The Future Place Blog

Re-focusing my blogs

I am now regularly contributing the 3 blogs: this one, the Virtual Surveys blog, and the blog on my home page at MR Space. In order to keep some sanity, I am going to try re-focus what I do along the following lines:

MR Space: this is where I will put my market research nuggets, tips, and gossip.

Virtual Surveys: this is where I put most of my larger market research pieces.

The Future Place: this will tend to focus more on Future related materials.

Well that is the theory anyway!

When I get a few minutes I will also try and link them all together with RSS feeds.

The evolution of blogging

Johnnie Moore has a link to a post by Marina about the history of Blogging, starting with a great illustration.

The illustration is yet more evidence of the accelerating rate of change that is happening.

How readable is your blog

Cognitive Edge as a post about a fun tool for estimating the readability scores of blog. To use the tool you simply type the blog's URL into the text box and it produces a readability score.

When I entered The Future Place blog it scored College/Undergraduate level, whereas the Virtual Surveys blog (where I am one of the authors) scored High School. I tried Nigel Hollis's blog, one of my favourite MR blogs and it also scored College/Undergraduate.

When I put The Sun newspaper into the assessor it scored Junior High School, wheras the The Guardian schooled High School. Finally, I tried The Economist, which scored College/Postgraduate.

This tool raises the issue of what is a good score? If a blog is truly erudite it will have a high score, but fewer people can appreciate it. My guess is that a market research blog probably wants to be in the High School to College range.

Tips for the corporate blogger

Wired have a post offering tips for anybody hoping to create or improve a corporate blog. The tips are provided by Steve Rubel, a senior vice president at the Edelman PR firm who blogs at Micro Persuasion.

To add my thoughts, here are my top three tips:

1. Decide on whether you are going to post daily, weekly, or monthly, and then stick to it. You can add the odd extra post, but you can't miss. If you are blogging weekly, try to make Monday your blog day (its easier to avoid it slipping a week that way).
2. Get somebody to proof read your blogs, and always use the spell checker as PART of the checking process.
3. Don't tell too many people you are blogging until a) you find that you can stick with the schedule you created in step 1 above, and b) you have found your voice. Roughly speaking, finding your voice means you have settled on your style, your use of 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person, past or present tense, precise or broad, amusing or serious. After 20-30 posts you will find your style settling down - that is finding your voice.

Improving Disclosure

David Weinberger (who blogs here) has added a comment to my post on PayPerPost. David makes the point we should all make sure that we are disclosing any interests which readers might feel could influence our comments. On David’s blog he has a link to his disclosure policy, in which he talks about how he earns his money, organisations he is associated with, and promises to alert readers to any links between him and an organisation he posts about.

I think this is a great idea and I have resolved to up my act in this area, firstly by trying to ensure that I improve my disclosure on specific posts, and I have added “create disclosure policy” to my 'do list'.

PayPerPost Improves its Disclosure Process

One of the most reviled organisations in the blogosphere seems to be PayPerPost. Using PayPerPost, bloggers can earn cash by posting articles about brands. Many people feel that this commercial activity taints the world of blogging. For example, David Weinberger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto described PayPerPost as “corrosive” to the conversation between and among consumers and marketers.

Recently PayPerPost has improved the level of disclosure suggested for it bloggers. Online Daily Media now report that PayPerPost is requiring writers to include a small graphical button that will denote that a post is sponsored. Although some people remain implacably opposed to sponsored blogs, others see this change in a positive way. Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer for Cymfony and a member of the WOMMA board said the new buttons could provide the appropriate level of of transparency, provided they were used correctly.

The problem with the cynics and purists is that they do not understand the real world. All posts by all bloggers have an agenda, whether conscious or unconscious. None of my posts are specifically sponsored, but they quite often feature clients of mine, because that is where much of my information comes from. Equally, I would very rarely post something very negative about a client, out of good taste and income self-preservation. The history in all previous media of sponsored activities, for example product placement in ‘soaps’ and in movies is long and inglorious.

To a large extent the Internet is a post-cynical world. Few people are criticised for having an angles, few are criticised for trying to make money. The two great sins of the post-cynical web are 1) hiding what you are really doing, 2) using monopoly or legal powers to restrict what other people can do. With proper disclosure I see nothing wrong with the principle of people being paid to blog about specific topics.

Using Bloglines to keep informed

OK, so many of you will already be familiar with RSS readers and the different ways of finding out what is being posted. But, several people I have spoken to this week are not, and this post is for them.

Most sites that post useful material also ensure that they provide feeds (and RSS being perhaps the most well known type of feed). Many news sites, such as the BBC also use feeds (hence those many orange RSS symbols next to stories).

What do these feeds do for you? Without feeds you would need to visit each potentially useful site on a regular basis to see if there was any new news. Sometimes sites publish an email service highlighting news, but most don’t.

With RSS feeds (there are also other systems such as Atom, but you don’t need to worry, most readers read them all) you can use a news read, or aggregator, or similarly named program to collect a reference to stories published on the sites you are interested in. These stories are then organised and delivered to you. The stories are delivered to you as a headline plus either the complete story, or as an excerpt with a link to access the full story.

There are essentially three ways of working with feeds, you can download a program onto your computer (for example RSSOwl), you can use a browser such as FireFox which has an RSS reader built in, or you can use a web-based service to collect the feeds.

Because I use several PCs I find it easiest to use Bloglines, one of the web-based services. Bloglines is free, easy to set up, and can be reached by any web-enabled device. The first step is to register an account. During registration process you have the chance to pick from a list of RSS feeds that other people find useful. Add or removing feeds at a later date is an easy process.

Once you have created your account you will want to visit bloglines at least once a day to stay up-to-date. Normally, all articles you view are removed from your list and will not re-appear the next time you log in. However, you can tick a box to say keep this article until I un-tick the box.