My editor at BtoB Magazine recently asked me to track down a top corporate blogger and interview him/her for a piece on blog marketing. I scoured the top-blogger lists at Technorati, Bloglines and a few others and was surprised to find that, outside of perhaps Scobleizer, no corporate blogs among them. All the top blogs are either maintained by individuals or as distinct business entities in themselves.

I wonder why? Is it simply that working stiffs don’t have the time to devote to maintaining popular blogs? Is their subject matter not relevant enough? Do other bloggers not take them seriously enough to link to them? I’d appreciate your comments. I can’t figure this one out.

I had a phone interview today with Ron Bloom, co-founder of Podshow, and came away thinking about podcasting in a whole new way. Bloom is what you’d call a technology visionary. He sees things the way they will be many years from now. I found his thoughts very thought-provoking.

The way we use podcasts now is not how we’ll want to use them in the future. Today we subscribe to programs. In the future, we’ll subscribe to people and ideas. You may find my thoughts on social media to be interesting but you could care less what I think about the Boston Red Sox So you’d have the option to get a subscription only to my comments about the topic that interests you. My comments would be captured through a variety of mechanisms, not just through a microphone, as they are today. If I wanted to “broadcast” my opinion, I might pick up a phone and say what I’m thinking. Depending on the way I tagged my comments, it would be distributed to a certain group of people via podcast. People who didn’t subscribe to my posts on that subject area would never see them.

This makes sense. RSS as we know it is a primitive tool implemented in a primitive environment. We subscribe to people but not to topics. Unless, that is, we go to Technorati or Feedster or PubSub and set up topical profiles. But even those are imperfect because keywords are not a good way to specify what we want. The best programs will learn what we want through competition and field experience.

Today’s podcasting landscape is really very primitive, if you believe Ron Bloom. The next generation of podcasts will be much closer to a utility that delivers us only the information we want via whatever viewer we happen to have at a time. He has a very compelling argument. I hope he’s got it right.

An editor at Nature e-mailed me a response to Encyclopedia Britannica’s complaints summarized in this earlier post. You can see Nature‘s response here. Basically, Nature stands by its story and says it took material from non-Britannica reference works because that’s the content Britannica was posting on Britannica.com and Nature was comparing apples to apples. That’s an explanation but I’m not sure I buy it. When you question Encyclopedia Britannica’s accuracy, you really should be sure you’re talking about the encyclopedia and not a summary written for schoolkids. It doesn’t appear that Nature made that distinction. Other than that, though, the rebuttal provides a plausible defense of the research methodology. And don’t lose track of the big picture, which is that Nature demonstrated that, nitpicking aside, Wikipedia is pretty damned good.

Network World has an interesting story this week about the profusion of security surveys and all the confusion it’s creating in the market. The premise is that security companies use research to sell products and services and the corresponding flood of data actually obfuscates rather than clarifies what’s going on in the market.

It’s a clever idea and well done piece, though I think NWW stopped short of doing what could have been a more interesting investigation. Someone should go to these security companies and ask them to give up the full results of their research and then analyze what didn’t get published. Factoids from vendor market research can be like movie review excerpts trumpeted in advertising: the full story is far less interesting or could even be contradictory to the snippet of data that the public sees. Even if the results of such an investigation weren’t blockbuster news, it would be interesting to see what gets left on the cutting room floor and which vendors choose not to cooperate. Maybe someone will do that story.

Encyclopedia Britannica posted a rebuttal to the journal Nature’s investigation that found that Wikipedia.org was only slightly less accurate than the venerable Britannica. “We discovered in Nature’s work a pattern of sloppiness, indifference to basic scholarly standards, and flagrant errors so numerous they completely invalidated the results,” the 20-page white paper says. But say what you really think, Britannica!

Actually, the rebuttal is pretty damning. If Nature cut even half of the corners that the document cites, then it did a shoddy reporting job, certainly not something you’d expect from such a respected journal. However, Nature isn’t taking this lying down. It posted a 27-page addendum to the article showing in detail what were the errors in both reference sources. While a lot of the errors are so small as to seem inconsequential, the sheer number of mistakes is surprising. The addendum also doesn’t address Britannica’s charges that some of the source materials Nature used came not from the encyclopedia but from related reference works that are less detailed or aimed at younger audiences.

If I were Britannica, I guess I wouldn’t take this lying down, either. When you charge people $70 to use your reference work and someone else is giving away for free, you don’t want to acknowledge the competitor’s quality. That’s about the only card Britannica has to play.

EMarketer says Podcast ad market to climb to $300 million by 2010
BtoB Magazine quotes EMarketer as saying that podcasts will grow to $300 million by 2010, about a four-fold increase. The report also predicted that the U.S. podcast audience would reach 50 million by 2010—up from 5 million in 2005. A 10-fold increase in audience combined with a quadrupling of revenue doesn’t quite jive to me, but it’s impressive growth nonetheless. And I thought no one could figure out how to monetize this stuff!

Actually, a lot of people are figuring it out and they’re getting funded. Among the players are Podshow, SNP Communications, Fruitcast, and Podtrac.

Cory Treffiletti, SVP at Carat Fusion was recently quoted in Online Spin talking about the bright side (for marketers) of media fragmentation: “Some consumers want their programming when they want it, while others are willing to take it when they can get it. The simple truth is that technology, though it segments the audience and fragments when the audience will view content, has the potential to increase the overall audience for that content.” In other words, the audience is still massive, it’s just more dispersed.

Ferris’s daily analysis is impressive

Ferris Research is distributing notes and commentary by its analysts to journalists on a daily basis, sometimes more often. I don’t know of any other IT analyst firm that does this. It must take a lot of time and effort, I told founder David Ferris in an e-mail. He replied :”So far, it’s bringing us extra clients. Last week Citigroup became a customer as a result, and we’re getting very valuable survey data. I believe that the service makes sense for us. The biggest question we are grappling with is how to clearly deliver value, while maintaining a clear distinction from our premium news service.”

That’s always a dilemma in content marketing: how much do you give away? I know of no simple answers but the rule of thumb is to give till it hurts. When you begin to see a measurable effect on your business, then you’ve gone too far. But chances are you haven’t. I think most information companies don’t give away enough information and should push the envelope a little more. By the way, you can sign up for the Ferris newsletter here.

Silobreaker’s got a new perspective
Silobreaker has an interesting tool for visualizing information relationships into the US market. It’s one of several new companies exploring alternatives to linear search results as a way to find information. Search is a great way to find but not such a great way to browse and discover. There are several companies and academic research projects tackling this same problem. Answers.com has a good article about the subject with numerous examples.

Tower gets into podcasting
From the March 7 Sacramento Bee: “Seeking a meatier role in the accelerating online music world, Tower Records next week will launch a podcast Web service designed to promote independent music and drive more business to the store’s Web site. The pioneering West Sacramento-based record retailer will debut the podcast site, called Towerpod.com, at the annual South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin next week, a company executive said Tuesday. People who go to the Towerpod Web site will be able to download 30-minute podcasts of independent music assembled by Tower’s staff.

Wikis are getting hot
Wetpaint got a lot of media coverage early this month with the announcement of some vertical wikis and tools to manage them. The company’s site doesn’t provide much detail but Robin Good has an excellent writeup on what’s different about this product. Basically, it looks like a wiki with fancy management tools, which means it’s a content management system. Or is it? What’s the dividing line? The company has raised venture money, in any case, and that’s significant.

Actually, if you want to try a real wiki for free, head on over to Wikispaces. You can sign up, launch and be using a wiki for your bowling league while you read the history of bowling shoes or church picnic or whatever in a matter of minutes.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that news coverage on TV, in newspapers and online is becoming shallower and more repetititive. On one day, Google News listed 14,000 stories on only 24 subjects.

This is not a big surprise, but it’s troubling nonetheless. The gradual decline of mainstream media as a business has led to cutbacks in reporting staffs and less original news. The other day, one of the Boston TV stations led the 6 p.m. news with the story of a moose in the front seat of a car. It was an interesting subject, I must admit, but last I checked, Iraq was on the brink of civil war. I think the station mentioned that after the weather.

There is a blogosphere crowd that delights in the decline of mainstream media but I think they’re foolish and short-sighted. There is nothing good about having fewer reporters on the streets. Bloggers do an excellent job of interpreting and analyzing the news, but they aren’t going to sniff out a story and spend months cranking through documents and interviewing sources the way a good reporter does. For that, you need professional journalists and organizations that support them.

Unfortunately, outside of a few elite publications, those organizations are becoming fewer and fewer. Most news departments are so budget-poor these days that they can’t afford to pay really experienced reporters. So the core of their news staff consists of recent college grads supporting a small number of “name” journalists. Professional journalists increasingly have to make their living working for corporate marketing departments.

I’d like to think the rise of social media will change all this but I see no reason why it will. If anything, words are becoming a commodity and that means that people who create words for a living will have to seek work elsewhere. The risk of the blogosphere is that it becomes a forum for a million Rush Limbaughs: people who spew and vent but don’t really contribute anything useful. Maybe someone will figure out a business model for reinventing news journalism out of a community of bloggers. I hope so.

Digital ID World’s Eric Norlin nicely sums up the changes that community media is driving in Syndicator Blog: Riding the Syndicate Wave. “The hierarchy of sacred media contacts is crumbling. Word of mouth, bloggers, buzz and small communities of extremely influential (and vocal) people rule the day.” Amen.

Personally, I believe this is an opportunity to big media. Those who have passed the denial stage will realize that blogs offer cheap content and the possibility of identifying new influencers who can grace their pages with compelling commentary. Blogs aren’t a replacement for mainstream meda; they’re a complement to it. Why aren’t more newspapers following Businessweek‘s lead and really embracing this channel?

GM is asking consumers to create ads for the Chevy Tahoe. I think you’ll see a lot more of this in the future. Broadcast advertising is dying a slow death, the victim of TiVo and viewers who are distracted by other options. Advertisers have to get creative. The much-reviled product placements will surely be a popular option but I find this concept more interesting. Take advantage of the fact that people have good quality, cheap multimedia production equipment and encourage them to create their own ads. Oh, and cut your costs by, like, 90%.

Podshow has been an innovator in this area. There will be a lot of debate about disclosure, of course, but I think ultimately this trend will be huge. Advertisers really have no choice.

I think in the history of the Internet or mainstream media or whatever history book you want to write, this story will go down as a milestone. For many years, newspapers have devoted pages and pages of daily editorial space to stock tables, usually with very little advertising to offset the cost. It was only a matter of time before the Old Gray Lady, as the Times is affectionately called, gave in an moved online. I’m sure there were no tears shed at the paper. With the Times taking the lead, expect stock tables to disappear entirely from newspapers. They’ll become but a shadowy memory to us old folks!

N.Y. Times to Scrap Weekday Stock Tables – Yahoo! News