Category archive: Blogging

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Qumana: Is Dumb the New Phat?

Readers don’t care about technology ... it just has to be easy and work, according to Tris Hussey, Chief Blogging Officer for Qumana (I’m using Qumana’s blogging software to post this). He goes on to say something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and says it well:

John Jantsch has some insightful commentary on RSS today.  It’s a truism that within a group, new words, concepts, and practices emerge and these become to the keys to entry into the group.  RSS this is one of those things for many Internet users.  Does my mom care about RSS?  No, she just wants an easy way to keep up on my blog (I don’t think she reads it often ... that’s okay because she’s busy teaching Sex Ed in the public schools).  I really like these two paragraphs in this post and I think it says it all:

You don’t do this by trying to convince someone that [RSS symbol] is the de facto standard for an RSS feed. Maybe someday, but I doubt it, [RSS symbol] will mean something to everyone, but right now it says to some, “I’m a blog snob and this is the only way you can subscribe to my blog so, if you don’t know what this is then, go away."

What’s deliciously ironic is that Qumana has been roundly criticized by these very blog snobs for being a “dumbed down” product. For a good summary of what Qumana is, read Michael Arrington’s original, friendly, review.

I find Qumana to be extremely smart where it counts--which is in streamlining the small, repetitive motions involved in posting to my blogs. When I click the link button in the WYSIWYG editor bar, the field auto-fills with the last thing I cut and pasted. This may not sound like much, but when you are writing a post with a half-dozen links, cutting the number of clicks per link in half and reducing the mouse-mileage by half as well is absolutely brilliant. Qumana creates exactly this kind of gestural economy throughout. In Typepad, the category default is set to a single category; selecting multiple categories is a chore. In Qumana, you check the categories you want, with no control key to hold down, and no false distinction between single and multiple categories. SixApart should have corrected this annoying hurdle long ago. Guess they’re just not “dumb” enough.

It takes a pretty dumb bunny to think that complicated = sophisticated. There are three reasons to write your blog posts in html: it’s faster; you can do more stuff; you think it makes you one of the cool kids.  I’ve had about enough of this geek chic mentality--it fosters bad design. Good design is sleek, user-transparent, dumb as dumb can be.

"Qumana: Is Dumb the New Phat?" continued...

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Blogs are business

Factiva, a Dow Jones and Reuters company, has a blogging CEO, Clare Hart. Euan Semple points to Hart’s latest post, which should ring some bells for those in business:

Factiva prepared a Business Terms index for The Financial Times Deutschland throughout 2005. We saw the term “blog” rise from 9th out of the 45 words we were tracking in January across the German media, and move to number 1 by the end of 2005. As the article points out, the term “blogs” was the most widely mentioned business term in December above terms like Risk Management, Crisis Management, Corporate Governance, Turnaround, ERP and Wikipedia.

This was the German press.  When applying the Business Terms Index across all of Factiva’s sources, the term “blog” moved from number 4 in January to number 1 in December 2005.

Adriana Cronin-Lukas, who is on our advisory board and whose Big Blog Company is an EA-approved supplier of blog consulting services, is also a risk management expert. If you suspect that gives her an edge when it comes to teaching her clients how to eliminate or reduce the risks associated with blogging, you’d be correct.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

Stormhoek and social lubrication

Here’s a great quotation (via SMLXL) from Jason Korman of Stormhoek wine, uttered during a podcast conversation with Johnnie Moore and James Cherkoff.

We’ve had a lot of trade press recently. It tends to focus on the free samples to bloggers but they misunderstand what we’re trying to do. It’s like going into a bar and buying someone a drink. You do it not to give them a free drink, but to start a conversation. All we’ve done is use our product as a way to start conversations with people. That’s what marketing today is about: conversations with people. We’re lucky to have a product that is a social lubricant.

Conversing with potential customers via the blogosphere helped Stormhoek to double sales in less than twelve months. Stormhoek is now launching in the US by supplying wine for 100 Dinners in 100 Days - dinners, large and small, given by bloggers. 

Friday, February 10, 2006

The business case for free wifi

I would love to be at Demo. Or at least I thought I would, until I read this:

After an evening and morning at DEMO in Phoenix, my only observation is:

Great companies. Too bad there is no Internet access here so that we can write about them.

No access in the hotel rooms, no access in the main hall. Only a few lucky people who are allowed into the press room can get on the Internet. I feel like a prisoner.

There is a great story here. 700 people. New innovative companies. Buzz.

"The business case for free wifi" continued...

Thursday, February 09, 2006

What, no wiki or podcast?

Here is a bit of a test. Read this text from the homepage of stealth-startup Fleck:

Fleck is: patent pending, world changing, paradigm shifting and user experience enhancing technology. Tagging, search, blog, AJAX and social networking, every WEB2.0 hype is covered.

If this bit of rummy verbiage made you snort coffee through your nose, you passed. But if it flew under your jargon-radar, then you have a serious jargon problem, and you need to spend more time reading this blog. A lot more time.