ContentRobot

Steve Jobs announced the Apple iPhone at his 2007 Macworld keynote yesterday.

It’s a remarkable innovation, and ContentRobot is salivating at the prospect of owning (and blogging from) this incredible device this summer.

We were thinking about how getting this sweet gadget to market is like developing a successful blog. Consider ….

The iPhone was developed over 2 years
Few blogs are overnight successes. Finding your rhythm and writing unique content takes time, energy, and effort. Despite the hard work required, don’t give up too soon!

Apple developed key partnerships
They hooked up with Yahoo! for delivering IMAP “push” emails, Google for Google Maps and a host of other services, and Cingular for developing Visual Voicemail. Seek out people that you can help and who might be able to help you. You never know what can develop.

The user interface is simple and intuitive
With its elegant UI, the iPhone allows you to concentrate on what you need to do (make a call, listen to music) without being distracted by the bells and whistles. Similarly, well-designed blogs provide a great user experience - you get right to the meat of the content, which is almost always preferable to slogging through Flash-based sites.

The iPod, Phone and Internet is fully integrated
You no longer to carry your cell phone and your iPod. Similarly, you don’t need to develop a website and a blog. Today’s blog software allows you to a full-featured website (with e-commerce or other additions) upon its robust foundation.

Small can be mighty
The device packs a punch in a small footprint. You don’t have to be a big corporation to take advantage of blogging. All you need is a desire to communicate.

The Apple iPhone is a leap for communications devices everywhere - we’re sure Treo is shaking in their shoes. With the right spirit and innovation, blogs can help your company jump over your competition, too.

Happy New Year, everyone! We sincerely hope that the next 365 days are full of hope and joy. ContentRobot has learned so much from our clients and colleagues about blogging in 2006, and thought we’d share our resolutions for 2007:

1. Make our blog posts more personal. We found that blogs are so much more interesting when there is a personal slant. See how the Farmington Valley Goldens blog does this so well. And, of course, the puppy pictures are just irrestible.
2. Make sure our blog posts encourage more two-way conversation. The guys at Bazaarvoice know how to get their readers involved and offers intelligent conversation on a variety of topics.
3. Make sure our blog posts points readers to more onsite resources. New School Selling provides great content that encourages travel throughout the whole site.
4. Make our blog posts more passionate. The Team Timex blog exudes passion and expertise as various team members document their training and racing experiences on the IronMan tour.
5. Be bolder and make our blog posts a bit more controversial when we can. Education Insider combines politics and personal beliefs to challenge and support the public education system in Austin, TX.

What did you resolve to do on your site? How will can that positively affect your blogging in 2007?

Remember when you listened to the radio, read the newspaper, watched TV, and surfed the net? You were part of a passive audience who sat there and were spoon-fed what the mass media wanted us to consume.

Now we live in a connected world where you can also participate! What was the domain of mass media can be done by the masses now.

The humble blog has given the press to us. Maybe you have your own blog. Or perhaps you’ve added your two cents by doing own some writing / commenting on other’s blogs.

Images and video can be done with a reasonably-priced digital camera! So we snap and shoot away - even from our cellphones. This allows you to produce your own visual view.

Podcasts have given the radio station to us, too. No longer stuck on unimaginative corporate frequencies, we can listen to stuff that interests and inspires us.

You now can decide how to engage with the media, including what application, what device, what time, and what place. And more and more of have participated in forming our own media experience.

This new “active audience” doesn’t want to just sit there but to take part, debate, create, communicate, share.

New media is doing all that, which makes us smile. Remember the power of the people, and use them to make your blogs and your brands more powerful, too!

~ Inspired by a story found on Press Think.

Are you blogging? Great! Is it what you’d thought it would be? Here are five things to consider as you continue to blog away:

1. It’s Hard Work
While you put in your hours at the start, are you still plugging away with the same enthusiasm? With so much competing for your time (family, “real job,” fun, etc.) you can get lulled into putting your blog aside. Everyone has the same 24 hours, so making your your blog a goal will get the job done.

2. The Rewards Are Not Instant
Hope you didn’t think that blogging was one of the ways to get rich quickly?! Your rewards will come if you continue to work hard to build your traffic, create a worthy reputation, interact with your readers, and work at it day by day. Create realistic goals, look for building blocks of success and build on those to keep you going.

3. Blogging is More than Just Writing
All you writers out there, just said, “Oh, man!” But beyond your great content, you must strive to put your blog and yourself out there. This means getting links, putting on your sales hat once in a while, and do a bit of promotion (online and off).

4. Where’s the Money?
Look for opportunities to monetize your blog. Do you have products to sell? Looking to do some advertsing - Google Adsense and Adwords campaigns are good places to start. Also, consider developing sponsorships, cultivating advertiser relationships, researching affiliates to create some real income potential. But remember blogging with passion often garners results over those who are blogging for the money.

5. Don’t Give Up
Don’t get quickly disheartened when their blogging goals are not being met (whether it’s earning big gobs of cash or garnering a following). Continue to be flexible with what you want out of your blog - and work, work, work towards that end.

If you want your blog to survive after the first year, try to work toward staying power, don’t be defeated by minor setbacks, and put in the hard work. Have fun and keep blogging!

Interesting thought on Seth Godin’s blog today:

So what if your company’s blog only reaches a few dozen people a day. If they’re the right people, the payoff is obvious.

While a bunch of traffic is nice, it’s the reach that is more important. Who will you blog for today?

Are you a blogger? Do you have your own blog or do you write one for your company? Why do you do it?

Here are some of our favorites reasons, in no particular order. Some of them may inspire you to get blogging!

• It’s a vital part of marketing your business.
• To express yourself and promote opinions.
• Blogging platforms and add-ons are free.
• It’s fast becoming the top internet marketing tool.
• To be heard.
• It’s easy to update.
• To educate.
• To make money - by selling something or dabbling in blog advertising.
• To offer tips, techniques, and best practices.
• To show off expertise.
• To write about a subject that deeply interests them.
• It’s one of the best ways to generating traffic to your web site.
• For top search engine ranking. With quality content, blogs are often keyword-rich, which provides plenty of food for search engine spiders. Top slot organic (or unpaid for listings) should be a goal to reach for.
• To create and nurture a conversation - not only on your blog but by commenting on others who write about your topic.
• ContentRobot’s favorite reason … it’s fun!

Why do you blog?

Not blogging yet? ContentRobot offers 5 reasons why you should be.

1. Publishing Content is Easier.
Blog posts can be written with minimal knowledge of HTML, can be done from any browser, can be written at any time (even multiple times per day), and you don’t need a big team of web specialists to update your content.

2. Blogs Make it More Personal
Blogs are not written by corporations, but are written by people. When bloggers infuse their personalities into their posts, blogs become more alive and interesting.

3. Conversations are Encouraged
Trackbacks and comments allow blog visitors to get involved and shape conversations. When done in the proper spirit, blogs are just better at building a community than websites.

4. Promoting Content is Automatic
Because most blog software pings (or broadcasts that an update has been made) weblogs.com or technorati or other ping servers, your relevant posts can get indexed quickly around the Internet.

5. Content Can Be Syndicated
Blog software allows your content to be syndicated via RSS or news feeds. This helps your blog fans to stay in touch with what you are doing. Encourage your visitors to come back to your blog regularly or (even better) subscribe to your news feed for any and all updates.

Why is blogging and other forms of new media becoming more and more popular?

1. We want to participate
Generally, we’ve been led by the hand by “experts” and reporters who present us with the news and other knowledge - and we passively consumed what they said. Today, not only do we want the latest information given to us, but we want to interact and participate in it. New media (such as blogs, podcasts, a camera phone image sharing) promotes expertise in the collective rather than the individual.

2. We are suspicious of “institution”
Government, church, business, mainstream media, and other institutions, in many people’s view, no longer hold the respect and admiration it once did. What’s we’re left with is a lot of disillusionment and suspicion of bigger entities. We now look toward many smaller players (often bloggers) who can offer a fresher, alternative opinion. 

3. We desire to connect
While we seem to revere individualism, there is a basic need to connect with one another. Blogs, at their best, involve conversations, collective learning, and being a part of things that are bigger than just yourself.

4. We seek out diverse opinions
The world is getting smaller and a lot less “black and white,” and it’s now OK to entertain different opinions and a clash of ideas. Blogs often allow discourse of thought through comments and discussion.

5. We want it now
No one wants to wait any longer than they have to. And new media, by its very nature, is light footed, nimble and quick to report and publish news and information.

Thanks to Problogger for his original musings on the subject.

Found this gem post on the Scobelizer blog today: Kid says blogging better than firetrucks

Earthlink held a “take your child to work day” last week and Staff Engineer Josh Kleinpeter wrote his experiences about when it was his turn to teach kids how to blog - after thinking that the tour of the firetruck would be the highlight of their day.

Go check out the pictures of the event and read what Josh say about it.

We agree with the little girl who said “blogging was cooler than a firetruck.” So listen to your inner child - blogging is fun!

Read the Entire Post >

One of the most highly touted features of the Web 2.0 era is the rise of blogging. Personal home pages, personal diaries, and personal opinion, have been around since the early days of the web, so what is the fuss all about?

RSS Extends Web Page Viewing Away from the Browsers
It used to be that web browsers were the only way for people to view web pages. Now RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology extends that capability. RSS aggregators can be web-based (like Bloglines), desktop clients, and even portable devices allow you to subscribe to constantly updated content.

RSS is now being used to push not just notices of new blog entries, but also all kinds of data updates, including stock quotes, weather data, and photo availability.

Permalinks Point the Way Toward Discussion
But RSS is only part of what makes a weblog different from an ordinary web page. The permalink (or the ability to click through to the entire post’s page) effectively turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities.

For the first time it became relatively easy to point directly at a highly specific post on someone else’s site and talk about it. Discussions, chats, and friendships emerged or became more entrenched. Therefore, the permalink was the first - and most successful - attempt to build bridges between weblogs.

The “blogosphere” then can be thought of as a new, peer-to-peer equivalent to Usenet and bulletin-boards, the conversational watering holes of the early internet. Not only can people subscribe to each others’ sites, and easily link to individual comments on a page, but also, via a mechanism known as trackbacks, they can see when anyone else links to their pages, and can respond, either with reciprocal links, or by adding comments.

Web 2.0 Harnesses Collective Intelligence
An essential part of Web 2.0 is turning the web into a kind of global brain. The blogosphere becomes the equivalent of constant mental chatter or voice we hear in all of our heads.

The blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect because search engines use link structure to help predict useful pages, and bloggers (as the most prolific and timely linkers) have a disproportionate role in shaping search engine results.

Considering what Wikipedia does, blogging then harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter or what James Suriowecki calls “the wisdom of crowds” or Dan Gillmor calls “we, the media.”

What it Means for Your Blog Efforts
Your blogs, which will evolve into a multi-authored, broad channel collaboration site, where it becomes your focus group and spokespeople for your brands. Because they are leveraged, not a regurgitation of the web site content, you’ll get input, reviews, shared pictures, etc. as you control and manage the conversation.

Adapted from Tim O’Reilly’s What Is Web 2.0