Category Archives: Blogging

Blog make-over

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Welcome to the new and improved smays.com. Okay, it’s new. I’m pooped and I didn’t do a damned thing. Many thanks to The Amazing Andy for getting all hot and sweaty under the blog hood. Which is where most of the “improved” stuff shows up.

We’re pretty sure everything (1,300+ posts) made the move but there’s sure to be a few busted links and such. When you find one, please let me know (steve mays at hotmail.com) and be sure to tell me where to find the link (url or date or something). Now some of you are saying to yourself, “Well, yeah!” And some of you are saying, “That’s a good idea.” I’m sure I’ll find and fix ’em all in time.

If you have ever linked to one of my posts, well, it’s probably toast. Sorry about that. Once I figure out how, I’ll add a Google search and you can probably find the post again if you really think it’s worth the effort.

The masthead image is something I first saw on Dave Winer’s blog and loved immediately. I’ll change it from time to time and use only shot’s I’ve taken and mean something to me.

The Office Cam will be dark for a while until I figure out how to post the images here. What else? Oh, Comments. I haven’t turned them on yet and I’m not sure I will. Let me think about it. For now, just email me if you have something to say. I might post it and I might not.

Jonathan Schwartz on executive blogging

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Jonathan Schwartz –president and COO of Sun Microsystems– on executive blogging:

“If you want to be a leader, I can’t see surviving without a blog. It’s as important as having an e-mail account and a mobile phone. It doesn’t count if you delegate the task of maintaining your blog to someone on your staff.”

Schwartz says that too often, communicating with employees and business partners is like a game of telephone. You speak to a group of people close to you, and they speak to their teams, and so on and so on. With a blog, “you hop through 12 layers of management to get directly to someone in New Zealand.” It also opens up a channel for receiving feedback and ideas from that employee in New Zealand.” [Fast Company]

I have been (gently) lobbying the COO of our company to consider blogging. He’s a smart and funny guy (neither necessary for blogging) and would be very good at it. But it is a bit like having a puppy. A lot of work and sometimes messy.

Jeff Jarvis on “citizen media”

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“…new world of weblogs and citizens’ media is all about possibilities — many of them unrealized, I grant — while the world of the big, old media is increasingly about worry: fretting over declining revenue, resources, audience, quality, trust. That is one good reason for big media to embrace the small, rather than trying to recapture the old: It’s optimistic, energetic, new, open, growing, and fun; it’s the medium in the better mood and that’s catching. In short: Bloggers make better barmates.”  — Full post here

Next week at Gnomedex, I will be surrounded by lots of bloggers and new media types. I’m looking forward to 3 days of optimism, energy, fun. The future is here and I’m loving it.

AgWired.com

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Since I started blogging (February, 2002) I’ve probably helped a couple of dozen folks get started but none drank the blog Kool-Aid like long-time friend Chuck Zimmerman. He didn’t just take a sip, he’s started chugging and hasn’t stopped. And his blog, AgWired.com is rapidly becoming one of the best sources for news about agriculture in the midwest. His focus is agrimarketing but he’s branching out quickly.

Chuck is a blogging machine. He is single-handedly covering more news than a bus-load of NAFB reporters and tired old print publications. He recently rolled out a new look and his blog is easily the best looking ag site on the net. Chuck is a classic example of citizen journalism. From their home, Chuck and his wife Cindy are demonstrating how just two sharp people armed with a laptop and a digital camera can tell a story. Tell a lot of stories.

Prediction: long after a lot of tired old print publications go belly up and begin collecting dust in the basement, AgWired.com will be a major source for agriculture news for thousands of daily readers. You heard it here.

Arianna Huffington’s new blog

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It has generated a lot buzz. It feels heavily “produced” to me. Not blog-like in the (can we say “traditional” already?) traditional senses. But, man, they have some pretty witty folks banging out the posts.

My houseboy just informed me that he has located a blog named Huffington is Full of Crap. I would like to inform the smelly blue-collar drone who named this site that while I am sure it was really funny when you mentioned it to your friends down at the labor pool, Arianna is not amused at all, and when she finds out who owns the land on which you park your trailer, she will marry him and make him evict you.

But so does The Onion. And that’s what Huffington’s Toast feels like to me. A well done humor magazine.

Business Week: “Blogs Will Change Your Business”

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I haven’t seen it, but Doc says it’s the cover story (May 2, 2005) in Business Week. In Blogs Will Change Your Business, Stephen Baker and Heather Green offer this warning: “Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.”

There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. Let’s assume that 99.9% are off point. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.

While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to.

The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.

Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they’re losing control of it.

The dot-com era was powered by companies — complete with programmers, marketing budgets, Aeron chairs, and burn rates. The masses of bloggers, by contrast, are normal folks with computers: no budget, no business plan, no burn rate, and — that’s right — no bubble.

A prediction: Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like — you guessed it — blogs.

We’ll see. In the meantime, I’m getting a thin spot on the top of my head from people patting and smiling when I talk about blogs. I’ve bookmarked the new blog at Business Week Online(Blogspotting.net).

Blogging NAMA

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My buddy Chuck has only been blogging for a few months but he caught on fast. This week he was at the annual meeting of the National Agri Marketing Association (NAMA) and blogged everything that moved and handed out a bunch of “You’ve been blogged by ZimmComm” T-shirts.

The folks that knew about blogging we’re impressed he was covering. Those that had never heard the term (Don’t ask me how that’s possible) will remember they heard it from him first. I kept checking the official NAMA website for news from their meeting. Yawn. The days of posting a few pix and a news release a week after the event are over. And out.