Business Week: "Blogs will change your business."

192677 Resource 76096 24 1 1197924236866 1201579374234 Controlled Business Week: "Blogs will change your business."

There's no debating it - businesses must engage in the conversational web.

This <a title="The Search Engine's Love Affair With Blogs" href="http://www.grokdotcom.com/2007/12/13/search-engines-love-blogs/" target="_blank">Business Week cover story</a> was one of the better written pieces about business blogging that I've seen in years. Typically, these stories are rife with misconceptions and misleading information. But the <a href="http://www.hispanictrending.net/">author</a> focused on two of the most important requirements - relevance and freshness. There are many other requirements and the author makes this clear.<blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">"Don’t add a blog to your site if you're not willing to consistently invest time and effort. An outdated blog will reflect the opposite image of whatever it is you want potential customers to know about your company." -- <a title="Posts by Juan Tornoe" href="http://www.grokdotcom.com/author/juan-tornoe/">Juan Tornoe</a></blockquote>MyST Blogsite provides the automated machinery to keep a blogsite fresh and tools to help keep it relevant. Automated briefings and inbound syndicated content capabilities work together to always provide fresh material relavant to your content focus.<blockquote dir="ltr" style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">"The power of a relevant and consistently updated blog is not to be taken lightly, nor is it for the faint of heart. Years and years of posting relevant information about the subject made Google consider the blog so relevant that, when this specific term was searched, they listed it “Numero Uno." -- <a title="Posts by Juan Tornoe" href="http://www.grokdotcom.com/author/juan-tornoe/">Juan Tornoe</a></blockquote>More excellent advice. A business blogsite is a serious decision and it has long-lasting effects. This is why we build quality assurance tools into our services; you'll appreciate the help maintaining the high content quality your customers expect. 9 application/xml false blogosphere BusinessWeek content relevance posting frequency quality assurance Business Week: "Blogs will change your business." You've read in one too many places that your website should include a blog in order to get better positioning in search engine results. http://www.grokdotcom.com/2007/12/13/search-engines-love-blogs Future Now's Marketing Optimization Blog GrokDotCom is published by the knowledge-thirsty folks at Future Now and focuses on grokking human reactions to marketing, sales, PR & evolving media. http://www.grokdotcom.com/ Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 $Admin false true false false true 174050 false false true false false false true 198459 Resource 174050 173239 21 1204274915509 1219595857816 Controlled Dugg: Social Media Will Change Your Business | BusinessWeek

Three aspects of social media are truely qualitative departures from the past.

The three aspects of social media that I'd like to view as qualitative departures from the past are:<ol><li>'The End of Channels' in that online conversations happen all over the place;</li><li>'The Wisdom of the Crowd', social software helping people navigate their way through online coversations;</li><li>The participatory and co-creational nature of social media. </li></ol> 9 application/xml false distributed conversations end of channels wisdom of crowds The End of Channels? Three aspects of social media are truely qualitative departures from the past. http://www.josschuurmans.com/2007/09/the-dilution-of.html Other Posts by Jos about Conversations Posts Categorized as "conversation" http://www.josschuurmans.com/conversation/ A published article is no longer the start of a discussion, nor does its channel any longer host that discussion. A published article contributes to The Conversation around the topic at hand (which in most cases was already taking place in various shapes elsewhere) and which can unfold in a thousand different directions in conversation threads across the Web and over time. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 aseidl 68.40.167.222 false true false false true 198564 Resource 174050 24 21 1204480015508 1205549024469 Controlled The End of Channels

... in that online conversations happen all over the place.

Hmmm... yes, conversations happen all over the place, but humans (and machines) typically try to create order from chaos. They do this by meta-categorizing information. This seems to be a natural objective in virtual and physical worlds.One might even conclude that while conversations [about a specific subject] occur everywhere and across all mediums, natural bonds based on say, tags(?) can be used to describe a "conversation channel". This is a virtual channel in that its topology is guided and shaped by tags (in this theoretical example).People tend to prefer the benefits that channels provide - they create the notion of a "meta-handle" that makes it easier for them to understand, know about, and share. Search engines love channels - they provide clumps of related information that make it easier for them to recommend as a source of knowledge because the content has a certain degree of density about a single topic.While most MyST Blogsites define separate blogs within a single blogsite as a "channel", the architecture embraces this idea purely as a logical array of like-minded information. The conversations that may occur within and peripheral to a given post (i.e., an item resource in a channel) are not bound to that channel. <a title="Topic Cloud FAQ" href="blog/108399">Topic Cloud</a> automatically exposes relationships that are "channel-less" and our filter-pattern technology allows us to create virtual channels to meet future unknown business requirements. 9 application/xml false channels What's the difference between channels and blogs? A channel is a container for content; a blog is a type of channel but there can be other types as well. item/154366 Channels and Comments Kevin Lynch (Macromedia) recently asked if there were good ways to create a commenting infrastructure for Weblogs. http://myst-technology.com/public/blog/18736 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 aseidl 68.40.167.222 false true false false true 198703 Resource 174050 173239 24 1204649997307 1216689574091 Controlled Simply 'conversations'

Why distributed online conversations are not channels...

Bill:Great stuff, thanks Bill! I'm adding on to this conversation as well: "Channels" does not sufficiently describe the dynamics of distributed online conversations - so why not simply call them "conversations"? 9 application/xml false channels collaborative filtering distributed conversations 'Channels' does not sufficiently describe the dynamics of distributed online conversations. The way I used "channels" in my post on 'The End of Channels?' was with the traditional notion of, if you will, media titles, in mind: TV/radio channels or shows, zines, newspapers, websites, blogs, forums... http://www.josschuurmans.com/2008/03/channels-does-n.html But if we look passed the keeper of the gate and over the garden wall, I am willing to accept that channels - as in "meta-handlers" - are not necessarily disappearing, but rather evolving into new forms, such as distributed conversations connected by tags. Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Dosware Team Internet Browser; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 bfrench 76.120.48.245 false true false false true 199185 Resource 174050 21 21 1205245602168 1205248020943 Controlled Conversations and channels are terms at different levels of abstraction

Would anyone suggest choosing between the terms 'building' and 'home'?

From the very beginning, our work on the MyST Platform (a layered set of services roughly organized, from bottom up, as MyST Information Object Model, MyST Web Services Platform, MySmartChannels Weblog Application Server, MyST Blogsite), has been guided by the topic map research that Bill and I did while we were both at Starbase.  Our goal was to design and build an information management platform almost as abstract as topic maps.  (While we both remain strong believers in the topic map vision, we also witnessed first hand the practical challenges of commercializing true topic map technologies--and as a small start up in 2002, we needed shorter routes to demonstrable applications.)So, in that mindset, we created the MyST Object Model--a highly abstract information model capable of representing any conceivable thing (motivated by the impressively general definition of subject in topic map speak.)  Fundamental building blocks in the MyST Object Model are Resources, Domains, and Associations.  (Technically, we could have done without domains, but domains are one of those concessions to pragmatism.)The MyST Web Services Platform builds web services and security around a MyST Object Model persistence layer.  Inherent in this platform is the idea of plug-ins that expose new object models which are based on the underlying MyST Object Model but are more specialized--i.e., more naturally suited to solving a specific class of problems.  The MySmartChannels object model is one such derived object model and forms the heart of the next layer in the MyST technology stack, the MySmartChannels Weblog Application Server.Central to the MySmartChannels object model are Spaces, Channels, and Items (and various association types).  Without getting into details, these object classes are more specialized than the underlying Domain and Resources classes of the MyST Object Model, but are still very abstract.  For example, we use channels to represent many differing kinds of collections of information--weblogs, competitive intelligence, site navigation details, various process configurations, public comments, etc.Finally, we can talk about conversations.  The term "conversation" generally refers to a communication between two or more people (or more generally, agents.)  Conversations do, in fact, take place all over the place, and channels may be suitable mechanism for capturing and representing some conversations.  (Other conversations may be more complex--i.e., contain more information--than can be easily represented in an single channel, perhaps suggesting multiple channels, various typed associates, etc.)The point of all this, of course, is that "channel" and "conversation" are useful, related, but different concepts; just as "building" and "home" are useful, related, but different concepts. 10 application/xml false channels object model Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 aseidl 68.40.167.222 false true false false true 76096 blog blogsite/Blogsite/web