:

We currently index the public Web for XHTML Friends Network (XFN), Friend of a Friend (FOAF) markup and other publicly declared connections. By supporting open Web standards for describing connections between people, web sites can add to the social infrastructure of the web.

What this means, in short, is that XFN matters now. Google launched with some example tools that let you map out what link relationships they’ve found with your blog and other web sites. Your report looks something like this:

I’m assuming this list will grow as you all start adding relationship metadata to your blogrolls. I’m going to go start filling in ours.

This type of link data has existed for a while, and if you’re using WordPress, you may have already put it in. The big holdup has really been that until now there hasn’t been much use for that metadata—if you bothered to fill in all the information about how you’re connected to the people you link to, nobody cared. So why bother?

Well now Google is trying to pull the kind of relationship superdata that people are generating in Social Networks like Facebook (which, incidentally, Google can’t crawl like it can crawl the open web) out into blogs and web sites.

In all honesty, I can’t say I’m too upset about the idea. I’ve always thought that there’s so much more to linking than just links, and this is a cool way to start quantifying that information.

In WordPress, if you want to start adding the XFN metadata, just go to your blogroll tab, then edit any one of the links, and expand the “Link Relationship” tab. Looks like this:

Seth Godin wrote a post the other day called Needle in a Haystack Marketing. It’s a good post: the idea is that if you solve specific problems for small groups of people, and you do it often enough, you’ll have a repository of really useful information.

I remember reading The Long Tail when it came out and trying, the entire time, to figure out how exactly blogging fit into the equation. I refused to think that there was no long tail here.

There is one. The long tail of blogging happens with your archives. If you answer one question thoroughly and well, it will turn up in Google when people search for it. You’re getting the ten or fifteen people per day who need the answer on your site. And that’s true for every post like this that you do.

You do it enough, and you’re going to get a steady stream of exposure from search. Forever. Pretty good return for a one-time investment.

For a while now I’ve been used to clicking the little “more” tab at the top of my google homepage to select blogsearch. It has been at the top of the list - first thing you go for.

Looks like people aren’t searching blogs as much as they used to. Now the top hit is Video:

In fact, now the list goes:

• Video
• Groups
• Books
• Scholar
• Finance
• Blogs

Eh? I refuse to believe that people use Google Scholar (what is that anyway?) more than they use Blogsearch. Although to be fair - it’s probably easier to click a link right next to the bottom divider than something in the middle.

Still, Google’s making a conscious choice to throw blogging farther down the list. I never understood why it was hidden in the “more” menu in the first place. Over the past year I think Google has been consistently the best blog search tool for me.

I wonder what people are using. Or if they’re not, why aren’t they searching blogs?

The additions blog has a post up from yesterday comparing the user-interfaces of Twitter and MySpace when you land on their home pages. It’s hard to come at this comparison without some sort of bias, and I’ll admit, I think Myspace is a visual quagmire, especially in comparison to Twitter. The insomniac comes to the opposite conclusion.

Basically, the idea is that users come to your site with a set of conventions in mind. Ironically, I wrote a post a while ago on Web Community Forum arguing that MySpace’s “conventions” were essentially non-existent, and that’s why it’s such a pain in the tookus to use.

Regardless of who’s right about which site is easier to use (I am), the point remains: when you design your blog or web service, keep in mind what your primary functionality is, and make those actions as simple as possible for the user. I could invoke the famous Amazon “one-click” story to prove this point. Amazon helps you buy things. One click.

If you’re not careful about how you set up your interface, you’ll risk turning off potential users (or readers, or clients, or customers) the way The Insomniac is turned off by Twitter.

Also, unless you actually log out of Twitter, your home page looks like this:

Notice the people search circled in Red? The whole process outlined in the additions blog post becomes three steps: search, click, click follow.

It’s appropriate for Twitter to require you to log in because the value in twitter is really in being logged in, and being part of the conversation stream. But that’s just my two cents.

In the Wall Street Journal article New Services Help Bloggers Bring in Ad Revenue, reporter Kelly K. Spors says “If you’re not making money off your blog, 2008 might be the year.”

Spors profiles several bloggers and the services available to generate revenue. Here are some revenue specifics to inspire you:

Rhett Butler, founder of Mongabay.com, a site with articles on rainforest conservation and other environmental issues, makes $15,000 to $18,000 a month from AdSense, using various types of ads. Mr. Butler says his blog currently gets about 1.3 million unique visitors per month.

He’s planning to eventually experiment with Google’s video player ads and create his own video content for the site. “The rainforest has always been my passion, but I never expected to make a living off of it,” says Mr. Butler, who quit his job as a product manager in 2003 when he realized he could make a living off his site.

Darren Rowse, the Melbourne, Australia-based writer of ProBlogger.net, a popular blog that teaches other bloggers how to make money, earned roughly $250,000 in 2007 off ads on three blogs he writes. Mr. Rowse says he makes the most off traditional display advertising, where advertisers pay a fee to appear, but he also has used affiliate ads and Google AdSense.

The great thing about Problogger.net is that the site is all about how to achieve the kind of success Darren has. Lots of great tips and techniques straight from the horse’s mouth.

One of our favorite online communities is the group of gadget heads that gather at CES every year to blog and geek out. We love them so much that we throw them a party every year. Here’s some video footage of this year’s event:

Full coverage of the event can be found here. Special thanks to our sponsors:

We’re very excited to announce that our friends at Virgin America airlines will be handing out 80 free round trip tickets anywhere they fly. For you online community geeks, this might be interesting because of Virgin America’s nifty seat-to-seat communications tool.

So if you’re at CES and you’ll be around tomorrow night, drop my colleague Jason a line at jason [at] blogbusinesssummit [dot] com, include the URL of your blog and let him know that you’d like to join us.

Since early October, we’ve aimed our sentiment tracking system at the many bloggers who have been comparing the Apple iPhone to the LG Verizon Voyager. While our Sentimine system can accurately sense the tone applied to almost any product or service, we focused our first public portal on consumer electronics as it provides a nice linkage to our upcoming CES blogger party.

As of this writing, the sentiment meter shows the two products in a dead heat. That was not the case at first. Below is a chart depicting how the sentiment tracked over time.

The blogosphere was largely pro Voyager until mid November, when the trend moved in the direction of the iPhone. It appears that the anticipation of the product led to positive speculation while the actual shipping of the phone (on Nov 21) led to side-by-side, hands-on comparisons. This led to some negativity.

This chart depicts the cataloging of 260 original relevant blog posts. Duplicate and splog-generated posts are filtered out from the final sentiment rating.

Many of the bloggers whose posts are cataloged will be attending our second “It Won’t Stay in Vegas” blogger party next week at CES. If you’re a blogger who covers the gadget space, we’d love to see you there. Just email Jason AT parnassusgroup DOT com for an invite. Vendors, exhibitors, and PR people should contact Kim AT parnassusgroup DOT com for sponsorship information.

Launching a new product or service? We can build a private, real-time blog/press sentiment portal for you too. Contact Kim AT parnassusgroup DOT com.

If you’ve been thinking about getting your business into hassle-free podcasting, NowLive might not be a bad option (and it’s free!).

Tomorrow at 10am, Jack Olmsted will be interviewing Steve, Teresa, and I about our 2008 CES blogger party on his show, which will be streaming live on NowLive, and edited later for a more traditional podcast format (did I just use the word “traditional” to describe a podcast? amazing).

We’ll be able to tell you more about the service after the show, but apparently NowLive lets you host what amounts to a conference call that is both recorded and streamed live over the internet. If you want, you can even embed a widget on your blog that lets listeners catch your broadcast on the fly.

If you ask me, that’s not a bad way to get into podcasting. Everyone knows how to use a phone, and it takes a lot of the headache out of the recording process.

Chris is a capitalist at heart, so I’m not sure what to think of some of the posts appearing on his site today. See screen grab.

Clearly, this is not copy written by Chris. It does remind me that I need to make a run to Nordstrom’s though…

We’ve faced some content weirdness ourselves lately thanks to “outside” activities, so Chris gets my sympathy if he’s being mucked with by hackers.

Have you had a similar experience? How did you solve it?

Jason showed Disqus to me a few weeks back, and I seriously considered using it — until I figured out that you don’t own your comments anymore. One of the main points of cultivating comments is to have valuable content added to your site, and with Disqus, it’s added to their site.

Scoble has a demo of the system (and fawns a bit over it) at Scobelizer.

Here’s my question, where does Google see the comment appear first? If it’s on the Disqus site, that means your blog is now being populated with “duplicate” content (or no content at all.) Scary.

Jason just tested this, see the screen shot below. This is a search for a comment made on “his” blog. Google sure doesn’t see it as a being linked to his content. This makes Disqus a total non-starter IMHO.

I can understand why the Typepad crowd might like this, as they aren’t used to totally owning their content, and are generally feature-constrained. I’m surprised Fred Wilson doesn’t care about the platform and SEO ramifications though.

We’ve had the opportunity to work with clients who are rolling their own blog engine. There are any number of reasons to build your own from scratch (although most of the time it’s the wrong solution, and this post might help explain why that’s the case more often than not).

A lot of people who build their own engines aren’t always up on the “features” that tend to come standard these days in engines like Movable Type, Wordpress, or Blogtronix. We’ve found that some aspects of blogging are more often skipped over than others.

Everyone understands that a blog needs to have posts in reverse-chronological order, and that somewhere there should be an orange feed button and the letters R, S, and S, but some of the finer functionality that bloggers will expect don’t always make it to the table on the first pass.

Here are a couple of the features that tend to get overlooked:

• Commenting systems need to be prepped to deal with spam
• Links in comments should automatically become “nofollow” links
• The blog engine should recognize and use trackbacks
• The system should support the ability to import feeds
• Bookmarklets should be available for easy interfacing with sites like Digg and del.icio.us
• Bloggers should be able to embed code in their posts, for things like YouTube videos

In a little more detail, here’s what’s usually missing:

Communications Interfaces

Include a complete commenting system - No, people don’t forget that you should be able to leave comments, but what they often do forget to factor in is the infrastructure: spam controls, moderation options, user dashboard interface. Wherever you have comments, you will have spam. It is inevitable.

More often than not, simply not allowing comments is not a viable solution. While most of blogging is posting, many bloggers will claim (and I think rightly so) that it’s not really a blog without reader feedback. So you need to be aware of your spam control options, and choose one or several methods for dealing with it. Common tools are CAPTCHAs, email confirmation of comments (Weblogs Inc uses this), or requiring commenters to be registered users at the site.

But regardless of what method you choose you will have spam. So you need to have a method for dealing with the spam that does get through (moderation). This means having a back-end where the blogger can view comments before they are published on the site.

It’s also pretty standard to give the blogger a range of options for how they want to deal with comments in the first place - the basic three options: comments off, comments moderated (all have to be approved), and comments unmoderated.

These are by no means the only tools available, but if you provide your bloggers these three options, and a reasonably intuitive interface for vetting the bad comments, they will be properly equipped to tend their comment sections.

Links in comments should become “nofollow” links

Directly related to spam, this is a small but significant feature. When people leave comments on a blog, most of the time they are tagged with the “nofollow” property, meaning that when Google crawls the page, it doesn’t treat it as a “real” link.

In layman’s terms, it means people can’t help their google rank by leaving links to their site in your comments.

If commenters and spammer figure out that you’re not turning off the google juice in your comments, beware! You will become buried in spammers and shameless SEO promoters trying to boost their Google placement.

The system should be able to interface with trackbacks

Trackbacks enjoy a kind of negative space in the blogosphere. Some bloggers really like them (I do), and some bloggers really don’t. Do you see where this is going? You need to provide the capability, but you should be able to turn them off.

What is a Trackback? A trackback is like a remote comment. If I read something on your blog, and I want to continue the discussion on my own blog, how do I let readers follow that conversation? I leave a trackback, which inserts a snipped of my post, like a comment, in the comments area below your post.

Your blog engine should be set up to ping other blog engines with a trackback (go to another site and say “hey! I’ve got a post that references this one”) and to receive tracbacks (”Thanks for the ping, I’ll add a link to this post in the comments”).

Users should be able to import feeds

At this point, a lot of people already have blogs. Some people have strong personal blogs that are separate from the blogging they’d like to do for work.

Some people may want to pull posts from their personal blog into their new blog on your system. If you’re looking to adopt a crowd that is already blogging, allowing for good integration with existing systems is important.

You should:

• Be able to re-post items from an existing RSS feed in the new blog, with a link back to the original post (the link back is important!)
• Be able to import posts & comments from a Wordpress export file
• Be able to import posts & comments from a Movable Type or TypePad export file

Also, if you’re allowing people to suck in and re-produce RSS feeds, you might want to find some way to check that they own the blog they’re sucking a feed from. You don’t want your blogging service to become a convenient spam blog host. You might limit the number of feeds people can pull in, and you might require that they validate the feed by posting a certain phrase that is randomly generated.

Provide bookmarklet buttons

Bookmarklet is a fancy word for convenient little buttons that let you tag pages in popular social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Netscape, or Newsvine. You’ll find them at the bottom of the posts on our blogs, and they’ve become popular in many places. It’s a good idea to include tools like these on your permalink (individual) post pages.

These are good tools for exposure, and many bloggers like to have them available. Having a post bookmarked on Digg is somewhat like having some space on a local billboard. These bookmarking sites can be big traffic drivers, and the easier it is for people to “share” good posts, the more often they will do so. Everybody wins.

Posting features

Support the ability to embed code

WYSIWIG posting areas are common and usually appreciated, but you should have a place for users to post snippets of raw HTML (or just have an option to edit the post in plain HTML) so that they can post things like YouTube videos.

If you’re planning to host videos yourself (allow users to upload videos and serve them in a video player), it would be wise to provide them with a snipped of code that can be inserted into any other blog to share the video. This is a fairly standard feature in video upload services and one that is crucial to allowing a video to spread virally.

So the breaking news is that Trent Lott may have retired in order to preempt a scandal involving a gay escort. If true, it will be another case of bloggers leading the traditional press around by the nose. The story broke at Big Head DC (a blog) while Hustler Magazine and Fox News could only hint that “a bombshell” was coming in “a week or two.”

We have a saying around the office — if you want to know what will be on the TV news day after tomorrow, check your rss newsreader today.

If the story proves to be false, it will tar bloggers yet once again as not doing their “fact checking.” My hope is on the former scenario. The latter is a tired old excuse that is largely without merit IMHO.