Vancouver Kris Krüg photographer / geek / Bryght founder is interviewed by The Aesthetic Poetic.

Investor's Business Daily reports on the use of Blogging and Web 2.0 in the enterprise intranet for knowledge capture and sharing:

Wells Fargo's 160,000 employees are finding it easier to communicate these days.

They're using blogs and group-written Web pages called wikis to spread the word about products, marketing materials, the latest company news and reports and much more.

"It used to be people had to talk one-on-one to have actual communication," said Danny Peltz, executive vice president, wholesale Internet solutions at Wells Fargo. (WFC) "Things like wikis, things like blogs, are just another form of communication — from one to many or many to many."

The bank is an adopter of collaboration tools called Web 2.0.

CIO Insight has posted the results of a survey of CIOs about which web apps they use "personally":

Video over the web	54%
Wikis	49
Blogs	48
RSS (Really Simple Syndication)	47
Podcasts	39
Social networking (e.g., tagging, social bookmarks, community sites such as del.icio.us, LinkedIn, Technorati)	33

Isn't that interesting? Statistically speaking, wikis, blogs and RSS work out to be about the same.

You can probably jam a lot of stuff into a blog database -- social bookmarks and lifestream pull feeds, for example -- if you can mark it "not front page eligible". This would also mean that they shouldn't show up in syndication feeds and maybe in some archives, though the latter will require more though.

Sharon Gaudin at Information Week writes:

Younger employees -- like that new batch of college grads hitting the market right now -- are going to be pushing employers to use Web 2.0 technologies on the job. And if their companies don't start adopting them, younger workers will most likely just start using them on the sly.

"The upcoming generation is going to have a major impact on business. She will expect to have access to her tools in the workplace," said Marthin De Beer, a senior VP with Cisco Systems. "It would be like someone from my generation not having access to e-mail and instant messaging. If they don't get this stuff, they probably won't be there for a long time."

Jonathan Schwartz wrote a letter to the US Securities and Exchange Commission about using the Internet (i.e. blogs) for disclosure:

In your letter of November 2, you raised potential challenges to permitting blogs and corporate websites to be used to satisfy Reg FD's "widespread dissemination" requirement. Specifically, you inquired whether “there exist effective means to guarantee that a corporation uses its website in ways that assure broad non-exclusionary access, and the extent to which a determination that particular methods are effective in that regard depends on the particular facts.” Some of the comments to my blog echo the same concerns: critical company information could be difficult to find, accessible only with a registration or technologically obstructed.

We understand these apprehensions, but are confident that they can be addressed with clear directives from the SEC on the presentation and accessibility of information on corporate websites.

The letter has specific proposals about how to do it.

Tom Evslin says the future is local:

Local sites are one of the next great web opportunities.  But the great local sites, even the very good local sites, will be those that are intensely local – not the local spawn of a global or even national mother-ship, not clones of a single success.

Nevertheless, there are global opportunities in supporting and enabling the wave of local sites to come.  If you are an entrepreneur who wants to succeed in local, you’ll have to decide whether you want to succeed locally by making a local site a success or globally by empowering the success of very individual local sites.

Since these sites will serve a single locality or a cluster of nearby places, they will have neither the need nor the budget to invent technology. They will succeed based on their content and the online dimension they add to the existing local communities; but they’ll fail if their technology sucks.

The success stories of today aren’t the conglomerates of bloggers – they are the individual blogs that have become hits or category leaders, the tools that made blogging so easy to do, and the information services that made blogs discoverable and searchable. The success stories of local will be community sites – some horizontal, some vertical, some large, some small – that have become essential and the tools that enable these sites to concentrate on content and community rather than technology.

As a side note, I almost had a fit try to find the Permalink for his post. May I suggest hAtom markup?

Marcel de Ruiter asks whether discussion forums are the Enterprise 2.0 killer app:

So to recount, let us list the main pro’s of discussion forums:

• just plain Q&A or information sharing
• the information remains stored and available
• the information is linkable and searchable
• community building
• customisation to different company entities / divisions / employee specialisms or enterprise applications (via sub-forums and categories)
• easy editing (WYSIWYG).

I'll briefly note that many of these features are applicable to blogging tools also. Discussion forums allow random topics to be started by random people, with the caveat that no one "owns" the end discussion which means (even though it's searchable) it may get "lost".

One way to bridge this would be either a "lazy web" type solution, where people could ask a question from their blog but the end result would be aggregated in a central location of question/responses.

(Rod Boothby comments further).

I was reading ZDNet today and came across this gem:

Earlier this week, amidst no fanfare, storage giant EMC entered the CxO blogosphere with an initial entry by its senior vice president and chief development officer (CDO?) Mark Lewis. The blog infrastructure appears to have been outsourced to SixApart's TypePad blogging service.

Head scratching; consult Lord Goog. Ah ... CEO, CFO, CIO (etc.) blogging AKA IR/PR.

Erik at the ProductWiki Blog writes "Don't settle for Google Adsense":

There has been a lot of talk lately about the performance of Google AdSense as a viable source of revenue for bloggers and publishers alike. Recently, a post on TechCrunch inspired a debate about the potential performance of Google AdSense on the MySpace behemoth as Fox and Google have struck a billion dollar deal. While I believe that AdSense is a great source of potential revenue, it is by no means perfect and, in my opinion, needs to be updated to meet the demands of its users.

We are in an interesting position at ProductWiki as we generate our revenue from two different sources of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising: Google AdSense and Shopping.com Merchant Listings. These ads show up on all of our product pages (never at the same time) and each type of ad gets approximately a 50% share of our page views across a broad spectrum of products.

I've compiled data contrasting the performance of Shopping.com and Google AdSense on ProductWiki taken from a one week period at the end of last month.

	Shopping.com	AdSense
Clickthrough rate (%)	29%	6.5%
Revenue per click ($/click)	$0.21	$0.19
eCPM ($/1000 impressions)	$59	$13

Taking a look at the most significant of these figures (eCPM), Shopping.com outperforms AdSense by a factor of 4.6!

 

RyanC of Signal vs. Noise writes:

If you’re one of the many companies or individuals who are currently working on a web app, I’d strongly encourage you to consider including an expensive premium plan. Something that is head-and-shoulders above the other plans you offer. Typical extras that could be included in a premium plan are:

1. Increased security (SSL)
2. Brandable interface
3. Higher capacity or usage
4. Extra support
5. etc.

[...] Well, two weeks ago, we finally finished the new DropSend Business Plan. It’s $80 more than the Pro plan ($19 vs. $99), and we were worried that it might be a bit too expensive. Holy crap, were we wrong.

[...] In two weeks, we’ve increased our total revenue by 30%! Two weeks. As I write this, I’m still finding it hard to believe. The Business Plan is now responsible for the lion’s share of our revenue from DropSend.

Six Apart (best known for the blogging package MovableType) has a new blogging/social networking tool called Vox. As they describe it:

Vox is a new personal blogging service. It's all about ease of use, privacy control, playing well with other web services, and staying connected to the people you care about.

• Control exactly who gets to see each of your posts and photos.
• See all the posts from your friends and family on one page.
• Bring in content from other web services you already use (Amazon, YouTube, more).

Marc Canter has written a 10 part (!) series of posts about Vox:

1. Neighborhoods = dynamic aggregation channel (I like it; where are the APIs?)
2. Hardwired interfaces = ‘gotta start somewhere’
3. New distribution channels = render RSS in Vox (So why can’t one take an RSS feed - and flow that into a Vox account?)
4. Integrated Media Galleries
5. Microcontent Publishing = something is better than nothing
6. Ease of use = using Ajax effectively
7. Hosted Experience = business model
8. Mobile
9. Community = How to get a bunch of folks to use your stuff (much of Vox’s ease of use can be attributed to this LACK of advanced features)
10. Hustling = what makes SixApart successful (Andrew Anker is all about making money.)

Canter, of course, is the man behind PeopleAggregator, the website that ... um, does stuff with social networking.

Dennis McDonald has a lengthy blog post called "How Can You Communicate the Corporate Benefits of Enterprise 2.0 Network Effects?". There's too much there to summarize, but especially pay attention to the parts after the section "Relationship Enabled Network Effects". The post was prompted by Rod Boothby, who has also extensively written about using blogging software to supercharge the enterprise (comments on McDonald's post here).

My observations and thoughts:

• every person, project, resource, process in an organization should be primarily identified by a web page, not an email address (i.e. a http: URI, not a mailto: URI)
• this URI should be easily discovered (i.e. it probably should a variant of name.corporation.com)
• all documentation, internal business cards, etc. should refer to this web page when refering to the person
  
• these webpages should be of similar structure but have ad-hoc content
• the blogging model of content creation is ideal for this purpose
  

• tagging should be used to create spontaneous links that both organize a person's content and cut across the organization
• formally specifying tags is bad, encouraging reuse is good
• tags will be recycled because they are inherently temporal; this is why specing tags will always be too little too late.

Of course, some blogging software is better than others. The BlogMatrix Platform (you're looking at it) was created for exactly the type of application discussed above.

Joey DeVilla has written a two part article on how to make money from your blog using Google AdSense.

• Blogging for Dollars, Part 1
• Blogging for Dollars, Part 2

Some of the data Joey uses comes from Darren Rowse's article How Much Money Can a Blog Earn? (The answers are "it depends", "maybe not a lot", "some people are making sh*tload of money").

Anil Dash:

The great parts of blogging still happen every day, but if you've been doing this for a while, it almost seems like it's despite the technology, not because of it. People who are familiar with blogging really seem to think that, from a technology standpoint at least, it's a solved problem. Blogging is not a solved problem.

That's definitely something to keep in mind.