Firstly someone convinced the U.S. Army to spend 450k on researching blogs as part of the War on terrorism.
Quote of note:
Blog entries have a different structure,” Ulicny said. “They are typically short and are about something external to the blog posting itself, such as a news event. It’s not uncommon for a blogger to simply state, ‘I can’t believe this happened,’ and then link to a news story.”
Look at how many Tailranks, Diggs, TechMemes and other sites you could create with that.
Businessweek also notes a company is paying bloggers to blog about products for their clients and disclosure is optional. They will only pay you after aliking your blog post. Charming.
I’ve recounted this story a few times on mailing lists but now I’ll share it here. I had to deal with this marketing/ebusiness/web dev firm before. Along with another guy we were asked to redesign a website for a hotel in Cork. They also wanted it marketed to they hired a marketing firm with tech experience. We all had a meeting together where said marketing company told the manager of the hotel that in order to be found on the web you had to go to a domain registry and register not only the domain name but also every page on it. He also advised the manager that having a database for all the static content would be better as it would speed up load times compared to just normal html pages. For this advice this company charged the hotel three grand. More than we were charging to redo the website.
I’m sure it’ll only be another small while before these snakeoil salespeople start doing the same for blogs. “Has to be on blogspot, not on your own domain.” “Write it in coloured text. use capitals.” etc. etc.
