E M E R G I C . o r g: June 22, 2003 Archives

Sunday, June 22, 2003

Corporate Blogs

NYTimes reports that corporate blogs are catching on: "For companies and executives, blogs provide a way to talk informally to customers, vendors and employees."

BlogStreet | PermaLink | Comments (0)

Two Meg Quotes

Two excellent quotes by Meg Hourihan:

The biggest thing I keep stressing, which I think is the fundamental difference: posts vs pages. It's about posts, chunks of content, not pages, which is what wikis are, and it's the content that Vignette and Interwoven output. They treat the chunks of content as pages, and they don't see the more discrete bits that are the posts. (via Scripting.com)

"The blog is becoming an online identity -- who I am, what I do,what my pix are of, who are my friends...Today, you can review a book on your blog and a review on Amazon.It would be better if you could just tell Amazon about the review on your site. More distributed...It would be cool to link recipes/reviews to Epicurious and collaboratively filter that info (people who cooked this, alsocooked this). You get to own your content but connect withothers, retain copyright but still participate in yourdiscussion." (via Boing Boing)

The first point Meg makes is the reason we launched blog post search on BlogStreet.

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This may not be the right places to tell this, but here it goes :)

It might be usefult to provide some way to convert the OPML subscription to HTML format. I hacked up a script to convert mine using Perl. You can see it here
and see my blog to see how it renders it. I put it on cron for each day.

Posted by Srijith

I do not believe in the 'future' of blogs as it is being depicted (hyped?) by media. I think it will be just like homepages for individuals who just want to give a written expression to their daily lives. The only useful, successful, and popluar blogs will be the likes of emergic, slashdot etc. For example, slashdot has been popular since I dunno when (essentially, much before the word 'blog' was even coined!). And it remains as popular as ever. Not many other 'blogs' can topple it 'cause not many other 'blogs' have the capability to do it.

You dont visit many people's homepages on the Net, U visit useful sites. For the same reason, (personal) blogs will loose steam very soon.

Posted by AJ

Google Everywhere?

EBay vs. Google is what the future may look like according to Bambi Franciso of CBS Marketwatch.

It may very well be that Google and EBay will be viewed more as competitors in the coming years as search is revealed as the center of online media and commerce.

It's really not hard to see this connection. If you're a vendor, you can advertise on a search page, or put up your wares on EBay's bazaar.

The question to ask yourself is: Which initiative delivers a customer at the cheapest rate?

Both Google and EBay attract a significant pool of potential buyers. Both rely on a significant pool of advertisers, like the ones who've typically used the classified pages. In both situations, a merchant asks: "Which outlet will get me in front of the most people?"

In short, "EBay bidding fee = Google listing fee".

Google's search appliance is making inroads into the enterprise too. Writes E-Commerce News: "Its dedicated search appliances promise a kind of simplicity not seen in enterprise computing since Netscape released its Mosaic program and shoved aside Total Quality Management in favor of browsing."

Meanwhile, there was news this week of Microsoft's MSNBot being launched to crawl sites, in anticipation of a search engine revamp to take on Google. It is easy to think that Microsoft has its USD 45 billion in the bank and will therefore eventually win. I don't think its that simple. Money may not help Microsoft to a great extent in this battle.

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