Category: Blogging

Laura Ries has some great thoughts about managing “brand you” that I think are relevant to blogging, especially if you are blogging about a topic that has to do with your career. Laura writes:

“The most successful business people consider themselves a brand and market themselves according. And like product brands, it’s not enough to just be well-known. You also have to stand for something in the minds of other people.”

There are many examples where business people have managed their brand successfully via blogs, like Steve Rubel (Micro Persuasion) = Blogs and PR and Åsk Wäppling aka Dabitch (Adland) = Advertising to name just two in my own field of interest.

If you take Laura’s advice and apply them to professional blogging it might look like this:

1. Do[es] you[r] [blog] have the right brand name?

With 4-5 million blogs it is getting harder and harder to give your blog a unique brand that can also help in positioning you as a thought leader in a certain field. That is especially true if you want to host your blog at Blogspot.com where many good names are already taken. The obvious choice to name the brand after yourself is of course ok as long as you don’t share names with thousands of others.

2. Narrow the focus, don’t try to be great at everything.

Many bloggers are commenting on a variety of topics, and do it with style. Erik Stattin is one good local example. But for most of us, focusing means that it’s easier to carve out a niche where you can be #1. When blogs become ubiquitous it will be hard for general blogs to gain readers.

3. Use PR to build your brand.

Blogging can generate publicity for yourself our your company, especially if you are good at creating original content and not just refer to existing information in media without adding your [expert] opinion.

Liberal journalists read liberal blogs. That’s not the way to increase the diversity of voices, is it? Peter Wolodarski, political journalist at liberal Dagens Nyheter likes to read liberal thinkers Dick Erixon and Johan Norberg. PJ Anders Linder links to several blogs from his own blog at liberal (or “independent conservative”) Svenska Dagbladet. Which ones? Dick Erixon and Johan Norberg are two examples of the 7 links. Other examples are not-so leftist National Review.

But then again, people tend to read information and sources that confirm their point of view, and shy away from conflicting opinions, so we shouldn’t be surprised.

I linked to Evelyn Rodriguez’ blog in my recent post about PubSub. Apparently Rodriguez was unfortunate to be hit by the tidal wave when she was in a boat outside Phi Phi Island, but apart from hurting her leg she luckily survived. And she uses her blog to tell that she’s alright.

Ordinary people are creating their own media and document the tragic incidents in southern Asia, sometimes better than what traditional media accomplish. Some are uploading photos to for example Flickr and you can surf Flickr for photos by searching for tags like “tsunami” or “earthquake“.

More photos here and more links here. But don’t forget to contribute to the thousands in need.

I revealed on Dec 22 that PubSub potentially had made some changes in their LinkRanks application that had a serious negative effect on many sites’ ranking. My blog dropped 32,544 spots in one day, down from 7,495. Well, I didn’t get any answer directly from PubSub, but their CEO made a comment in Trevor Cook’s follow up post.

Hey Guys,

The reason for the sudden shift is that we increased the granularity of how we measure linkranks. Specifically, we added individual blogs from the various hosting services for the first time (e.g. livejournal.com/johndoe) – that has suddenly shifted everyone’s ranking. Bob Wyman, our CTO, dropped 30,000 places (much to his chagrin). Check out his blog for more details – http://bobwyman.pubsub.com

Cheers,

Salim Ismail, CEO

PubSub’s CTO Bob Wyman also posted a comment on his own blog.

The effect of this improvement in the granularity of the LinkRank calculation will take about 10 days to be fully felt. We need to wait for the impact of old links to fade out of the system and for the impact of more recent links to dominate. Once this settles out, it will be fascinating to try to figure out why some sites went up in LinkRank and others went down. In any case, we’ll have more accurate and thus more useful numbers to work with in the future.

Please keep sending suggestions on how to improve LinkRanks — and please forgive what will be inevitable “turmoil” in the numbers as we continue to increase the accuracy and granularity of reporting in the future.

So it seems that the new ranking is more accurate than the previous one, but taken into consideration the drastic changes in rankings, the application maybe was launched too soon. On Nov 18 Ismail said in a press release that “We now feel the system is ready for use by consumers and professionals across the country, and the world”. But as a professional you would want the data from PubSub to be reliable and if changes are made you would expect some kind of information. That information should be clearly visible on the web site, not only on a blog that most people are not aware of. PubSub have yet not published any information on their site about the changes to LinkRanks.

Something seems to have changed with PubSub’s LinkRanks the last 24 hours. My ranking has dropped considerably, and so have several other blogs that yesterday were in the top 10,000, while many others have seen no change at all. I know that the rankings can change substantially overnight, but this seems to be more than a coincidence. For example:

* Adland 36,290 (-35,103)

* CorporateBloggingBlog 42,407 (-22,787)

* Crossroads Dispatches 36,938 (-32,603)

* Earnie the Attorney 37,366 (-33,985)

* Kunal.org 36,553 (-34,735)

* Media Culpa 40,039 (-32,544)

* Micro Persuasion 35,795 (-35,558)

* Mymarkup.net 38,346 (-34,058)

* NevOn 36,733 (-34,674)

Could it be that PubSub are adjusting their system in a way that affects some blogs a lot, while others are not affected at all? Steve, it’s your client. Am I too suspicious or has something changed?

Swedish e-mail list Virus Bulletin (Svenska Viruslistan) has started a blog about stuff related to internet security, reports IDG. It is being run by security expert Per Hellqvist from Symantec, but he points out that it is a personal blog and not an official corporate blog.