IPTV agrregation and services company Brightcove has sent up a service for Sony which encourages bloggers to link to music videos. Story here. For me this announcement is an extension of the logic used by Le Monde and by the Guardian - trying to harness bloggers to help you extend the reach of your media brand. It will be successful to the extent that Sony are proactive in using their media assets to build a community around their artists. Their community-aggregation skills will be one of the core value-creating skills of record companies in the era of social media.

An excellent survey of “citizen journalism” and the switch of news consumption to being a) continuous b) online by Stephen Quinn of Deakin University, Australia, writing in Ohmynews. The key stats:

• Internet advertising in the United States jumped 38 percent to a record $3.9 billion in the first quarter of this year as more marketers moved to the Web (IaB, PwC);
  
• UK Internet advertising will surpass newspaper advertising in 2006, at 13.3% of total $23bn. (Guardian);
  
• 39 percent of men aged 18-34 surveyed got their news from the Internet compared with 5 percent who read newspapers (Carnegie Foundation)

I thought I’d wait until my return from Paris to write about the fantastic international two-day Les Blogs 2.0. (Though I have to admit that I’m feeling a bit inadequate here, having watched many of the other participants simultaneously blogging, chatting on irc and paying attention to the excellent speakers and panels.)

Highlights for me included the panel on Citizen Journalism and mainstream media. I particularly enjoyed hearing about Marcel Reichart’s experience at Hubert Burda Media. The visionary Burda apparently sees building and interacting with audiences as key to the future. The company uses blogs to support the online version of Focus, the popular German news magazine, which now has now has nearly a dozen blogs with daily and weekly contributions from staff and external contributors. Celebrity blogs also seemed a perfect match for entertainment mag Bunte.

Elizabeth Albrycht led a panel discussing RSS, and, it turns out, the panel’s anticipation of the imminent demise of RSS as an entity in itself, as it becomes accepted as mainstream and integral to the web.

The panel on which I sat, Tracking/Listening to the Online World, was a lively session. Guillaume du Gardier’s introduction referred to Market Sentinel’s new white paper, which for the first time sets out to prove the influence of blogging on corporations, using Jeff Jarvis’s Buzz Machine “Dell Hell” and Dell as a case study. While Jeff Jarvis’s status as a journalist would probably have assured that his poor experience would have given rise to some print exposure of Dell’s failings in this instance, the fact that he blogged it - and his cause was taken up by other bloggers with similar experiences - can now be shown to have a strong influence over Dell’s reputation for customer service.

Technorati’s David Sifry gave a powerful account of his vision for a ‘conversation stream’, up-ending the conventional analogy of the web as a ‘library’ with page ranks and indexes, and seeing hyperlinks not so much a link between documents, but as a form of social gesture. Yahoo! Europe’s Yan Motte also shared information about some of the innovative tools coming our way, including Yahoo! Mindset, a search tool which will allow us to determine the degree to which our search returns focus on transactional or research-based sites.

Ben Hammersley gave a fantastic talk about his ‘Eight ideas that will really revolutionise the 21st century’. Glad to have been there.

There are now around 3,500 photos tagged Les Blogs on Flickr. I’m told I’m the one looking poised and intellectual - see if you can spot me!

Michael Nutley makes some interesting points about the viral power of blogs in this week’s NMA.

‘In the early days of blogging, it was all about an individual voice - using the Web to publish your journal. As the number of blogs has risen, their function has changed, becoming less about micro-publishing and more about being part of a network. As well as generating unique content, bloggers are increasingly directing their readers to stuff they find interesting elsewhere on the Web or in other media. Add to this the effect that name bloggers have in attracting information from other people, not necessarily bloggers themselves, and what emerges is an incredibly powerful filtering and reference tool.’

Taking music as an example, Nutley goes on to cite the power of the blog in introducing new audiences to unknown bands (taking Arctic Monkeys as a case in point), comparing this revolution with its peer-to-peer downloads predecessor.

Echoing the past, it appears that the traditional marketers in the music industry are not willing to engage with this powerful new influence. However, there can be little doubt that in a broadband world, bloggers will be wielding increasing influence which PR and marketing should not ignore.

A long and thoughtful piece by Adam Hill in PR Week surveys the threat to brands from blogging and gives prominence to Market Sentinel’s report on how detractors dominate search results for some of the UK’s top grocery brands including Coca Cola and Kingsmill Bread.

So what should PROs do about it? ‘Blogging has never been in anyone’s control, which is why it is so disruptive,’ says Joel Cere, Hill & Knowlton vice-president and head of netcoms EMEA. ‘Consumers, analysts or employees are now able to share their opinions or voice their discontent on a planetary scale. The disgruntled employee or dissatisfied customer could ignite a full-blown crisis, much quicker and on a broader scale.’

PROs can start by identifying the influential bloggers who write about clients’ industries and track what they are talking about, sending them relevant information. ‘Identifying the public opinion influencers is crucial here,’ says Cakim. ‘Not all bloggers are experts on what they write, and they may not have a large following.’

Dave Winer confirms what Robert Scoble hinted to us ten days back. Internet Explorer will support RSS. The full launch is due later today at Gnomedex in Seattle.

This will have a dramatic impact on corporate adoption of RSS not just in PR but in productivity tools. It will mean that Market Sentinel don’t automatically have to install Firefox on our customers desktops.

The day after a customer requests feeds on their Blackberry (we know it’s part of our presentation, but no one actually asked for it yet!), we note that Paris Hilton has one. We originally gave them the go-by because they don’t do Bluetooth. What do we know?

A call from Elena Berton on Dow Jones who has come across what may be Europe’s first business blog. It is by Glaxo Wellcome and addresses the politics of health. It is called Avenir de la sante.

She was asking us whether UK businesses have woken up to business blogging. We said it is a big opportunity for very early adopters. They can write the book here.

Last night a phone call from Chloe Stromberg at Forrester in San Francisco. She is working with Henry Harteveldt writing about the use of RSS by travel websites and wanted to know if we had developed one-to-one RSS feeds (yes), with end to end encryption (no). People have been discussing this as a possible solution to the issue of spam filtering. Why should I open my genuine mail from eBay or Paypal if I am deluged with Phishing scams (emails that purport to be genuine asking me for my credit card details)?

An RSS reader may be the answer to this. Market Sentinel produces account specific RSS feeds (all the information personalised to one user) but do not yet encrypt. Instead we make security a condition of our contract.

Two solutions:

1) A secure website updates a feed first with neutral information in the feed title, say the words: “account notification” and keeps the description blank. The user then clicks the link to access the secure site using browser security.

2) The RSS feed itself is https and the feedreader and publisher exchange tokens.

I met on Monday an interesting company offering packaged RSS to City institutions and traders. This is a service they might appreciate, and pay for. As I said to Chloe: we would happily build it for anyone willing to pay!

Excellent article by Charles Arthur in Net Imperative - sorting through the blog hype and making some good points.

Interesting mention of Wired founder John Battelle’s early attempt to create a business model around aggregating blog journalism on the model of Korea’s “Oh My News” from a company called Federated Media.

Market Sentinel’s blog-monitoring services were featured in an article by Paul Durman “Firms line up to rocket into the Blogosphere” in the Sunday Times of May 8th 2005.

PRESS RELEASE

Whilst blogs are causing a PR revolution in corporate America, the UK has yet to get the message.

Blogs – simple syndicated websites – have revolutionised corporate communications for Fortune 500 companies like Disney, Avon, FedEx, Motorola, McGraw Hill. An increasing number of global brands realise that with 27% of Americans (according to Pew Internet) using blogs for news, it is vital to get their story out in this arena. The Vice-chairman of GM – Bob Lutz – has even started a personal blog. The technology behind blogs - RSS - means that companies can communicate faster and more effectively internally and externally.

They are not alone - in the daily Blogpulse survey - the number of global blog users has passed 10 million and is growing at 13% a week!

But in a survey conducted by the UK blog monitoring company Market Sentinel Ltd, it was found that only one of the FTSE100 UK blue chip companies syndicated their news releases with RSS – BT . And not one of them has taken the step of launching a corporate blog.

Market Sentinel CEO Mark Rogers thinks that the UK bluechips are missing a trick. ‘Any large company or brand receives thousands of comments and references in the blogosphere. The result is that when customers or partners do a Google search on a company or brand name they are as likely to find a negative comment as they are to find the company’s own message. The big UK companies need to get blogging.’

You can read more about business blogging in the Sunday Times.

Mark Rogers, CEO of Market Sentinel, will be talking to Tyler Brule of BBC4’s The Desk on Tuesday 3rd May 2005. The interview will cover buzz tracking during this UK election, and to how the same techniques are being employed in corporate monitoring. Tune in at 10pm.

Blog culture has really taken off in France - according to this Wired News piece. Most intriguing is the revelation that as soon as the newspaper Le Monde started allowing readers to publish their own pieces, these immediately became the most linked pages.

Le Monde, France’s biggest newspaper, is also a weblog host, letting thousands of readers write journals alongside those of staff reporters and columnists. Just two days after the invitation to “become your own editor” in December, readers-turned-writers were leapfrogging the pros in a rundown of the online paper’s most-read pages.

In a fascinating and wide-ranging speech , Rupert Murdoch points out that the editors have lost control over the media. He points out that it is no longer possible to control what people read, and media companies have to wake up to that. What is really extraordinary about this speech is how many touch-points it has with stuff which is everyday currency on industry blogs, but which has had precious little attention from industry leaders. Murdoch is ahead of the pack.