Today, the Associated Press took bloggers to task by stating that they do not allow anyone to quote excerpts from their articles. They specifically went after The Drudge Retort, a left-leaning political site that aggregates short bits of content from around the web as selected by their readers, and told them to remove remove seven items that contained quotations from articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.
The Drudge Retort
Many sites and blogs on the web, like The Drudge Retort, link to articles of interest on other sites by displaying the title and a short excerpt of a few lines from the original article, with a link to click through to read the rest of the article. This is considered accepted practice under the laws of fair use, which state that people can quote from other publications without asking for permission from the creator in certain circumstances. The New York Times gives the example of a book reviewer, who does not need to ask permission from the publisher in order to quote parts of the book in their review.
Bloggers Rebel
The blogosphere has not taken AP’s actions lightly. In a post titled “Here’s Our New Policy On A.P. stories: They’re Banned,” TechCrunch says that AP should consider all these links a favor, and that they can’t make their own rules. TechCrunch says that AP has taken this type of behavior too far, and as a result AP is now banned on TechCrunch until further notice:
So here’s our new policy on A.P. stories: they don’t exist. We don’t see them, we don’t quote them, we don’t link to them. They’re banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet.
Plagiarism vs. Fair Use
I am strongly against stealing content. People work hard to create intellectual property, whether it’s movies, music, or writing, and just because it’s easy to steal doesn’t mean that it’s ok. At the same time, the web is about sharing content, and sites enjoy greater success the more their content is recommended and linked to by others. Sites like The Drudge Retort aren’t copying content - they are linking to the original source with short excerpts. By threatening people who share their content, AP is causing themselves damage two-fold:
- They look like the big, bad corporation who looks down upon the plebes from their ivory towers.
- People will think twice before sharing their articles with others on the web for fear that they will be sued.
The big bad corporation is an unsavory character that doesn’t mesh with today’s web. Instead of shunning its audience and those who want to share its content, AP may want to consider learning what the web is about today, and working with it rather than against it.
Privacy by doc18
This week Emily Gould, former Editor at the mega-gossip-blog Gawker, published a stunning and moving description in the New York Times of her experience as a blogger who exposed all, both with regards to her own personal life, and those of celebrities. Her piece is fascinating and disturbing, and raises a lot of questions about the boundaries we set up and break down between our real-life identities, and those of our online personas.
One of the questions that I’m often asked about blogging is about how far bloggers should go in exposing their private lives. This aspect of blogging makes people nervous, since blogging is obviously a very personal endeavor, with people exposing their personal experiences, opinions and agendas.
In addition, many bloggers have seen that posts relating more detailed personal information are often more successful and engaging than those that just relate their opinions. So the question becomes: do I have to write about my personal life in order to succeed as a blogger?
You need to be public. And private.
In my opinion, the answer is yes and no. If you are blogging for professional purposes, it is very important that you stick with the main topic of your blog, and not deviate with whole posts dedicated to your dog’s antics or your spouse’s new haircut. People are reading your blog because they perceive you as an expert in your field, and they want to learn from your wisdom in that area. By writing about subjects unrelated to your main topic, you’ll make your readers wonder if it’s worth their while reading your blog post when there are five gazillion others out there that won’t waste their time.
Also, as we all know, exposing too much can actually be dangerous. There are unsavory creatures prowling the web, looking for juicy personal tidbits that they can use to harm you, whether it’s by stealing your identity, stalking you until you are too afraid to even leave your house, or in other unpleasant ways.
At the same time,you must be personal (and personable) when blogging. Personality is the main difference between conventional journalism, which is supposedly objective or, in the case of opinion pieces, sophisticated and controlled, and blogging, which is emotional, temperamental, and highly subjective - and way more fun to read!
Striking the balance
Here are three tips to help you maintain that balance between publicity and privacy:
- Make sure to use the word “I” when writing as much as possible.
- Stay focused on the topic of your blog. Remember that your readers are there to hear your words of wisdom, and that should keep you on course.
- And most of all: if you wouldn’t want your friends, parents or coworkers to read it, don’t put it on the web! There’s this company called Google that works hard to expose your web content.
About a month ago I spoke at the Techshoret Conference for technical writers. Techshoret is an active mailing list for technical writers in Israel, but it includes many members from overseas as well. The people on the list are very supportive and helpful, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was one of the best email groups in the world for technical writers.
Techshoret holds an annual conference in Jerusalem, and I was invited to speak on the topic of Blogging and Social Media as Marketing Tools for Hi-Tech Companies since they decided to add some non-technical writing lectures to the mix.
My lecture covered case studies of businesses and their successes and failures in the blogosphere, and how the world of marketing is changing to the point where blogs and social media are a necessary part of today’s marketing strategy.
I promised the participants that I would upload my presentation, and here it is (finally)!
Hollywood on a Shoestring Budget
I am also including the great presentation given by Benjy Caplan who works at ECI Telecom. Benjy spoke about how to create great videos without being a professional videographer. His presentation was interesting because he explained how his company uses video as part of their user manuals. I think this is brilliant, because so many Israeli companies have overseas customers who don’t really speak English, and the best way to communicate in that situation is visually. In addition, his company saves the costs of sending technicians overseas to help clients by sending them help videos instead.
Benjy gave us one real example of how his company used a video to help clients in India install one of their products. The clients sent ECI a picture of their installation, which was a jumble of wires. Instead of sending technicians over to fix things up, Benjy produced an Oscar-worthy video with step-by-step visual instructions of where to put which wire.
With so many Israeli companies exporting overseas, I think many should learn from Benjy’s example and save themselves a lot of time and money by adding videos to their customer support services.
Enjoy!
Commtouch, one of the world’s leading email spam fighters, has now officially launched their new corporate blog, Commtouch Cafe, which was built by none other than…illuminea (i.e. us)!
Founded in 1991 in Israel and publicly traded on the NASDAQ (CTCH), Commtouch’s technologies help companies avoid the rising costs of email spam by constantly monitoring, identifying and blocking new malware attacks. To accomplish this, the company analyzes the distribution patterns of billions of email messages per month. That’s quite a job.
The new blog, called Commtouch Cafe, aims to “show the face & voice of the people behind Commtouch’s technology; share the type of informal information that [they] are exposed to daily just wandering the halls here, that might also interest our partner community or other spam/virus fighters; and have some fun.” This blog is the place to go if you want to keep up on the latest reports, figures and developments in the world of spam and malware.
Now I know they are my clients, so you probably should take what I have to say with a grain of salt, but this move by Commtouch into the world of social media marketing is very impressive for the following reasons:
- Commtouch is publicly traded. Many publicly traded companies cite the complicated compliance issues of stock exchanges as reasons not to have a blog. Commtouch saw the value of becoming part of the online conversation, and overcame any obstacles that they may have faced in order to do this.
- They also launched with a new viral video. Not only did Commtouch launch a blog, but they combined it with the launch of a cute animated video they made that is now on YouTube. (The video is below.)
- The content is written with a web audience in mind. Big corporations often speak in long expanses of corporate speak. The posts on Commtouch Cafe are short and contain a lot of visuals, like video and images.
- They are an Israeli company. Big Israeli companies in particular are still staying away from blogging. A notable exception is Answers.com, a large publicly traded company with an obscure and hard-to-find corporate blog (if you look up Answers.com blog, you won’t find it): no.stupid.answers. This blog is also pretty good - short, useful posts about questions and answers.
Congratulations to Commtouch on their entry into the world of social media, and may this signal the start of a new trend among Israeli companies!
Here’s the Commtouch video:
There are so many social media sites and tools out there, that it’s hard to know which to pay attention to, and which to ignore. Also, how do we use them effectively and still retain time to get some real work done?
A recent discussion took place on the CIWI (Connecting Independent Writers in Israel) mailing list about how to start a blog, and whether one should start one at all. One writer was of the opinion that blogs are passe, and that users should concentrate on microblogging mediums, like Tumblr and Twitter.
In my opinion, the microblogging tools are a nice addition to an overall social media strategy, but are weak on their own. Many of the most popular people on Twitter, for example, are those who have built up a following for themselves via their blogs. They use Twitter to drive people to new posts on their blogs, and to create a supplementary stream of information. Much of the information on Twitter is backed up by longer posts or articles on other sites.
Blog, Twitter, both, none?Â
So what is the best way to create an effective web presence? Do we blog, do we tweet, or do we do both?
Adopting a social media strategy can be a daunting task, particularly due to the wide range of tools and services available. Users need a strategy that is effective, yet also gives them time to have a life outside of the web.
Here’s how I have structured my social media activity. This is not necessarily the only or right way to go, but it can give you an idea as to how to get started:
- Blogs: I use this blog to write about different issues related to marketing and business. In order to keep up with the world of WordPress, which is the platform we use to build all our sites and blogs, I also write a blog called WordPressGarage, which we use as a kind of online manual for knowledge management. WordPress’ categorization features such as categories, tags and search, are excellent for managing information. WordPressGarage has become more than just a blog: I use WordPress’ Blogroll to keep track of my links on the Links We Love page, and I’ve set up a microblogging section in the sidebar called Shorties, which is where I post really short bits of info that don’t justify a real blog post. I could have accomplished this with del.icio.us and Tumblr, but I really prefer to keep everything in one place if I can.
- Twitter: I don’t really like Twitter, but I use it because I know it is effective. It also helps me keep up with the social media arena, and I have to admit I’ve found some pretty interesting content thanks to the twitterers that I follow. I post here short things that aren’t appropriate for my blogs, or I post links to new posts on my blogs. (You can find me here on Twitter: http://twitter.com/miriamschwab.)
- LinkedIn: LinkedIn was really boring for a while, but it seems to be picking up, although it’s still not the type of site I’d visit on a regular basis (unlike the site mentioned in step 4). The advantage of LinkedIn is that it gives me a place to create a professional profile that people can easily find on the web. Other than that, not much happens there (unless I’m missing something). It’s like a really boring party where we all shake hands, and then sit around looking at each other. And here I am on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/miriamschwab
- Facebook: facebook acts as a kind of aggregator for all the content that I publish all over the web. I mashed together my blog RSS feeds into one feed, and that feed is pulled into my facebook profile’s notes section. My twitters (tweets) appear in my facebook status. Any extra stuff that I want to publish or share that aren’t directly connected to marketing or WordPress are published there too, like videos, links and events.
Here are the social media sites that I would like to be more active in should the days suddenly become 40 hours long: flickr, YouTube, de.licio.us, digg, and StumbleUpon.
The above still uses up a lot of my time, but it ensures that my “online presence” stays fresh and current, and my offline presence retains some semblance of a life.
More and more professionals are starting their own blogs. There is a growing realization that blogging can help advance a person professionally, or market a business. It helps establish them as thought leaders, create relationships with people they wouldn’t normally connect to, and increase search engine rankings for their corporate sites.
But it’s hard to know where to start. Here are some tips that can help you start off on the right foot, so that you can grow as a blogger and head in the direction of becoming a “really professional blogger” (RPB):
- Really professional bloggers have self-hosted blogs. A self-hosted blog is a blog that is hosted on a person’s own hosting account, as opposed to a blog that is hosted for free on WordPress.com or Google’s Blogger. To self-host your own blog, you need to install one of the blogging platforms on your hosting. This means an investment of about $10 a year for a domain name, and about $8 a month for hosting. So when I say investing, we’re not talking thousands. But it shows that they’re taking their blogging seriously. This also means that they are not at the mercy of WordPress.com and Google’s Terms of Service, and they also avoid the risk of being blocked in certain countries that block entire social networks like WordPress.com.
- Really professional bloggers have their own domain name. This means that the domain name of their blog is not something like miriam.blogspot.com, but is www.miriam.com, or www.company.com/blog. If the idea of hosting your own blog makes you nervous, but you do want to have your own domain name, sign up for a blog at www.wordpress.com, and then upgrade to their paid service that allows you to have your own domain name. This will also make it easier for you to move to your own self-hosted blog with that domain name in the future. (We just did that for a client and the move went really smoothly. All their URLs were preserved.) But just note that people will still know that you are using the WordPress.com hosted blogging service because their
favicon appears next to your URL in browsers. That just means you can’t personalize your favicon, but it’s not the end of the world.
- Really professional bloggers use WordPress as their blogging platform of choice. Some may argue with me, but many if not most of the leading bloggers (except Seth, maybe) use WordPress for their blogs. Bloggers love WordPress because: 1. It has a large user community; 2. It is really flexible and many cool and wonderful things can be done with WordPress; 3. It is pretty optimized for search engines out of the box, and can be optimized even more by WordPress designers and developers. If you don’t want to invest right now in your blog, and you’re just getting your feet wet, it’s a good idea to get started with a free blog at WordPress.com. This gives you a few advantages: 1. You can easily migrate (move) your blog over to a self-hosted WordPress blog when you feel ready; 2. You will be used to the WordPress user interface and features, since the admin is basically the same for the hosted and self-hosted versions of WordPress; 3. You look much savvier than a blogspot blogger. (Ok, that’s very subjective, but at least I’ll think you’re cooler!)
- Really professional bloggers have customized blog designs. This is a serious investment in your blogging career, but in a world of millions of blogs, it’s important to find a way to differentiate yourself and show people you are serious about what you are doing. But you don’t have to worry about that right now - WordPress makes it easy to change your blog’s appearance at any time. It’s like putting a different dress on your content: the content all stays the same, but it’s now wearing its fall wardrobe.
So if you’ve been bitten by the blogging bug, and want to get started on the right foot, I think the above tips can help you start a blogging career that lets your blog grow with you, and vice versa.
Happy blogging!
Background
The Cluetrain Manifesto
A document created by a number of thought leaders on the new direction of marketing: it is no longer a monologue but a conversation.
“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter�and getting smarter faster than most companies.”
Getting Started
55 Essential Articles Every Serious Blogger Should Read
Problogger’s Blogging Tips for Beginners
Becomeablogger.com free video tutorials on setting up a WordPress blog
Social Media Sites
Marketing blogs
Seth Godin
Publishing 2.0
Blogging Blogs
Chris Garrett on New Media
Problogger
The Blog Herald
Lorelle on WordPress
Social Media Blogs
Web Strategy by Jeremiah
The Jeff Pulver blog
Blonde 2.0
MyBlog by Ouriel
WordCamp Israel is over. It was fun and interesting, and you can read my complete review of the event over here. But, there is no rest for the weary, so it’s on to the next event: this Tuesday I’ll be giving a free workshop on using blogs as a marketing tool. Here’s more info:
The Oct. 30 meeting of the Yokneam Forum of Technical Writers (Elephant) will feature a workshop on “Using Blogging as a Marketing Tool“. Meetings of the Forum are free and open to the public (most are technical or marcom writers, but others are welcome). The standard for presentations and workshops at the Forum is very high because many of the participants come to meetings with a lot of technical and practical experience. The informal atmosphere leads to a discussion format rather than frontal presentations. Meetings always begin with AA style introductions and announcements. Networking is always an important part of the meetings, especially at the start and during breaks.
Location: Yokneam City Hall
Date: Oct. 30
Time: 18:00-19:15
Cost: Free, but you are expected to bring a refreshment to share (New England style potluck) and registration is required
Registration: www.elephant.org.il/headlines/oct_30_workshop_on_using_blogging_as_a_m.html
Join us to learn how blogs can help you take your company’s marketing to the next level. We will cover:
- What makes a blog a blog?
- What are all these things we’ve heard about: RSS feeds, trackbacks, pingbacks?
- What system should we use to blog: we’ll look at blogger, typepad, wordpress.com and self-hosted WordPress.
- How blogs benefit your business: increase search engine rankings, control your online brand, strengthen customer loyalty, and more.
- Blog writing strategies: how often should we post, what should we write about, how long do the posts need to be, how do we find new material?
I know Yokneam isn’t the most convenient location, but it’s not impossible, so I really hope I’ll see you there!
Last night I went to my first iDrink event. For those of you who are not familiar with iDrink, it’s a party/event for Israelis in the Internet and web industries. The format usually includes presentations by startups and sponsors of the event, some free drinks, and a lot of socializing and networking. This was their seventh event, and there were tons of people there. At first, we couldn’t even get into the bar, and people were literally spilling out the door. But that was ok, cuz even the door was a social place to be. We got inside in time to hear/see the end of a presentation by a startup called KitchenBug. It was so noisy that I couldn’t hear so well, but what I saw and heard made me a little worried: a pretty presentation with really cool shiny graphics, and a concept that I think has little value (sorry KitchenBug and investors). This screams “bubble” - pretty face, no content, investors investing. Yikes.
Aside from that, I actually had fun. Despite the fact that I was the only religious woman who looked like she stepped out of Biblical times, I met some interesting people and got an in-depth explanation of a new blogging-widget being developed by one of the startups (sorry, but that one also has signs of a bubble).
So what do you think it’s like to get into a room with a bunch of web fanatics? Well, upon meeting you they immediately take out their phone and “friend” you on facebook. I’m serious. Also, I had more than one person come up to me and say hi because they recognized me from facebook. I’m surprised no one was live-blogging.
The line between real and virtual life has become very thin.
Anyways, it was an experience. Kol hakavod to the organizers - it’s really great that they provide a setting for everyone in the industry to get together in a casual atmosphere. In a bar, it’s so easy to be friends, especially after a few drinks.
Maybe real life isn’t that different from facebook after all:
- Real life - drink, be friends
- facebook - “friend me,” we’re friends
And in that spirit, Demetri Maritin on the Daily Show gives his point of view on social networking:
WordCamp Israel is fast approaching, and I wanted to update you on what’s going on.
First of all, the registration closed a little over a week ago - capacity has been reached. I know there are a lot of disappointed people who really wanted to come, but hopefully it will either work out for them this year, or they’ll manage to register in time for next year’s conference.
Second, I’m going to be moderating the panel on Blogging and Business. We have a really great panel, and I hope it will be enjoyable and informative. Here’s a bit about our panelists:
- Me. My company, illuminea provides blog development and strategic consultation services to businesses.
- Ouriel Ohayon. Ouriel is the General Manager at LGiLab, a VC company, and he blogs on VCs, business, startups, and more. His blog has a very wide following.
- Yigal Chamish. Yigal is an expert in knowledge management, and approaches blogs as a tools for creating effective learning and knowledge-sharing environments.
- Kfir Pravda. Kfir produces magazines and video for the Web, and works with companies and groups both locally and internationally to help them use blogs as business and marketing tools.
- Yisrael Blechman. Yisrael is the CTO of Blink, which specializes in research, development and application of Web 2.0 methodologies and technologies for both intra- and extra-organizational purposes.
Third, Lorelle has written a few posts in preparation of the upcoming conference that provide an interesting perspective on blogging and Israel:
That’s it for now, and I hope I’ll see you there! Remember: Oct. 25, at 9am at Michlelet Afeka in Tel Aviv.
