I am feeling more than a little foolish right now and the reason is simple… I’m kicking myself for completely forgetting a lesson I learnt not so long ago.
I have been in between computers using both my acer laptop and macbook (it’s a long story). When on the windows-based machine I like to use Windows Live Writer (WLW) to blog as I don’t have to be online to do so and it is pretty easy to save a draft when I’m unable to complete a post in one sitting. So I decide to set up an account in WLW for this blog. All goes well until I need to submit the remote posting url for Wordpress 2.2+. I hit a snag.
I struggle with the same error for 2 days. I search the net and come across some very helpful sites. Finally I remember that I had the same problem the last time I used this machine, and even blogged the solution on the now defunct victoire.za.net! What was the solution? Uncheck the proxy setting in Internet Explorer… Voila… I’m posting this post from WLW.
Forrester has released a paper researching the “why” and “how” of what they call “external blogging accountability”.
Many large companies stand on the brink of blogging, yet they are unwilling to take the plunge. Others, having dove in early, now face the challenge of managing existing blogs without the ability to show that they effectively support business goals. While blogging’s value can’t be measured precisely, marketers will find that calculating the ROI is easier than it looks. Following a three-step process, marketers can create a concrete picture of the key benefits, costs, and risks that blogging presents and understand how they are likely to impact business goals. This, in turn, enables marketers to answer the key questions, such as whether to blog or not to blog, or to make smart choices about an existing blog.
The paper investigates the need for measuring the return on investment (ROI) of organisational blogs and the limitations to these calculations. In addition to the actual calculation Li et al have identified three factors to determine the return:
Quantify and value the key benefits of blogging
Estimate the costs of blogging
Incorporate the risk calculations in the ROI model
The measurement of ROI of technology within the organisation has always been a key factor in the motivation for its cost of ownership. As blogs, and new media in general, are more intensively marketed to, and adopted by, organisations the measurement of the total cost of ownership and their return on investment will be critical. Whilst the “cost of ownership” of the research paper itself is inhibiting at US $379.00, it will be interesting to observe the various permutations of the blogging ROI model as organisations gain experience with this technology.
Another article of relevance published by Forrester is one which explores a case study on the calculation of the ROI of blogging. The case study takes a look at General Motors‘
implementation of corporate blogs. What I found most interesting though, was the ROI model used by GM. Instead of making use of a traditional monetary-value measure, or the popular “page hits” used by most bloggers, GM measure their value of return by “the number of press mentions” metric.
Forrester used the process outlined in the associated Best Practices document, “The ROI Of Blogging,” to calculate the ROI of General Motors’ FastLane blog; but, this is not merely an exercise to generate a number. Using scenarios, General Motors can understand the risk and impact of increases and decreases of a key metric the number of press mentions on the value of the blog. With this knowledge in hand, General Motors can make critical businesses decisions, such as whether to invest heavily in innovations that will rekindle press attention.
Before I introduce this blog topic, I have to mention that the 27 Dinner was superb and an amazing networking opportunity. Not only that though, it was an opportunity to meet some of the most amazing people in the New Media space. I certainly feel like I have not only expanded my business network, but I’ve also made a few more friends. I look forward to many more interactions.
In addition to this, I was severely chastised (not least of which by our numero uno fan) for not posting regularly enough on chilibean. This is going to change.
Now, without further ado I present Paul’s speech (with audible encouragement from moi)! It was recorded on my K700i Sony Ericsson phone, so the quality is shocking, I apologise in advance.
Now that you know more about blogs from Paul’s articles (I & II), it’s time to introduce you to web feeds, which are usually closely coupled with blogs.
Web feeds go by many names including just plain feed?, XML feed, web syndication, syndication, aggregation, RSS, and Atom. In this article I’m going to refer to it as a feed? for the sake of simplicity.
So what is a feed? A feed is a small file published in a special format (XML). It contains a summary of the recent content published on a web site, and allows you to find out about updates to that site without having to browse to it. This is one of the cool advantages of feeds, not only are you updated with new information from your favourite sites, but you’re kept posted with any changes on them too.
Who publishes feeds? Feeds are mainly associated with blogs and news sites, but are growing in popularity for syndicating almost any information on the web. This even includes sharing company information across an organisation! Another development is the use of feeds for publishing newsletters. Imagine publishing your newsletter on your website, whilst it is automatically sent out to all the people who subscribe to your feed, at the same time.
How do I know whether a site has a feed? Most sites conform to displaying an orange button or a link labelled with either XML , RSS , or Atom in the sidebar (although it could be placed anywhere on the site) to show that they have a feed. Another handy way of discovering whether a site has a feed, and if you use Mozilla Firefox as your browser, is to look in the right hand corner of the navigation bar. If you see a button like this called a live bookmark, you’ll know that the page has a feed.
Where do I begin? The first thing to do is actually subscribe to, and read, some feeds. Before you can do that you need to find a feed aggregator / feed reader / RSS reader / RSS client. There are two types of feed readers, web-based and installable applications. The pro to using a web-based reader is that you’ll be able to view your feeds from any computer with an internet connection, but you won’t be able to access your feeds offline as you can with a reader installed on your computer.
Anyone heard of the blogging platform iUpload? I hadn’t heard about it myself until I read this preview to Forrester’s paper titled “The Forrester Wave: Blogging Platforms, Q2 2006″ published in June 2006.
Forrester evaluated leading blogging platforms across 54 criteria and found that iUpload leads the market with its robust blogging capabilities and its strong strategic vision of a blog as a lightweight content management system (CMS), a collaboration and knowledge management tool, and even as a foundation to form communities of customers. When choosing between a full-featured suite like iUpload’s Customer Conversation System or strong blogging-focused solutions like Movable Type and WordPress, companies should have a well-developed vision of how blogging will be used within the enterprise and then select a vendor that shares that vision.
Forrester conducted in-depth evaluations of nine blogging platforms: Drupal, iUpload’s Customer Conversation System, Roller, Six Apart’s Movable Type and TypePad, Telligent Systems’ Community Server, Traction Software’s TeamPage, UserLand Software’s Manila, and WordPress. To further enhance our analysis, we conducted client reference interviews with 30 user companies, including 3M, CNET Networks, General Motors, IBM, In-Q-Tel, McDonald’s, Oracle, SAP, Time, Wells Fargo, and Ziff Davis Media.
, RSS 
, or Atom 
in the sidebar (although it could be placed anywhere on the site) to show that they have a feed. Another handy way of discovering whether a site has a feed, and if you use 
called a live bookmark, you’ll know that the page has a feed.