A recent study released by PEW/Internet reveals that a significant number of internet users want to voice their opinions online.

In this article, Micro Persuasion: Internet Users Want a Voice, Pew Finds Steve Rubel ask the question of taking customer participation to the level of blogging and contributing reviews?

Blogs are a brave new frontier for businesses who see the advantage of these open two-way dialogues with their markets and with their customers using a business blog. These conversations with customers can advance opportunties for businesses to create evangelists out of customers and prospects. I like to call this "participatory marketing" that allows customers to engage businesses and become a part of the process of product and service development for improvement.

A business blog allows businesses to have these dialogues or conversations with their markets. This PEW study indeed shows that "markets" want to talk. While a business blog may be quite challenging and daring for some businesses, the potential rewards for opening up your business products and services for feedback are certainly worth the effort.

A business blog enables ultimate and instantaneous feedback. This could be scary for some businesses and welcome change for others. A blog puts come control of the message to the customer and some businesses may not like the feedback they get. On the other hand being open to the level of cooperation can enchance customer relationships and accelerate business success.

Business blogs or b-blogs are becoming increasingly important for product and service marketing and promotion.

A business blog allows you to communication at the speed of business and influence the conversations taking place in your markets as well as allow website to remain relevant in the your marketplace.

Reference:

Internet Users Want a Voice, Pew Finds

PEW/Internet

Wired News: Internet Users Want A Voice

Here is promising service is designed to give you help address the concerns over bandwidth with the increase in RSS usage. RSS Cache will service requests for your feed. What RSS cache will do is proxy the request to your RSS feed through a custom URL they provide for you so that the request will hit their service first.

RSS Cache will then begin to service RSS requests from RSS readers based on updates that is has retrieved directly from your server. If your feed hasn't been updated since the last request from a particular RSS feed reader than RSS Cache will service the request instead of allowing your server to take the bandwidth hit for update requests when your RSS feed hasn't been updated.

RSS Cache also reports to uniquely service RSS feed requests by serving only RSS "items" ...   more »

I found this article on point with what I've been discussing of late. In the this article published today, entitled One-stop way to read news, blogs online / RSS allows users to get free, automatic feeds there are a few points of interest.

This article talks about how RSS feeds are used to streamline information management and consumption and allows you to target specific information sources you must have to be productive in work and play.

RSS feeds can indeed be a big convenience and time saver.

Some interesting stats from this article:

• 12, 000 new blogs are created daily or 1 every 7.4 seconds


• Only 32.1 percent of all blogs offer RSS feeds

Technorati is the quoted source for these statistics.

This article also talks about the future of RSS being a delivery mechanism for rich media content such ...   more »

Cube Interactive is a new moblogging (mobile blogging) service that allows you to post pictures, text and video from your cellphone. CubeBlog is an innovative service combining online, mobile and voice connectivities for interactive community based blogs. This service is really seeking to innovate on integrating more sensory communication into blogs and allowing user to create truly media rich blog content.

According to Jay Adevoso, head of Cube Interactive, CubeBlog will later extend its services to television sets where they plan to show blogs on a currently named "Cube iTV" channel. This should be very interesting to see. This will be something to keep your on.

CubeBlog seperates themselves from the pack of other blog software hosting service providers by including mobile blogging via mobile phone and landline in addition to traditional web access. There are other mobile blog software services available that support text and pictures via mobile phones as Text America comes to mind as one of the best.    more »

15 Ways To Read An RSS Feed - Guest Article

Copyright 2004 Steve Shaw

No doubt you have seen those small orange 'XML' or 'RSS' buttons beginning to spread across some of your favourite web sites.

Perhaps you have clicked on one out of curiosity, only to be faced
with a barrage of angle brackets and undecipherable code, seemingly
designed to scare the heck out of anyone less than familiar with the
intricacies of this new fangled technology creeping across the web.

But once you click on that button - what do you do then? This
article will show you exactly what to do. RSS? It's actually Really
Simple, Stupid.

The first thing to do of course is click that button. It may be an
orange button with 'XML' or 'RSS' written across it; or you could see
the ...   more »

'The RSS Weblog' at Weblogs, Inc. cites popular Microsoft tech blogger Scoble as saying that perhaps we all should just subscribe to RSS feeds for the information we need on the 'Net.

'The RSS Weblog' poses this option rather tongue in cheek based on more news on browser vulnerabilities. Well, my mother always told me that "there is a lot of truth in jest". I think there is definitely truth in jest here.

While RSS feed-only content consumption is unlikely, RSS as an alternative to standard browser-based Internet surfing holds some value in my opinion.

In my previous articles on RSS marketing information overload Part One and Part Two I talk about the growth of RSS information sources contributing to the huge number of content sources people will need to choose from, creating new information overload situations and few options ...   more »

Here is an an excellent tool url analysis tool at URLInfo by FaganFinder.com.

This is a very simply laid out tool but it allows you to get lots of statistics on your Blog url suce WHOIS information, search results information, links analysis information and several other useful tools.

Whey they've done is provide you a single inteface to various site analysis tools via a framed window with a easy to navigate colored and tabbed navigation bar.



You simply enter the url of your blog and you just select the different tabs for each category and then select the specific tool.

All analysis are performed against your site from a single browser window session which make using all the tools very convenience.

I have not used all the tools extensive but right off the bat I've found the "link" category obviously very usefull.

This is great tool to use to how well connected your blog is getting from your blog marketing efforts. This tool is always a great way to find other sites to link to and other blogs to comment on.

This tool can also be extremely useful in allow you to do research on both competitor sites you are following and well a successful sites that you want to model and emulate.

You can certianly study how influential those other blogs are and plan your own blog marketing success strategy.

I recommend that you bookmark this site and a cool tool in your blog marketing and blog promotion arsenal. :-)

In addition to RSS tools for users there will be the issue of desktop real estate for the user. What is the logical choice for RSS feed consumption? Will browsers become the tool of choice once RSS support and subscription through browsers beome commonplace? Will users ship their surfing activities to their desktop RSS feed readers and use the integrated browsing capability in most RSS readers for any required browser sessions that are needed? Will web-based aggregators like Bloglines and Feedster along with RSS supported start pages like My Yahoo! become the tool of choice?

While I cannot say for sure what he shake on tools will be this may not really be the bottom line anyway. RSS feeds can provide a net time savings resulting in improved quality of time associated with content consumption online by providing update notification ...   more »

At the heart of blogs is the goldmine of reward communication of all types that can take place. Blogging is already quite viral because the rich linking that takes place between blogs linking to other blogs for reference. What happens is a rich experience in communication and networking that is quite rewarding, suprising and can help you grow your business.

You are bound to be surprised by who you end up getting connected with and what type of joint ventures can spring from just giving others a opportunity see who you are.

This is the marketing goldmine of blogs. Establishing credibility and establish a trust of intelligence in your "market space" will generate more interest by others to communicate and give you feedback. If you blog delivers high quality content that to your market, the word will definitely get out.

Other bloggers will reference your posts with trackback, respond to your posts and in general, blogroll you and just plain get the word out their particular audience about the value of your blog.

I grow more and more passionat about blogging by the day. There is so much to learning and keep with that I am constantly intrigued by the blogging trend.

Most people feel that have something to say and are passionate in least one area of life. Why not start a blog about and share you mind with the world of bloggers and get your own social network going?

The socialization power of blogging and the transferrence of ideas in the marketing is why blog marketing is a goldmine opportunity for businesses.

There is simple untapped communication channel waiting to be leveraged by respective business that are willing to start a transparent dialogue with customers and partners. Onlines business can begin to build solid relationships and create a product and service evangelists by simply connected with people in a more personal way through blogging.

Blog marketing is more than just writing about your products and services. It a communication goldmine with the power to grow your brand awareness and customer base.

Reference:

Blog Marketing Explosion
Quantify Word of Mouth

I was thinking today about the accelerating growth in RSS feeds as RSS feeds get more news coverage and more and more publishers begin to deploy RSS feeds as part of their content distribution strategy.

I'm thinking about what type of usage behavior patterns will emerge as RSS feeds gain mainstream adoption as an alternative means to getting and using content online.

Will we see over subscribed behavior as with email? It's no secret that a lot of people over subscribe to email newsletters of all types causing an information overload situation. Aside from the filter and spam wars with email, much email goes unread simply because people are over subscribed and don't have the time to read all of their email.

RSS feed readers or news aggregators allow you to manage and read multiple RSS feeds from a single ...   more »

Here is a good short article about Blogging for Dollars.

I cover some of these points in my forthcoming information product "How To Blog For Fun and Profits".  You will hear more about that shortly.

In discussing ways in which blog marketing can be used to generate revenue for bloggers, this article provides the following tactics.

1. Google Adsense In Blogs
2. Affiliate Programs
3. Product Promotion
4. Banner Ads

Product Promotion is particularly suited for blog marketing tactics. Content rich product promotion will help with search engine placement and blogs are especially suited for providing rich content.

Setting up a blog and describing product features, providing updates and general education about your products are services will create opportunities for your content to get crawled and placed in search results.

When you target your keywords within your content you are laser targeting your market search engines definitely index keywords in blogs much, much quicker than they do with regular websites that aren't frequently updated like blogs are.

It seems to me that the argument over whether RSS advertising is viable or even the "right" thing to do is should be phrased within the context of how to properly implement RSS advertising effectively.

I've believed from the beginning the RSS advertising will happen. I know there are purist who are utterly disgusted at the idea of advertising in their feeds but as with websites and email, RSS will also experience advertising.

Where there is content delivery on the Internet there will inevitably be "advertising" attempts.

In the Wired News article RSS Feeds Hunger for More Ads cites how RSS advertising is growing and how few people seem to be complaining about it.

Perhaps the lack of complaints are do to the fact that we are bombarded with advertising every day so most people on the Internet are accustomed ...   more »

If you haven't read a review for or heard of Blog Explosion yet you might be missing out on a grand opportunity to boost traffic to you blog.

I've been trying the service out for a the past week to see how it looks and feels.

If you don't know, Blog Explosion is a 100% free to use blog traffic exchange and here is how it works.

You surf other Blog Explosion member blogs and in return you generate traffic to your blog at the same time. You are reguired to surf a member blog for a minimum of 30 secs in order to earn surf credits to your own blog.

This service is worth checking out. Among other things the allow you to use your earned credits to also display your banners on their network. You are allotted a certain number of impressions per credit. You can use your credits to bid for positions in their directory.

They provide some pretty useful Blog Explosion stats on how well your blog doing within their network as well. Your at-a-glance stats will provide you information on how many credits you have, how many visits you've had from the Blog Explosion directory versus the number of visits from their bloggers surfing their network. Other stats include the number of people that have bookmarked your blog using the Blog Explosion "blogmark" feature as well as the number of visits from searches.

They provide chat, blog ratings, credit for referrals, and you can even "buy" credits for traffic and banner ads but this is hardly required. This will probably be a preferred method while the surfing option will be popular with those like me who really love blogs and like to visit all types of blogs for interesting conversation and ideas.

In summation, this is a fatastic service to and for the blogging community. Blog Explosion is new but growing rapidly! You will only do yourself and your blog a disservice by not at least check them out. You've got absolutely nothing to lose but a lot of potential traffic to your blog to gain. :-)

Click here to visit Blog Explosion now.

Here is an interesting blog tools and blog software site. It seems to be a fairly new site as a couple of pages are incomplete.

The site is called blogtricks and they provide short list blog add-ins.

The provide a blog rss tool that allows you to integrate RSS feeds into your website. The provide a referrer list list tool for private and public viewing of traffic referrers to your site.

There are a few other fun tools for your blog site such as 'countdown to event' counter, gallery creation blog software tool, a random quotation blog site tool, and an Amazon products integration tool.

I haven't demo'd any of these tools just yet but I'm always on the hunt for fun and profitable things to do with blog. Check out Blogtricks and see if any of their tools are fun and interesting to you.

I came across this list a great resources at Inc.com.

Go here for more: Inc.com - Weblog Resources