I got this from the Consumers Guide for Women & Minorities
It's a big list, so read on...
Continue reading "America's Top Organizations for Multicultural Business Opportunities - 2004" »
Tom Murphy reviews where he went right, where he went wrong in a review of last year's predictions.
Doc Searls is catching some flak about the impression Newsweek gave that he said blogs are not for making money.
Well, I know he didn't say that, because I've heard from him occasionally that making a few bucks is certainly not out of line. And yes, Doc, there are some people trying to figure out how.
I've been trying to come up with a brilliant idea for some time, and I think some of us might just have something. Still in the discussion stages, but a few of my buds and I will hammer out the details soon. I'll report when there's something tangible to report.
It's just kind of disturbing to me when I see a pile-on like that over a misquote.
I did have a more-general idea the other day:
Blogging kind of reminds me of the 1849 California Gold Rush. A few miners struck it rich, most lost their shirts, but the people who really made out were the storekeepers, the hoteliers, the tailors, the wagon makers. In short, those who made it possible for the miners to go up into the mountains and do their thing. It was those people who built the foundations of the California of today.
Just a thought...
Since Wayne and Steve were nice enough to give my Transparent Job Search a mention, I've decided to pay it forward.
Dick Stroud at 50+ Marketing is talking about a good article he saw recently about changing the way marketers approach older customers. He pointed out we need a new, fresher, term for this group that has no associated stereotype. Well, I think the solution is right in that article. How about "The New Majority"?
There’s been plenty of buzz in the last day or two whether Google is going to mean death to tightly-focused niche publications. I think this Ad Age article misses the point, as are others who claim Google will have anything to do with the future of small publishing.
That’s because Google is a search engine, and it is limited in what it can do.
To be able to search, first you need to have an idea what you’re searching for. Looking at it from a reader’s rather than an advertiser’s viewpoint, sure, if all you’re after is new entries on a specific, defined, topic, you can subscribe to several different kinds of searches, both online in general, or just blogs, or both. This will give you results all the time, but only for the results you specify. You’ll miss a lot in a more-general field of information, and also get back a lot of junk that doesn’t apply to what you want to know about.
A niche publication is more of a browse. Those who write for publications of this kind are always on the lookout for information and ideas of interest to their readers. Not all of the good stuff is online yet; not every expert in every field has a website. It will be many years before that happens, I’m sure. Niche publications exist to alert their readers to things they didn’t know about before, and thus would not include them in any search. Not everybody has the creativity, the ability, or the time to keep 100% informed on their areas of interest. That’s why these publications exist in the first place.
As John Battelle mentioned in his Searchblog, if anything’s at risk it’s paper. That will also take a long time to be redundant. People still want hard-copy publications for a variety of reasons. I really don’t expect things like magazines and newspapers to disappear, at least not in my lifetime.
I've been invited to facilitate a discussion as part of Global PR blog Week. (Link goes to the outline schedule.)
Currently topics include:
Monday, July 12 – PR in the Age of Participatory Journalism
Steve Rubel (Micro-Persuasion) interviewing key thinker in the area - tbc
Trevor Cook (Corporate Engagement)
Tuesday, July 13 – Corporate Blogging
Jeremy Wright (Ensight)
Trudy Schuett (WOLves)
Roland Tanglao (Streamline)
Hans Kullin (Media Culpa) – Corporate Blogging in Sweden (tbc)
Wednesday, July 14 – Making PR Work: Creativity & Strategy
Elizabeth Albrycht (CorporatePR) – Corporate PR – Practical strategies
Alice Marshall (Technoflak) – Media relations issues – including pitching small businesses to editors
Bernard Goldbach (Irish Eyes) – Promoting client messages through blogs
Mike Manuel (Media Guerrilla) – Micro media measurement
Angelo Fernando (Hoi Polloi) – Impact of blogs on PR and Marcomms
Anthony V Parcero, ([3]), eKetchum Digital Media Group - Developing interactive PR strategies
Thursday July, 15 – Crisis Management
Jim Horton (Online PR)
Kevin Dugan (Strategic PR) – On the Martha Stewart case
Colin McKay? (Canuckflack)
Steve Rubel (Micro-Persuasion) interviewing second thinker on blogger and media - tbc
Friday, July 16 – The State of the PR Profession
Richard Bailey (PR Studies)
Robb Hecht (PR Machine)
Tom Murphy (PR Opinions)
Philip Young (Mediations) – Ethics in PR
Carnival of the Capitalists has come round again! For a variety of economics and business-related blogs, check here.
Seth Godin's got BULLMARKET 2004 :: COMPANIES THAT CAN HELP YOU MAKE THINGS HAPPEN up and ready for download. We didn't make it as one of his cool blogs (sigh) but one our cool AZ companies, Stealthmode Partners, got a well-deserved mention. I know some of the people at Stealthmode, and I'm proud to say they do a lot to promote tech and small business in AZ.
I did make the list of Bzz agents helping to get the word out on Free Prize Inside, and that's some consolation ;>)
It's been seven years since Dave Winer launched Scripting News, and now we've got millions of blogs on every subject from political commentary to bird watching and even God.
Because you can't define the circulation of a blog in the same way you'd define the circulation of a newspaper, it's impossible to know precisely how many individuals are reading blogs, but the numbers are surely in the millions somewhere. As recently as a year ago, the Pew Internet Project suggested only about 4% of people online were reading blogs. With 75% of American households now online, even if there are only a tiny portion of those people reading blogs, it's still an amazing number. When you consider the projection by the Computer Industry Almanac of 950 million users worldwide in 2004, that's a lot of potential readers, anyway you slice it. As with anything else online, the new and innovative very quickly becomes commonplace, and so I don't think it's too far out of line to expect there to be tens of millions reading blogs by the end of this year.
