New to Me
Adding 2 blogs to the blogroll today. XPlanes' bblog (via POELog) which has some good marketing and business blogging. And Boing Boing (via Rick Bruner), which points out the interesting and annoying things in life, like why Blockbuster requires you to rewind DVD's.

NPR Clueless
Marek J writes an open letter to NPR on their assbackwards policy on requiring permission to link to their (see, I did it) web site.

Blogging Giving Voice to Women in Iran
JOHO points us to a very neat story about women blogging in Iran -- allowing them to express themselves freely for the first time in history. Check them out here -- I can't understand a word of it, but I like the idea.

Sean Carton: ...Death of the "Official Story"
Sean's latest in ClickZ talks about Macromedia's use of blogging to "promote" their new products. Sean points us to a very important study by Edros and Morgan which found only 10% of consumers trust Internet advertising.

I think blogging and other forms of C2C communications (Sean mentions instant messaging, SMS, email chat rooms .... BTW, I think what makes blogging so powerful is that its truly in the public sphere, where as apps like instant messaging are private communications...) are the future of "marketing." "Marketing" in quotes because as oppposed to B2C marketing, where a company pushes a message to a customer, C2C marketing is where businesses facilitate and encourage the communication between customers. And going back to that stat where only 10% of people trust internet advertising, I think customers are looking for some kind of communication that is lower in the bullshit and higher in real value. As marketers we need to facilitate this marketing and ensure its integrity and honesty is upheld above anything else (including -- and don't jump -- negative commentary).

From Sean's article:

Whether Macromedia knows it or not, what it's done is merely institutionalize a trend that's been building up in the consumer landscape for years, a trend that many commercial advertisers are loathe to address: that the Internet now makes it virtually impossible to create a unified "image" consumers will swallow. Sure, you can still create "brands" people can identify, but now, if that finely crafted brand image doesn't match reality, you're gonna be found out.

Interestingly, Mike Chambers, one of the Macromedia bloggers, said that it wasn't a decision by Macromedia to start the blogs but a decision by the 5 community managers who are blogging for Macromedia today.

Facing the Music: Michael Wolf
This has got to be the most realistic and honest look into where the music business is heading. Saltire chimes in with commentary on the piece too. From the New York Magazine:

Starting in the fifties, and then gaining incredible force in the sixties, rock-and-roll performers eclipsed authors as cultural stars. Rock and roll took over fiction's job as the chronicler and romanticizer of American life (that rock and roll became much bigger than fiction relates, I'd argue, more to scalability and distribution than to relative influence), and the music business replaced the book business as the engine of popular culture.

Now, though, another reversal, of similar commercial and metaphysical magnitude, is taking place. Not, of course, that the book business is becoming rock and roll, but that the music industry is becoming, in size and profit margins and stature, the book business....

Radio, heretofore ad hoc and eccentric and local, underwent a transformation in which it became formatted, rational, and centralized. Its single imperative was to keep people from moving the dial -- seamlessness became the science of radio. ...

From mono to stereo to Walkman. It just happens that the next stage of technological development in the music business has largely excluded the music business itself.

I would comment, but I think it's all been said.

Search and Ye Shall Find
Kottke searches the top 10 search engines for the top 10 search engines. Pretty neat.

Doc on Advertising and Blogs
Doc has a lengthy piece on Harry Copelands Blogonomics piece in Pressflix:

Agreeable stuff, indeed. But Henry's going somewhere with this, and it's not a place all of us will want to arrive at. .... Advertising..... So maybe there's a market there. But it's one that will exist between bloggers and advertisers. Not between bloggers and readers. ....The minute this blog turns into an intellectual property business, or the minute that I need to "monetize" it in some way, it will have a different purpose than the one that brings readers to it now.

I tend to partly agree with Doc. But I think we're looking at this blogging and business concept from the wrong angle. It's not about placing ads on blogs. It's about turning bloggers into advocates for your products and/or service and connecting networks of common communities (i.e. common groups of blogs) to larger websites of mass appeal. So several micromarkets are connected to a corresponding mass market (i.e. corporate web site).

Blogging opens up honest conversations about products, issues, companies, hobbies and habits. With that said, it is essential that "the system" helps maintain the integrity of bloggers. I think Jeff Jarvis has got it dead right (in a Gonzo marketing kind of way) when he says, "the wise marketer will recognize a community of shared interest and will underwrite that community .... 'we share an interest and affection for this community.'"

Gonzo Marketing & Blogs
Lot's to catch up on, since I've gotten back from Hilton Head (thank you very much). This is a really interesting read on applying Gonzo marketing to blogs. And so is this. These two pieces are really central to this idea I keep thinking about, incorporating blogs and business. From Jeff Jarvis:

that instead of intrustive advertising, the wise marketer will recognize the power of blogs and join that power by joining the community. Instead of buying ads on blogs (which we'd all love, but which would not work even if it happened... witness other failed Internet ad movements; we will be spared that humiliation thanks to timing) the wise marketer will recognize a community of shared interest and will underwrite that community, will help make it possible, will say by that act "we share an interest and affection for this community."

And Corante has a pretty cool diagram which, I'm sure, will be similar to what I'm thinking too.