Damien Mulley

Who ranks businesses in Ireland and makes lists like the Fortune 500? Is it the Sunday Times or the Business Post that has a list somewhat like this?

James brings up the question about whether there are Irish blogging consultants and it got me thinking like many of the posts that James makes .

My take on blogs and business is that they are going to become inevitable and with them come marketing scum and every two-bit cowboy consultant who will declare themselves experts at blogs.

Aside Alert: [This reminds me of the time I was working with a friend to build a website for a client. They hired in a marketing company who excelled at websites. They told the client that he needed a database backed website for his hotel because the pages would load faster and they also told him that if he wanted a .ie domain he had to buy the domain name and also buy every url from it from the domain registry. They also told him every page had to be submitted to the search engines and not just the main site url. That company got close to six grand for that consultancy work. I think they went bust eventualy. Hopefully anyway.]

Anyway, I would hate for business blogging consultants to be like them, but like splogs I think we can guarantee that we will have scum muscle in on this area and screw over innocent companies. Right now this isn’t happening but I know blogs will become more of a buzzword in 2006. So let’s try and prevent this.

Why not create a vendor neutral site about business blogging in Ireland? Have all of us in the blogging world in Ireland work on an FAQ via a Wiki and produce something that helps a business understand blogs and how they can be useful. We can also work on a code of practice that people can sign up to. A quality mark one could say. It will also help us share tips with each other so that we ourselves can improve our skills from the technical, to how to sell it to business people e.g. finding the simplest way to have a non-technical manager see why it is a good thing.

I don’t think there is any giving away of secrets by working as a community and creating this online resource (and keeping it up to date). There’ll be enough work to go around I should think and it is good PR for anyone that is seen to be genuinely helping out people. “Don’t want to pay me to help you? No problem, have a look at this site for advice on how to do it yourself.”

The money is going to be made by those consultants employed by companies too lazy/busy/non-technical enough to do it themselves, which I bet will be the majority. Hell, I was too busy/lazy to update my blogging software and Michele was kind enough to do all the donkey work but at the same time I would have happily payed him or anyone else a few quid (not a fortune) to do it for me.

So, who wants to sign up for this? 🙂

EDIT: To clarify, marketers are not scum, just a few, like in every other profession. Unfortunately I trust marketers less.

I regularly visit Bubble Brothers in the English Market(why does it not have its own website?) in Cork. The main reason I go there is that I’m clueless about wine but I know what I like and ask for variations on my taste or ask to try something different. The staff in there are passionate about wine and love talking about it. Seriously, the enthusiasm is addictive and you come away from the place energized. (And often with a few more bottles than you thought you’d purchase.)

If I were to go to an offy or Dunne’s or Tesco’s I wouldn’t hear the story of the wine, I wouldn’t get recommendations. I wouldn’t get the enthusiasm. I think it was Hugh Macleod who talked about Stormhoek and it having a story. I like this idea and I’m happy to pay extra for this kind of service. I just wish that there was a blog on the Bubble Brothers website where the rest of the world could feed off this enthusiasm. Yeah, they do give reviews to an extent in the product descriptions but I think they could do so much more than that and gain a lot more custom as a result too.

Google will be releasing a feed reader API. Nicely investigated by Niall Kennedy. Scoble seems a little pissed off and a little impatient as a result. But honest to a fault at the same time.

Jeff Jarvis has an enthusiastic rant about Amazon’s author blogs initiative. Jarvis and ranting? Yes, the the name of the day ends in a “y”. 🙂 Still, a very valid rant as usual with Jeff. It’s good they’ve got blogs, shit they don’t allow comments and links to external blogs. But that may change in time. If I were Amazon I’d approach people like Bookslut and ask their permission to link to them from some main book section on Amazon and offer to host them if there is a dramatic traffic increase. They should be doing the same with other maven type sites too. For Ireland they should be linking to the likes of Sigla or Bibliofemme. I still stand by my statement about bookshop.ie

I’ve read Fred Wilson’s blog before and enjoy it for his VC musings and his excellent taste in music. I’ve just added him to my bloglines. In a recent post he quoted Alan Kay who said “The best way to predict the future is to invent it. “ Very true. Hopefully Newsroom.ie can meet some of these future predictors.

Edit: Clarified Jeff’s enthusiasm about Amazon!