Olympics Blogs…
With the Olympics a day or so away, take a look at these two blogs. Both are excellent implementations from different directions.
The first, Visa’s Journey to Torino blog engages Visa Olympians in the run-up. Rather than purely a branding event, Visa is showing the depth of its work and relationship with the athletes.The other, Coke’s, is from the perspective of people attending the games. It’s great to see blogs being used by such large marketers as an integral part of their communications efforts.
Southwest also made it’s first forray into the blogosphere today – their “Adopt A Pilot” blog supports a great community effort they have underway in which pilots engage actively with students in classrooms. It shows lots of promise.
disclosure: The Lark Group provided counsel to Southwest on this blog at its early stages and we work closely with RD2 – a terrific brand and design agency based in Dallas. And, per my previous posts, The Lark Group worked closely with Visa and their agency, Fleishman-Hillard on The Journey blog.
State Of The Blogsphere
David gives a great update on the momentum in the Blogsphere… This says it all:
We track over 75,000 new weblogs created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day – and 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. In other words, even though there’s a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging is growing as a habitual activity.
In October of 2005, when Technorati was only tracking 19 million blogs, about 10.4 million bloggers were still posting 3 months after the creation of their blogs.
Feed Overload
How to handle all those feeds? Rubel suggests deleting them all when it becomes too much and starting again. Even Scoble’s. What you miss most is what you’ll hunt out and reload.
While this is an interesting idea (and mirrors some of the new thinking in time management – don’t archive, just delete what you don’t need), I actually value my feeds more than that. All of them. Some were hard to find. Some I share by exchanging files with freinds and colleagues. Others I just enjoy. My approach is to keep them filed. I have a must read folder and then the rest are categorized by my bizzare collection of interests. I only open the folders and look at the feeds when I have time or my interest is sparked. I’m also a fan of Dave Winer’s River of News philosophy.
To do this I’m using NetNewsWire on my Mac and NewzCrawler on my PC. I also use FireFox (who BTW released a really anoying upgrade then other day – it wipes your themes and other extensions) – there I have a folder nestled in my toolbar with 20 of the feeds I follow most. I can then do a quick scan without opening any windows. I’ve yet to sort out the mobile thing – my damn Balckberry is already intrusive enough.
So, all of this enables me to avoid the extreme measure of deleting them at the point of maximum frustration. It’s interesting that I have more tools for reading feeds than I do for reading email. It would be easier if Exchange/Outlook emails were just feeds.
FourDocs
Picked this one up via Veer. Gool idea from Britain’s Channel 4 – FourDocs, “the place to upload, watch and learn about documentary. Anyone can upload a FourDoc, it just has to be fact-based and 4 minutes long.”
Here’s one about a French toy store, and anothere one on abseiling (rappelling).
Very participatory.
Attention vs. Search
Om makes a really interesting point: My.Yahoo.Com is no longer a portal page, but instead an “attention page” which can be and should be leveraged to become the aggregator site for complicated digital life.
I doing so he says in a much shorter form what I was trying to get at yesterday on why Yahoo is heading in the right direction. Google doesn’t hold my attention. Yahoo does.
