Gawker Media released two new blogs:

• Gridskipper, a travel related blog, sponsored by Cheaptickets. Gridskipper proclaims itself “the decadent travel guide” and describes its mission as “scouring the world for discount flights, chic hotels - and pretty people.” Andrew Krucoff, a former guest writer on Gawker Media and Fleshbot, will edit the site, which will focus on urban travel.
• Lifehacker, a blog about software downloading and time saving, sponsored by Sony. Lifehacker will include software download recommendations and content about spam filters, virus killers, spyware, search engines, e-mail applications, Internet phones, and general productivity tips. It’s a counterpart to Gizmodo, Gawker Media’s blog that reviews consumer electronics, but will be written in a less snarky style than sister blogs Gawker, Defamer, and Wonkette, said Gawker Media Publisher Nick Denton.

Via ProBlogger and Micro Persuasion.

Christopher Carfi of The Social Customer Manifesto starts a series of posts and podcasts about business blogging: The Business Blogging Field Guide.

Via public(MIND).

Boeing has just started a weblog written by Randolp S. Baseler, Vice President Marketing, Boeing Commercial Airplanes. Unfortunately there are no comments, no RSS, no trackback, not even an e-mail contact for the time being.

Via NevOn.

Moonwatcher writes about Traction TeamPage: “TeamPage is a deep product, and includes functionality well beyond weblog management… TeamPage is designed to be used by multiple users and groups and incorporates a sophisticated permissions system to enforce security. The product is also built for scalability and can manage hundreds of thousands of entries, well beyond the scale of most hobbyist tools. It’s because of these differences that Traction has been seeing competitive wins over competitors including Six Apart’s Movable Type.”.

The development of pMachine Pro is being discontinued with version 2.4 and the product can now be downloaded for free. A decision which was taken in favour of ExpressionEngine.

Via Weblogger.ch.

b-spirit.com now appears as an official Traction partner on the corresponding page.

Darren on ProBlogger publishes a list of links to articles giving good reasons to blog by type of business or occupation. He is even looking for people who’d be ready to publish posts about:

• Why Teachers Should Blog
• Why Accountants Should Blog
• Why Academics Should Blog
• Why Hairdressers Should Blog
• Why Plumbers Should Blog

Caterpillar’s knowledge networks or how they solved business problems and had their Knowledge Networks system support that activity.

The last presidential elections in the United States and their associated professional bloggers represented a tremendous promotion for blogging last year. What about Europe? Well, it seems that the buzz rather comes from the politicians; in France, a few of them such as Dominique Strauss-Kahn (with not less than 50 comments per post!) and Alain Juppé have started quite successfully. We didn’t really follow politicians’ weblogs in the other countries. Any idea of what is going on in Germany, Italy, UK or Spain? Anyway, European politicians seem to follow the trend too: EUobeserver.com announces that Margot Wallström, vice-president of the European Commission and commissioner for communication and institutional relations, will start a blog on January 14th, that is tomorrow! Her blog is to be updated two to three times a week and will contain some personal thoughts (Mrs Wallström will write all of her own).

Via Micro Persuasion.

[Update 14.01.2005 08:37] Via NevOn: Mrs Wallström’s blog is called my diary and is already online with a pre-launch post yesterday with commentary about the tsunami disaster in South Asia, plus assorted comments about some of her fellow commissioners.

Why Corporate Boards Should Blog.

” The blogging technology platform, when properly executed, provides boards and legitimate shareholders with a transparent platform to seriously engage one another on the issues. It can provide boards with a low-cost, highly effective means to establish a credible dialogue and allow directors to obtain feedback from a wider variety of shareholders with differing viewpoints.”

Via Ken Leebow.

You can download Debbie Weil’s Beginner’s Guide to Business Blogging (676 Kb) for free until January 25.

Field sales and their needs to be aware of numerous things while they are on mission, are a great example to demonstrate our previous post. Here the key for the company is to:

• provide a constant flow of relevant pieces of information
• allow employees to aggregate selected parts of this flow
• eventually push content directly to the users’ desktops or mobile devices
• allow employees to publish their own content, which can be aggregated by others later on

Such dynamics are not only vital for companies who employ field sales reps, but also for large companies, with many departments or offices spread around the globe.

Via Moonwatcher.

The same way all of us sometimes, not to say often, do not realise the value of the information and knowledge we have as individuals, the same way most of the companies out there are not aware of the collective knowledge of all their employees. As a result, they are losing, every day, opportunities and chances to grow.

Not recognising internal knowledge= not managing it= losing it= losing opportunities= losing money!

Knowledge is not only a piece of news that you just read on a newspaper or that you fortunately heard at the coffee machine. From a business perspective, it represents many things that you may have neglected or missed. For instance:

• The knowledge that you have but…
  • you received it too late
  • it was altered
  • it was wrongly targeted and as a result it is useless
  • it took you too long to find
  • it is unclear
• The knowledge that you need but you do not know where/how to find it
• The knowledge you don’t know it exists
• The knowledge you don’t know (yet) you need it
• The knowledge you lost or forgot
• etc.

Think a minute. Imagine all the things you miss, every day, and so do all of your team members and colleagues. Corporate weblogs and other KM tools help businesses to improve many of the situations above. They do not change things on their own since they are only tools but still they provide a platform people can rely on to store, share, learn, search, exchange, organise all the information that cannot be handled by common business applications with structured data models. And using a weblog is so easy: no training, ultra-easy web based interface, no complicated validation processes, instant publication, central storage, facilitated collaboration, etc.

Having the right tool is a good start but then you need a method; we, at b-spirit.com, help businesses to assess their working environments and processes in order to find the most adapted way for them to manage their existing knowledge and also to build on it. Just send us a quick note now and we will tell you more!

And yes Hans Henrik, you are right, it is not only about marketing and PR!

“The FastLane blog is your source for the latest, greatest musings of GM leaders on topics relevant to the company, the industry and the global economy, and — most of all — to our customers and other car enthusiasts. We look forward to an open exchange of viewpoints and welcome your ideas and feedback throughout 2005.”

Welcome to FastLane, the brand new weblog of General Motors with a post of Bob Lutz himself. As Neville Hobson says, this is the first ‘mainstream’ Fortune 100 company (as opposed to technology-related) to venture into the blogosphere with an executive leadership blog. A tremendous step.

All the features of the classic weblog are available: comments, trackbacks, archives, blogroll, RSS feed, etc. They even included their own Blogger Code Of Ethics, adapted from Charlene Li. The design is sober but very clear and easy to read. Well done.

Via NevOn.

On the Social Customer Manifesto, Christopher Carfi explains why organisations need to open up to their customers, to interact with them. Otherwise those customers are very likely to go away and never come back. And possibly make everybody know about their dissatisfaction. He also gives a few trends that he has identified from the customer’s point of view:

• I want to have a say.
• I don’t want to do business with idiots.
• I want to know when something is wrong, and what you’re going to do to fix it.
• I want to help shape things that I’ll find useful.
• I want to connect with others who are working on similar problems.
• I don’t want to be called by another salesperson. Ever. (Unless they have something useful. Then I want it yesterday.)
• I want to buy things on my schedule, not yours. I don’t care if it’s the end of your quarter.
• I want to know your selling process.
• I want to tell you when you’re screwing up. Conversely, I’m happy to tell you the things that you are doing well. I may even tell you what your competitors are doing.
• I want to do business with companies that act in a transparent and ethical manner.
• I want to know what’s next. We’re in partnership…where should we go?

Have you ever heard about on-line conversations with your customers and partners? Have you ever thought of using the power of weblogs? Do not wait longer and contact us to put all the chances on your side.

Via Easy Bake Weblogs.

The 4.19Mb video of Bloggers - People of the Year by ABC News. Via The Last Minute.

Blogs aren’t just for marketing, there are many areas of the business where they can help improve information flow, reduce clutter and avoid the dreaded “but I didn’t know about that” situation. Cutting Through gives ten good ways that they’ve used blogs for managing projects, both internally and with clients.

1. Communicating with project stakeholders
2. Replacing paper
3. Building issue blogs
4. Capturing information snippets
5. Publicising the project progress
6. Reducing email overload
7. Capturing requirements
8. Circulating screenshots
9. Keeping team members up-to-date
10. Provide an automatic audit trail

Via Weblogger.ch.

Via Editor & Publisher:

A study released Sunday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project at least partly confirms the year-end hype: 2004 was (among other things) the Year of the Blog.

Pew polled Internet users and found that blog readership increased 58% between February and November 2004. And by November, 27% of 120 million adult Internet users claimed to visit blogs, up from 17% nine months earlier.

Not only that, but Pew also found that 7% of online users, or 8 million Americans, had created their own blogs, up from 3% in 2002. And more and more Americans are posting comments on blogs.

On the other hand, the study discovered that 62% still have no clear idea what a blog actually is. One imagines this includes even some of the users.

“The story is, blogs are catching on,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & Amercian Life Project, “Not just on the creator side, but also on the demand side. Blog readership took off in 2004.”

Breaking down blog creators, Pew found that 57% are male and 48% are under 30.

“The election year drew awareness to political blogs, which then spilled over into other areas,” Rainey said. Blogs related to the tsunami disaster have probably stirred new interest.

The Pew study also found that 5% of American online users, or 6 million people, consume news and information through RSS or XLM aggregators, a trend that Rainey expects will grow in 2005.

T. L. Pakii Pierce gives his 5 important (and valuable) reasons why blogs can boost your business.

1. Your markets are getting smarter, faster, and more organised.
2. You must deliver genuine knowledge.
3. Your competition is using blogs and RSS.
4. Speed of business.
5. Blogs and RSS represent social networking at its’ most powerful.

Via ProBlogger.

InsideBlogging, a blog consulting company, organises the 2005 Business Blogging Awards. Nominations can be submitted until January 24 by leaving comments here. Then the list of nominees will be adjusted by a panel of judges. Finally, voting will start on January 26 and people will be able to vote once per day per category. They are still looking for sponsors!

Via Corporate Engagement.

[Added on 01/02/05@15:10] NevOn also reports about the 2005 Bloggies organised by Fairvue Cenral.