PR Thoughts

75 000 new weblogs each day

Technorati published it's last state of the blogosphere,  over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago, about 50 000 new post per hour ! We keep the rhythm !
Have a look on the full report on Dave Sifry's blog, the summary is below:

- Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
- The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
- It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
- On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
- 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
- Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

Tags: technorati, blogosphere

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Social computing: new report from Forrester

Forrester published it's report on Social Computing, "How Networks Erode Institutional Power, And What to Do About It", issued by Chris Charron, Jaap Favier and Charlene Li, available through online order for 299$.
Charlene Li gives some input on her blog about it, the executive summary is below:

"Easy connections brought about by cheap devices, modular content, and shared computing resources are having a profound impact on our global economy and social structure. Individuals increasingly take cues from one another rather than from institutional sources like corporations, media outlets, religions, and political bodies. To thrive in an era of Social Computing, companies must abandon top-down management and communication tactics, weave communities into their products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists."

Last Forrester's related research document:

Social Computing Takes A Step Forward
December 14, 2005, Trends

How Firms Should Work With The Open Source Ecosystem
October 4, 2005 Market Overview

Social Networking Redefines Self-Service Options
August 16, 2005, Best Practices

Podcasting For Marketers
July 5, 2005, Trends

Tags: forrester

Blogs vs. MSM

Dave Sifry published yesterday the second part of Technorati's state of the blogosphere, it's definitely worth reading !
In the same time, Technorati announced a new filter by authority feature, that I have to say, I was expecting for long...;o)

Below is the summary from Dave's post.

• Blogging and Mainstream Media continue to share attention in blogger's and reader's minds, but bloggers are climbing higher on the "big head" of the attention curve, with some bloggers getting more attention than sites including Forbes, PBS, MTV, and the CBC.

• Continuing down the attention curve, blogs take a more and more significant position as the economics of the mainstream publishing models make it cost prohibitive to build many nice sites and media

• Bloggers are changing the economics of the trade magazine space, with strong entries covering WiFi, Gadgets, Internet, Photography, Music, and other nice topic areas, making it easier to thrive, even on less aggregate traffic.

• There is a network effect in the Technorati Top 100 blogs, with a tendency to remain highly linked if the blogger continues to post regularly and with quality content.

• Looking at the historical data shows that the inertia in the Top 100 is very low - in other words, the number of new blogs jumping to the top of the Top 100 as well as he blogs that have fallen out of the top 100 show that the network effect is relatively weak.

• The Magic Middle is the 155,000 or so weblogs that have garnered between 20 and 1,000 inbound links. It is a realm of topical authority and significant posting and conversation within the blogosphere.

• Technorati Explore is a new feature that uses the authoritative topical bloggers as a distributed editorial team, highlighting the most interesting blog posts and links in over 2,500 categories.

• The new Filter By Authority slider makes it easy to refine a search and look for either a wider array of thoughts and opinions, or to narrow the search to only bloggers that have lots of other people linking to them. This gives you the power to decide how much filtering you want.

Full post from Technorati's blog

Technorati's State of the blogosphere

Technorati published it's "State of the blogosphere" report, part I.

In summary:

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• Over 81 million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

See the full report on technorati's weblog, part II is announced so stay tuned there !

Technorati and Edelman to launch a "Blogger PR Survey"

Technorati and Edelman have launched a new survey to analyze how bloggers interact with companies and their products. The goal of this survey is for part of it, to get opinions on best practices for companies wanting more active involvement with the blogging community.

Certainly a good idea and I am looking forward to see the results.... But... I'd like to react on Question #9: If you know a message is sent to you from a PR firm, how much are you likely to trust it on a scale between 1 and 10, where “1” is "not at all" and “10” is "complete trust"?

Although I am a PR blogger, I often receive informations/products from companies that are looking for my "voice" ... I don't think that a message is loosing immediately credibility as soon as he has been send out by a PR firm. My answer is a blogger one, not a PR one by the way here. The most important is how the message coming from this PR firm is formulated, knowing that the target audience must be taken in consideration in the way the message is written. As blogger, I am happy to get informations about companies that are in my scope of interest, but it will be boring to get traditional press releases from them, I am not a journalist. Which doesn't mean that I don't want to be informed. I wan't the sender of the information to adapt the content for me or what I represent. Send me information plus links to help me get additional inputs on the story and let me form my own opinion.

So, my answer to the question is "5", depending of the content, not only of the sender ...;o) How many times are we spammed directly by companies to promote products, often pharmaceuticals or software, of no interest to us at all... ? Would those companies be working with PR firms, then they would certainly not be spamming us... ;o)

Just my 2 cents...

Technorati Tags: Edelman, technorati

A white paper on podcasting

Podblaze issued a very interesting white paper on podcasting that you can download for free after registering on their website.
They are also providing a lot of informations on various tools, podcast software, forum and directories, they also began a blog.

Technorati Tags: podcasting

Deutsche Bank to issue a report on corporate blogging

Deutsche Bank Research, the think tank of the Deutsche Bank issued a report "Blogs: The New magic formula for corporate communications ?"

You can download it there as pdf file. See also DB Research

Via Francisque

Technorati Tags: blogging survey, Deutsche Bank

Ogilvy PR published an "Executive Blogger's Guide..."

Ogilvy PR's Asia Pacific President, Christopher Graves has published the "Executive Blogger's Guide to building a nest of Blogs, Wikis & RSS ".

You can download the full study here.

Thanks to Tom Murphy for the link.

Reminder: Edelman and Intelliseek published a guide to the blogosphere several month ago, see there.

PS: sorry for this lack of post those last days, some holidays have taken me out of here...

A new white paper on blogging

Mark Rogers, CEO of Market Sentinel just told me about the white paper they have published recently with Weboptimiser.
"It looks at the whole area of how blogging is impacting brands and suggest some simple suggestions", say Mark.

Thank you Mark for letting me know, I've just printed it and I am going to have a deep look on it !

"Search is brand" - Market Sentinel - Weboptimiser

Technorati Tags: corporate blogging, blogging survey

Proximity published results from a blog survey

An interesting picture coming from Germany about the expectations of blog readers conducted by the Proximity.
Fredrik published a translation in english of the results on his CorporateBlogging's blog.

Extract:
- Of the blog readers, 54% form their opinions about products/companies on the basis of blogs.
- 51% of the blog readers visit product and/or corporate sites as a results of reading blogs.

Original german press release is there.

Are you still wondering whether your company should have a blog ? ;o)

Via Don.

Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications?

Frank Gilbane recently drop me an email to let me know about the last report his company has been publishing,  Blogs & Wikis: Technologies for Enterprise Applications ?  I am happy to post a short reminder here to make sure I'll have a deep look on it in the very next days as I am more than interested in that kind of topics...

Thanks for letting me know about the survey Frank.

Executive summary:

"Blogs and wikis are flexible practices and technologies that are increasingly being used within companies and organizations to ease the creation and dissemination of information, as well as making it easier for companies to communicate effectively with customers, partners, and the public. This article discusses some of the salient features of blogs and wikis, and give examples of companies who already have implemented one or more of these systems.

On speaking with several vendors and users, it is obvious that many companies are implementing blogs and/or wikis or hybrid systems successfully and I expect this to continue as the technologies and practices mature."

Download a PDF version of the report here