If you have missed the 2008 hot trends, you can find them on Read/Write Web.
What I have noticed is that Mobile is in the list again, I have seen that a few times in there before but it never lifted off like it should (to me). Let’s see what it brings this year…

Source: Read/Write Web

Art2blog is going on holidays for 1 week to Bodrum. We’ll be back on October 4th. In mean time don’t stop reading our favourite colleagues. If you still have some holidays planned, check out Fasten Seatbelts where you can find the “Do’s and Don’ts” of the country you’re visiting.

We will certainly remember that:

• In Turkey, it is rude to show the sole of your shoe.
• In Turkey, the “OK” sign is very rude.
• In Turkey, in crowded busses (Dolmus), the way to pay for your ticket is to pass the money from passenger to passenger towards the bus driver.
• In various countries, you may be asked to remove your shoes before entering a home.

The last few days it has been quiet…well…now you know why. I moved our blog to my own hosting.http://www.art2blog.be is the place to be now…I’ll make some more changes the coming days on the design but all credits go to Design Disease which created this great 3 column wordpress theme. Furthermore you don’t have to change your rss feed address, that stayed the same (http://feeds.feedburner.com/art2blog)!

Hope you enjoy…

Received several mails from contacts to join their social network on the Quechup site. Ignore these! Don’t know what the final plan is, but once you register the engine behind the site proposes to import online contacts from your webmail account like Hotmail, Gmail, … once imported all these get a mail from you inviting to join Quechup again. Pure spam with hopefully no other harmful intentions (viruses?) behind.

I already posted about pay per post before, the story under confirms what I said: “It will become a money race for competitors”.

Digg became one of the top sites for tech news because it lets Web-savvy geeks decide what’s newsworthy, offer up stories they like and vote on their favorites.

Now, dubious Internet marketers are planting stories, paying people to promote items, and otherwise trying to manipulate rankings on Digg and other so-called social-media sites like Reddit and Delicious to drum up more links to their Web sites and thus more business, experts say.

Companies charge as much as $15,000 to get content up on Digg, said Neil Patel, chief technology officer at the Internet marketing firm ACS. If a story becomes popular on Digg and generates links back to a marketer’s Web site, that site may rise in search engine results and will not have to spend money on search advertising, he said.

Read full story

Some related stories:
15.000 dollar voor een verhaal op Digg - MarketingFacts.nl [NL]
Bloggers betalen om andere bloggers aan te vallen? [NL]
15.000 dollar voor een verhaal op Digg - Emerce.nl [NL]

Source: CNET News.com
marketingfacts.nl

Most of you probably know all about this already but I ran into an interesting article on Social Bookmarking Services And Tools: The Wisdom Of Crowds That Organizes The Web. If you ask me, the way to go for some companies…

Some highlights from the article:

• Social bookmarking has been one of Web 2.0’s success stories
• Social bookmarking brings to the equation something that search engines can’t compete with - the human touch.
• Del.icio.us, Stumble Upon, Blue Dot, Magnolia, Digg, Simpy, BlogMarks, Reddit, Furl, Blinklist, Spurl, delirious, Linkroll, Shadows, Yahoo MyWeb

 Source: RobinGood

Yesterday I was listening to one of Jaffe’s podcasts (#63) where one of the topics was Pay Per Post.

My personal view on this:
I totally agree with Jaffe’s point of view!

What’s the sense of having a blog if you get paid for each thing you place on it? Content will be total rubbish as it is manipulated by the company that delivers the content.

Even for SEO purpose I don’t think it’s a good idea. Also there you will have to manipulate what you write to make it work. It will become a money race for competing companies.

If you ask me, I am not going to be the one reading these kind of blogs…

Good job to make them the loser Jaffe!

What’s your point of view on this??

Source: acrossthesound

This is a collection of information I got from RSS feeds and Blogs I was reading the past days. As the subject interested me a lot I made a short overview of what I found, mostly inspired when reading Luis Suarez blog. If you are planning to start a corporate blog or already have one, it doesn’t matter…you should still check out the following.

To start of with you could have a look at the study that Northeastern University, in Massachusetts, did, where they got the share the results from a recent survey they performed about what makes a successful corporate blog?

Detailed information on the study you can find here: Blogging Success Study by Northeastern University and Backbone Media, Inc. However, to give you a quick shot of some of the stuff you would find there:

• Culture: If a company has particular cultural traits worth revealing or a bad reputation it wants to repudiate, blogging can be an attractive option.
• Transparency: Critical to establishing credibility and trust with an audience. People want to see an honest portrayal of a company.
• Time: It takes a lot of time to set up, research and write a quality blog. Companies need to identify a person who has the time or whose schedule is freed up to make the time.
• Dialogue: A company’s ability and willingness to engage in a dialogue with their customer base about topics that the customer base is interested in is critical to its blogging success.
• Entertaining writing style and personalization: A blogger’s writing style and how much they are willing to reveal about their life, experience and opinions brings human interest to a blog, helps build a personal connection with readers and will keep people reading.”

You should also have a look at Roland’s article if you are interested in corporate / enterprise weblogs. Go and check it out at Tips for successful corporate blogs.

Also Check out 10 Tips for Becoming a Great Corporate Blogger where you would be able to read some further details on what a great corporate weblogger would be like.

To get you started:

1. Understanding the fundamentals of Blogger Relations
2. Create value
3. Grow and sustain your audience by providing real analysis
4. Report on community opinion
5. Respond with comments to build relationships and traffic
6. Track your conversations
7. Don’t be afraid of criticism
8. Conduct interviews to generate content and ideas
9. Promote your weblog
10. Monitor the web for brand names and references

Last but not least, posted today at Clickz a nice article on Quick Tips on Corporate Blogging. “Corporate blogs are the new faces of business. Customers, employees, and those interested in your business want authentic dialogue, real insights, and a fresh perspective. Give it to them with a blog”.

And if you still have the time :), have a look at this research from Cédric on “Should companies integrate corporate blogs into their communication strategies?“ 

[Edit 7 December]

Another interesting article I found on cioinsight.com about: Corporate Blogging: What Could Go Wrong? Corporate blogging scares a lot of companies, and there are some good reasons to be nervous. But are people worrying about the right things?

Sources:
Northeastern University and Backbone Media Inc. Investigate
Luis Suarez
Roland Piquepaille
Cédric
Clickz
cioinsight.com

Interesting article comparing Blogs vs E-mail Newsletters.

Read all about it here

Jeanne Jennings: “…All in all, doing a good blog is more difficult than doing a good e-mail newsletter. Readers expect blogs to be updated at least daily; you can get away with doing an e-mail newsletter once a month…”

What is your tought on this??
I am not totally convinced; I agree with the fact that creating a email newsletter is quicker and more easy but the added value of a corporate blog shouldn’t be underestimated.
Customers, employees, and those interested in your business want authentic dialogue, real insights, and a fresh perspective. That to me is only possible via a blog.

Source: Clickz