Getting Granular: The DigitalGrit Blog

Still not getting the whole RSS thing? Allow Seth Godin to explain.

In two "really simple" and easy-to-understand posts on his blog, Seth Godin explains the what, how and why of Really Simple Syndication.

• Seth explains RSS
• Seth clarifies

I'm still not sure I subscribe the opinion that email is "so 1990's" - most of us business folk would be lost without it. But RSS is definitely a technology to continue watching. If you haven't started picking up feeds yet, time to get on board. Seth's posts offer two very easy ways to get in on the action before we start making fun and calling you a "late adopter!"

Still not getting the whole RSS thing? Allow Seth Godin to explain.

In two "really simple" and easy-to-understand posts on his blog, Seth Godin explains the what, how and why of Really Simple Syndication.

• Seth explains RSS
• Seth clarifies

I'm still not sure I subscribe the opinion that email is "so 1990's" - most of us business folk would be lost without it. But RSS is definitely a technology to continue watching. If you haven't started picking up feeds yet, time to get on board. Seth's posts offer two very easy ways to get in on the action before we start making fun and calling you a "late adopter!"

Splog Reporter - Superhero of the Blogosphere?

Heard it from the RSS Blog:

Spam blogs (or Splogs) are a growing problem in the blogosphere -- and well-intentioned bloggers, AdSense participants, SEO experts and Web marketers are paying the price.

Enter the "Splog Reporter" - a new reporting system for spam and fake blogs. The main page is a form by which the good guys can report the bad guys. From their launch press release:

The call to clean up the blogosphere was answered today. Splog Reporter is a new Web site that encourages good-willed bloggers to take the front line in the flight against spam blogs, or splogs.

Splog Reporter allows users to submit splogs they encounter to its database. The data is complied, confirmed and made available for purchase to search engines that wish to optimize search results for their users. Ultimately, the users who submit splog to Splog Reporter benefit from the accumulation of this data through search engine improvements.

“The idea behind Splog Reporter is simple, but there is a great need for a monitoring process in the blogosphere,” said Frank Gruber, creator of Splog Reporter. “Splog Reporter functions like the a blog-community’s trash can, where good-willed bloggers can come together to combat the existence of splog. The response has been encouraging.”

Within its first 24 hours of existence, Splog Reporter received an estimated 1000 hits.

According to the RSS Blog, Doc Searles believes the site is an Ice Rocket project. Could also be Technorati, if you look at Sifry's recent call to clean up the blogosphere. But hey, Doc Searles is a lot smarter than I am.

So, The Splog Reporter. While it's interesting that they're creating a database of splogs that they'll sell to the likes of Google and Yahoo, who's to say they'll buy it? And who's policing it? Couldn't I very easily put one of our competitor's blogs into that database? (If I wasn't so petrified of the bad marketing karma, I just might!) Do they do enough fact-checking to know that I've done that? And - hey! - couldn't our competitors do that to us??

Remains to be seen. The site's about two weeks old, so...proof is in the pudding and we've barely boiled the milk at this point. (Is that a good metaphor?)

Splog Reporter - Superhero of the Blogosphere?

Heard it from the RSS Blog:

Spam blogs (or Splogs) are a growing problem in the blogosphere -- and well-intentioned bloggers, AdSense participants, SEO experts and Web marketers are paying the price.

Enter the "Splog Reporter" - a new reporting system for spam and fake blogs. The main page is a form by which the good guys can report the bad guys. From their launch press release:

The call to clean up the blogosphere was answered today. Splog Reporter is a new Web site that encourages good-willed bloggers to take the front line in the flight against spam blogs, or splogs.

Splog Reporter allows users to submit splogs they encounter to its database. The data is complied, confirmed and made available for purchase to search engines that wish to optimize search results for their users. Ultimately, the users who submit splog to Splog Reporter benefit from the accumulation of this data through search engine improvements.

“The idea behind Splog Reporter is simple, but there is a great need for a monitoring process in the blogosphere,” said Frank Gruber, creator of Splog Reporter. “Splog Reporter functions like the a blog-community’s trash can, where good-willed bloggers can come together to combat the existence of splog. The response has been encouraging.”

Within its first 24 hours of existence, Splog Reporter received an estimated 1000 hits.

According to the RSS Blog, Doc Searles believes the site is an Ice Rocket project. Could also be Technorati, if you look at Sifry's recent call to clean up the blogosphere. But hey, Doc Searles is a lot smarter than I am.

So, The Splog Reporter. While it's interesting that they're creating a database of splogs that they'll sell to the likes of Google and Yahoo, who's to say they'll buy it? And who's policing it? Couldn't I very easily put one of our competitor's blogs into that database? (If I wasn't so petrified of the bad marketing karma, I just might!) Do they do enough fact-checking to know that I've done that? And - hey! - couldn't our competitors do that to us??

Remains to be seen. The site's about two weeks old, so...proof is in the pudding and we've barely boiled the milk at this point. (Is that a good metaphor?)

Official QuickBooks Blogger Joining Us at DMA B-to-B

Silly me. I neglected to mention in yesterday's post that Scott will be joined by Scott Wilder of the Official QuickBooks Blog at the DMA's B-to-B Marketing Conference next month. (Wilder is better known as the "QuickBooks Guy.")

It should be a great session, so if you're going to be in Tucson for the show, definitely check it out. (And I'm sure I'll be posting info here after the fact, so check back for handouts, etc.)

To learn more about QuickBooks blogging strategy - which is pretty cool - read these in-depth posts  on Diva Marketing and  BlogWrite for CEOs.

Official QuickBooks Blogger Joining Us at DMA B-to-B

Silly me. I neglected to mention in yesterday's post that Scott will be joined by Scott Wilder of the Official QuickBooks Blog at the DMA's B-to-B Marketing Conference next month. (Wilder is better known as the "QuickBooks Guy.")

It should be a great session, so if you're going to be in Tucson for the show, definitely check it out. (And I'm sure I'll be posting info here after the fact, so check back for handouts, etc.)

To learn more about QuickBooks blogging strategy - which is pretty cool - read these in-depth posts  on Diva Marketing and  BlogWrite for CEOs.

DigitalGrit at DMA and ad:tech

I know you've all been waiting with baited breath to meet the DigitalGrit team in person (in people?). Here's your chance. Here are the details of our upcoming tradeshows and speaking gigs. Get your calendars and call your travel agents...

• The DMA's B-to-B Marketing Conference, 9/13 - 9/15, Tucscon

We're exhibiting and speaking at this one. Scott Delea will be leading a session on 9/14 at 1:30 called, "Advanced Tactics in SEO: Leveraging Your Business Blog for Better Lead Generation." You can learn more about it here -- and see a really, really bad picture of Scott while you're at it.

• DMA'05, 10/15 - 10/19, Atlanta

Just speaking at this one. Scott will be speaking on a panel along with the other members of the Search Engine Marketing Council. The session is a "pre-conference intensive" scheduled for Sunday afternoon. Here's the whole deal.

• ad:tech New York

Well, duh. Of course we'll be there. We'll be at booth #414. Expect to see about 80% of our staff milling around the exhibit hall floor. This is our favorite hometown show, after all.

DigitalGrit at DMA and ad:tech

I know you've all been waiting with baited breath to meet the DigitalGrit team in person (in people?). Here's your chance. Here are the details of our upcoming tradeshows and speaking gigs. Get your calendars and call your travel agents...

• The DMA's B-to-B Marketing Conference, 9/13 - 9/15, Tucscon

We're exhibiting and speaking at this one. Scott Delea will be leading a session on 9/14 at 1:30 called, "Advanced Tactics in SEO: Leveraging Your Business Blog for Better Lead Generation." You can learn more about it here -- and see a really, really bad picture of Scott while you're at it.

• DMA'05, 10/15 - 10/19, Atlanta

Just speaking at this one. Scott will be speaking on a panel along with the other members of the Search Engine Marketing Council. The session is a "pre-conference intensive" scheduled for Sunday afternoon. Here's the whole deal.

• ad:tech New York

Well, duh. Of course we'll be there. We'll be at booth #414. Expect to see about 80% of our staff milling around the exhibit hall floor. This is our favorite hometown show, after all.

Feedster 500 as a Media Planning Tool

Evidently, the marketing community is embracing the Feedster 500, looking to it as a tool for media planning, according to MarketingVox.

Feedster's new list of what it calls the 500 top blogs, largely based on the ambient prevalence of links to those sites across the web, spawned several prominent discussions as to how useful blog media may be for advertisers. The list itself was published in part because of encouragement by some bloggers unhappy with the methods used by Technorati to rank its top 100. And the subtleties of these differences underlay the core of the issue of why blog media may or may not prove useful for some advertisers.

Typically, ad agencies like to rank traditional media in terms of popularity, with circulation and ratings providing a surrogate measure for quality and relevance. That instinct is served with the new list, and according to an insightful ClickZ canvassing of the buying industry, some buyers are beginning to cautiously look to the list for this sort of validation.

But marketers using blogs as media fall into one of two very different groups: consumer marketers and business-to-business marketers, and the mechanisms for buying media relevant to one are quite different to those employed to buy the other. Where consumer marketers see a direct correlation between site popularity and its usefulness, b-to-b marketers often find the opposite, as they instead seek highly discrete, specialized audiences. Mixing Boing Boing and Fleshbot with the New England Journal of Medicine and Search Engine Roundtable conflates not just two different types of sites, but also two different types of buying processes.

It is interesting. Hear I am lambasting Feedster for being so subjective in their criteria, and the rest of the online marketing community is building media plans around it.

More interesting is that there seems to be a wide open window for someone like MediaPost or ClickZ to jump in and create a 100% editorial list of top blogs, factoring in popularity as well as editorial quality. Let's see who gets there first.

Feedster 500 as a Media Planning Tool

Evidently, the marketing community is embracing the Feedster 500, looking to it as a tool for media planning, according to MarketingVox.

Feedster's new list of what it calls the 500 top blogs, largely based on the ambient prevalence of links to those sites across the web, spawned several prominent discussions as to how useful blog media may be for advertisers. The list itself was published in part because of encouragement by some bloggers unhappy with the methods used by Technorati to rank its top 100. And the subtleties of these differences underlay the core of the issue of why blog media may or may not prove useful for some advertisers.

Typically, ad agencies like to rank traditional media in terms of popularity, with circulation and ratings providing a surrogate measure for quality and relevance. That instinct is served with the new list, and according to an insightful ClickZ canvassing of the buying industry, some buyers are beginning to cautiously look to the list for this sort of validation.

But marketers using blogs as media fall into one of two very different groups: consumer marketers and business-to-business marketers, and the mechanisms for buying media relevant to one are quite different to those employed to buy the other. Where consumer marketers see a direct correlation between site popularity and its usefulness, b-to-b marketers often find the opposite, as they instead seek highly discrete, specialized audiences. Mixing Boing Boing and Fleshbot with the New England Journal of Medicine and Search Engine Roundtable conflates not just two different types of sites, but also two different types of buying processes.

It is interesting. Hear I am lambasting Feedster for being so subjective in their criteria, and the rest of the online marketing community is building media plans around it.

More interesting is that there seems to be a wide open window for someone like MediaPost or ClickZ to jump in and create a 100% editorial list of top blogs, factoring in popularity as well as editorial quality. Let's see who gets there first.