September 2005
Commentary by blog and social media consultant Josh Hallett on the use of blogs for public relations, media, marketing, communication & branding and from time-to-time the unsolicited opinion.
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AdRants reports that 29 percent of traffic to a site created as part of a recent Audi A3 campaign was generated by advertising on the BlogAds network.
The kicker is that 29 percent was achieved with just one half of one percent of the overall media budget. Let's say it again, advertising on weblogs deliver Audi 29 percent of all responding yet took just on half of one percent of the budget to do so. To drive the point home even further, Mickinney-Silver, on its A3 timeline site states, "The media cost for the entire blog ad buy was less than the cost for one banner ad on a mainstream site such as Yahoo!"
I guess I should balance this out with a story about an amazing blog advertising failure. Anybody got one?
Web 2.0 is a popular topic, but how soon before somebody starts to talk about Web 2.1 or even Web 3.0? Who will be the first to say, 'Our product draws on the social networking capabilities of Web 3.0' We always talk about 'internet time' being so fast, yet it's taken us 10 years to get to Web 2.0. A quick Google search shows:
Web 2.0 - 9,230,000 results
Web 2.1 - 19,700
Web 3.0 - 38,300
Web 4.0 - 16,100
Looks like there is plenty of opportunity in Web 2.1 or Web 3.0. It reminds me of the scene from There's Something About Mary where Ben Stiller and Harland Williams discuss Harland's ideas for '7 Minute Abs':
Hitchhiker: You heard of this thing, the 8-Minute Abs?
Ted: Yeah, sure, 8-Minute Abs. Yeah, the excercise video.
Hitchhiker: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7... Minute... Abs.
Ted: Right. Yes. OK, alright. I see where you're going.
Hitchhiker: Think about it. You walk into a video store, you see 8-Minute Abs sittin' there, there's 7-Minute Abs right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted: I would go for the 7.
Hitchhiker: Bingo, man, bingo. 7-Minute Abs. And we guarantee just as good a workout as the 8-minute folk.
Ted: You guarantee it? That's - how do you do that?
Hitchhiker: If you're not happy with the first 7 minutes, we're gonna send you the extra minute free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B".
Ted: That's right. That's - that's good. That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6-Minute Abs. Then you're in trouble, huh?
[Hitchhiker convulses]
Hitchhiker: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. Who works out in 6 minutes? You won't even get your heart goin, not even a mouse on a wheel.
Ted: That - good point.
So folks let's start talking about Web 3.0: all the taste and satisfaction of Web 2.0 but half the calories.
Update: Jeremy Zawodny found a Web 2.1 conference.
Now that the Orlando blogger MeetUp group is defunct and I have so many friends that have started blogs it might be time to socialize. Let's try to organize a social event in the coming weeks. Of course this means things like time and location need to be determined.
How about the Panera on Lake Eola one evening? Then again, Panera does not serve alcohol. So perhaps another location would be better :-) Any suggestions?
As for a date, what works best... Oct 12, 18, 19, 20, 25, 26 or 27?
How about it Doreen, Jeremy, Buzz, Wendy, Bob, Jennifer, Trent? I'll get the word out to the folks over at Metroblogging Orlando.
More and more restaurants and hotels are providing wifi (sometimes free, sometimes paid) which is great, but what happens when the service is not working? Are you entitled to a refund or a discount?
In many cases I select a hotel or restaurant purely because they offer wifi and expect the service to be working. In most hotels I am paying for the service (read Elizabeth's The Scandal of Hotel Internet Access). If the service is not working then I don't pay, simple enough, but the issue goes farther. I selected the hotel because they offered wifi, sometimes paying slightly more than another hotel because they offer high-speed access. If I had known the service was not working I wouldn't have chosen that hotel.
With regard to restaurants I have had similar issues. Earlier this week in Atlanta I went to a restaurant that advertised free wifi. I bought my food, sat down and opened up the PowerBook. I quickly joined the access point, but could not get anywhere online. I walked to the counter and asked the manager on duty and his response was, "oh yeah, it's been down for the past two days." Had I known that I would have gone to another restaurant in the same plaza that also offers wifi. Recently I catch myself looking around a restaurant to see if those using laptops are browsing the web (In the case mentioned above there were a few people using laptops in the restaurant, but none of them were online)
Perhaps hotels and restaurants should have a sign that says 'Wifi - Working/Not Working" posted at their entrance.
Elizabeth is fed up with tagging. She says, "Tagging is too much work." In the past few weeks I have had a number of conversations with people who share the same opinion.
Like many TypePad users, Elizabeth is limited in tagging solutions. Yes you can use your categories to tag your content, but anything further requires inserting the proper HTML into your posts.
Moving to MovableType or WordPress is the best option, but not always feasible. A few months ago I documented how I can easily tag my posts within MT.
I know that tagging my posts has led to increased traffic from Technorati and other search tools that support tags. Granted it is very easy for me include them in my posts.
Georgia schools were closed Monday and Tuesday to conserve fuel, so what do all the out-of-school kids do? Go to the mall and play with the iPod Nano at the Apple Store.
I had some free time on Monday so I swung by the Apple Store in Alpharetta, GA to look at the new Nano in person. No luck. The display area was mobbed with kids all getting some hands-on time with the new iPod.
Doreen waited a little bit longer at the opening of the new Apple Store at the Florida Mall this past Saturday.
Hi there from Maggiano's in Buckhead. Good food and great people at the IABC event.
Stephen says when blogging his most important audience is himself.
My interests in particular subjects may wax or wane, but if I'm allowed to talk about whatever's on my mind at the time I'm far more likely to keep contributing, as opposed to highly specialized blogs which may or may not hold my interest level longer term. This isn't always possible in settings like corporate blogging, of course, but when I talk to people about starting blogs I emphasize the importance of having personal ownership - and by extension, accountability - for a blog. Ownership alone is not going to make a non-writer want to write, but it may keep a writer writing.
Go read the entire post.
According to ThePaceline.com Lance Armstrong will host Saturday Night Live on October 29, 2005 with Sheryl Crow as the musical guest.
I would hope that since Lance has some experience in front of the camera (mostly commercials) that he'll be a much better 'Athlete-host' than the infamous Wayne Gretzky episode.
Update: The Paceline has rehearsal photos.
One of the much talked about aspects of podcasting is that it allows you to hear inflection in the voice of the podcaster. How true.
Over at the Across the Sound podcast there has been a bit of a 'discussion' about transparency between Steve Rubel and Jeremey Pepper (I guess Steve and Jeremy won't be sharing a room at BlogOn 2005). Steve and his co-host, Joseph Jaffe featured the topic of transparency in their third show. Listening to the show you could easily detect a heavy does of sarcasm in Steve and Joseph's approach to the topic.
This might not have been their intent, but it's definitely the perception I had while listening to the show. Anybody else pick this up?
TDavid points out that according to the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans that Mark Cuban is the only billionaire blogger.
Perhaps Mark can start a teleseminar series to teach others how to 'Earn Billions Blogging' :-)
Over at the Burning Door, FeedBurner has announced PingShot a service that notifies aggregators and search engines when your feed has been updated. On the post there is an FAQ about the new service.
A quick check of my FeedBurner account shows the new option (click image for larger version):
The default services listed are Technorati and My Yahoo. You can check: PubSub, Ping-o-matic and NewsGator and then add up to three other services which include: Feedster, Icerocket and Weblogs.com
If you have a FeedBurner account you will need to activate this service via your control panel. Outside services such as web directories and search tools may submit their name to receive notifications of updates.
Niall Kennedy has been blogging from DEMO and posts details on the TypePad 2.0 demonstration.
I've been working on a few client projects with TypePad. While there are some limitations with TP, the advanced template option (available only to Pro level accounts) allows for quite a bit of design customization. Working frequently with MovableType does make it easy to tweak the templates though.
Mena Trott posts about her mom's demonstration of Six Apart's new Comet project. From the Comet page:
Project Comet will launch in early 2006 and will combine the publishing power of TypePad, the community aspects of LiveJournal and the years of insight garnered from Movable Type. Project Comet is focused on creating an advanced weblogging technology platform combining the best elements of all our products, giving people the ability to easily stake out, build and share their own place on the web.
Project Comet will incorporate the latest technologies, some of which include:
Community Aggregation: Gives you the ability to create individual blogs and share sections of them with other users in an elegant and customizable way.
Multiple Streams: Provides a single place to keep everything that is important to you. A record of your life is created by incorporating streams from various media, like music, photos, videos and other blogs into a single customized blog with an identity of its own.
Privacy: Lets you decide who gets to see what parts of your blog in addition to existing password protections for entire blogs.
Looks interesting.
Earlier today Stuart Bruce announced the launch of a client blog. Clicking on the link for the Softalk blog took me to a site with one post (at the time, there are two posts now).
Very first post
This is the very first post on the new Softalk blog. It's only here because you need to have at least one post before you can view the site properly.
I have always had a firm belief that launching a blog with little or no content is a bad idea. Launching with something so vague is even worse. Arriving at the Softalk blog to find that initial meaningless post gives me little or no reason to add it to my feed reader. It's like going to the grand opening of a restaurant and being told that they don't have any food.
All the client blog work I do includes a soft-launch period. During this initial period, the primary content authors are blogging away developing a good content base. I've got three clients doing that right now. Once we have a good base that demonstrates the type and quality of blog content we'll do a formal launch and invite the masses.
Nothing personal against Stuart. I've read his blog for quite a while and he's always had good content. Perhaps this was a case of a client saying, "Let's get this thing out the door" against all better judgement. Hopefully the new blog will develop into a valuable resource over time. I just think the launch announcement was a bit premature.
Heading to Atlanta tomorrow morning. The trip will be full of work and fun. I've scheduled some meet-ups with a few blogging friends/contacts. Here's a partial list:
Monday:
- Toby Bloomberg - Diva Marketing Blog
- Robert French - Auburn University
Tuesday:
- Jeneane Sessum - Allied Blog
Wednesday:
- Kevin Howarth
I am also presenting to IABC Atlanta on Tuesday, September 27.
Am I in a time warp? Is it 1997?
Sitting at a coffee shop and at the table next to me are two guys talking about a web project. Vendor is attempting to sell client on buying listings on his local web directory. I have never heard of the local web directory he's talking about, which tells me it's not worth anything.
There is discussion about 'premium listings', i.e. making the business name bold, for an extra fee the listing can have a link. The vendor is quoting traffic figures that I know he's pulling out of his ass.
I am so tempted to lean over and tell the client to run, run as fast as he can.
Update: Wait, now he's talking about search engine optimization. Shoot me now!
Update 2: If the client refers other business to the directory he'll get a percentage of revenue!
Update 3: It just gets better! The directory site is not a database, just flat HTML pages so there is no searching or faceted classification. Vendor uses FrontPage to manage the site, but they did recently buy some, "Adobe software, so we can make it look more fancy."
I agree with Neville, there is so much great content over at Global PR Blog Week 2.0, but little time to read it now.
I am trying to read as many articles as I can, but a heavy workload and some speaking engagements this week make it tough. Luckily the articles will still be up once the event is over (that's what permalinks are for).
What are you doing here? Global PR Blog Week 2.0 has started. Go there.
There will be very little blogging for the next few days. I have a variety of things going on/coming up. One thing I am working on is Global PR Blog Week 2.0 which starts on Monday, September 19.
Hi there. Just a quick test post from a PRSA presentation. As always a great group with good questions. Issues that are always asked about:
- Libel
- Credibility
- How Much Time Necessary
- Do These People Have a Life
I will be heading to Jacksonville on Thursday the 15th for a PRSA presentation on blogs. Short notice? can't make it? I'll be back the following week for an AdFed presentation on Wednesday the 21st.
The week after that I am in Atlanta for an IABC presentation on Tuesday the 27th.
Don't think you need to publish full-text RSS feeds? Think again.
Looking at the Search Engine Watch review of Google Blog Search:
Google's blog search indexes all of the content it finds in feeds, but does not attempt to access and index the full content available on a publisher's web server.
One more reason why you should publish full-text feeds.
Niall Kennedy writes that RSS reader, NewsFire is now blocking RSS ads from Google and FeedBurner as part of the default install.
In November of last year I predicted that this would come about:
I see a few things happening in the coming months regarding RSS advertising (many of these items mirror the battle between consumers and banner advertisers):
- First and foremost, newsreader application developers will release new versions that will disable or block advertising. I would be willing to pay an extra $5-10 in cost for an application it if blocked advertising (works for Tivo). For web-based readers, perhaps a Firefox extension will be developed to block ads.
- This will lead to feed services such as Feedburner to begin blocking feeds sent to known newsreader applications that are blocking feeds. The battle is on
Now we'll see what the next step will be.
Update: Looking at the comments from Niall's blog here are a few items:
Will NewsFire now mysteriously drop out of Google's search listings?
Not quite the first. We've had that functionality in the (free) CITA RSS Aggregator since April. Our implementation is tailorable and can be switched on and off on a per feed basis.
Wal-Mart has launched a blog to post information on how they are assisting with Hurricana Katrina relief and other touching stories.
The new Wal-Mart Facts - Stories of Hope site is running MovableType 3.2 and offers an Atom feed. There are no comments associated with the posts, but you can share your story to blog@wal-mart.com.
via Jeff Jarvis
Update: Wal-Mart is using Edelman and Mike Krempasky for their blog.
Google has finally launched a blog search tool. The new service is available at: www.google.com/blogsearch, blogsearch.google.com, search.blogger.com/ and your Blogger dashboard.
There is a lengthy blog search help page that details the nuances of Google's new toy.
By default the search results are shown by relevance, although you can switch over to 'by date'. A search for Katrina on Google showed the most recent post being 3 hours old. The same search on Technorati returned posts that were 5 or 6 minutes old. On a related note, it will be interesting to see 'Google Blog Search' as one of the 'Top Searches' on Technorati later today.
It looks like Google is also offering a serivce similar to PubSub with their RSS subscriptions to searches. From the help page:
Can I subscribe to search results?
Yes. At the bottom of each page of search results you can find several links, offering the top 10 or 100 results as either Atom or RSS feeds. Just grab the links from here and subscribe to them in the news aggregator of your choice and you will get updates whenever new posts are made that match your query.
In addition, the Advanced Blog Search offers the standard options for narrowing your search quite a bit.
Other reviews: Dave Winer, Search Engine Watch, Charlene Li, The Blog Herald
Last Friday, Duncan Riley from The Blog Herald posted a short item about another blog stealing his content. Today, Duncan follows-up with his case against WebProNews and writer, Jason Lee Miller. In a lengthy post, Duncan provides a number of examples of how he feels Jason has stolen his content without proper attribution.
Mr Miller is creative, I’ll give him this, because when he writes he usually tries to put his own spin on things, or as the case may be, re-writes others ideas and presents them as his own, but it really, really pisses me off when time and time again I see anyone presenting idea’s, qoutes or otherwise as their own, and don’t give attribution. Sure, a lot of bloggers are ametuers and don’t know any better, or if you dug through the archives of the Blog Herald I’ve probably done it by accident once or twice as well, but when your a paid writer for a leading internet portal you shouldn’t just know better, you do know better, and when you don’t play by the rules its not an accident, its a concious decision.
Duncan also provides examples of quotes taken from other publications without credit being given to the original source.
Continue reading "WebProNews Stealing from The Blog Herald?" »
Just the standard e-mail over the weekend:
- 4 Notices about my eBay account being suspended
- 5 Notices that my PayPal account had been compromised
- 3 Winning lottery notifications
- 6 Business proposals from 'Most Honorable' foreign nationals
Then of course my favorite:
josh@hyku.com
Some of our clients complained about the spam (negative e-mail content) outgoing from your e-mail account. Probably, you have been infected by a proxy-relay trojan server. In order to keep your computer safe, follow the instructions.
Further details can be obtained from attached file.
Sincerely,
The Hyku.com team
Of course the attached file is something you don't really want to open on a Windows machine. Considering that I run my own web server and I am the Hyku.com team, that e-mail always makes me laugh. I get one of those per week it seems.
The title says it all, what's the dumbest request you've had from a client?
I have had quite a few, but the one that sticks out in my mind was a particular web client. They were a medium sized company that sold a product on a national level. It was a basic household product. During a planning session they once asked, "Do you think we would get more traffic to our web site if we had naked women on the pages?"
Trying to keep a straight face I calmly responded, "Perhaps, but I think that it might alienate your primary customer base, women."
"Yeah you're probably right," they responded, "we thought it might be something different to do, but we wanted to run it by you first." (they being two men if you didn't figure that out yet).
So how about you? Any experiences you can share without giving away too many details or losing your job?
What blogs do you suggest I add to my feedreader?
I've been trying to expand my blogroll over the past week or two. It's an attempt to read some different views on the same topics (if that's possible) and read blogs outside the industry topics I normally monitor. A liberal arts degree approach to blog reading.
In the process I have been reviewing other blogrolls to see if there are some feeds that I don't read, but should check out. The big problem is that sometimes blogs are listed by their author and not by their name or vice-versa. This makes it difficult to determine if I am already subscribed to a feed or not. Luckily, NetNewsWire to the rescue. In Safari on the Mac OS when you click on the RSS icon it will attempt to add the feed to my reader. If I am already subscribed to the feed it will jump directly to it, rather than add the feed again. It's sort of a, 'Hey stupid you already subscribed to this blog" approach. Handy though.
I usually don't mention political items on this blog, but RatherGate was a defining moment in the blogosphere. For better or for worse, the debate over the 60 Minutes story put the word 'blog' into many people's heads.
Power Line Blog notes that today is the first anniversary of the little post that started it all.
Joi Ito posted this morning that Vint Cerf has left MCI to work for Google. This is very interesting news. (Google press release via SiliconBeat)
Joi puts the news in context of eBay buying Skype, but I see this adding to the speculation about Google building out a separate network.
Last night I got the sudden urge to upgrade to MovableType 3.2. I am not sure why, but I figured I'd see what happened. Well, 12 hours later and the upgrade is in, but all is not perfect.
Continue reading "Upgrading to MT 3.2" »
Stephen Davies writes that he stumbled upon what he thinks is podcast spam.
While searching a few media podcasts on the iTunes website through my iTunes player I came across the iMedia Pro podcast. Thinking it was a podcast about…you guessed it, media, (oh how stupid of me!) I subscribed. Only to find some guy telling me how I can make “six figure sums” by…well, I don’t know how because I couldn’t bare listening to his drivel!
I wonder if this will be an iTunes only issue? Other podcast directories such as Podcast Alley allow users to rate podcasts and provide comments, so any podcast spam will be quickly noted. Within iTunes there is no ability to comment. All you can do is 'Report a Concern'.
Over at Voce Nation Dave Black writes about a touchy subject, Cashing In On Tragedy: Is Hurricane Katrina Another Opportunity to Peddle Your Product? I feel that most firms are genuine in their efforts to support those in need, but there are those that attempt to capitalize on it.
next time you’re pressured by your manager or client to “leverage the news of the day,” take a minute to pause and carefully assess exactly what you’re “leveraging.” Even if your widget can help save the world from the next disaster, chances are we can all wait a few weeks to hear about it.
Read the entire post.
Boing Boing picked up the chatter about how you can't access the FEMA claim web site with a Macintosh. Macintouch had the following comment:
FEMA's website for disaster registration requires:
"In order to use this site, you must have JavaScript Enabled and Internet Explorer version 6. Download it from Microsoft or call 1-800-621-FEMA (3362) to register."
I tried the latest Safari, IE and Firefox, none work. Heaven help all the Mac users in the South... assuming they have power.
I visited the registration page last night and had the same issue. What's ironic is that this violates Section 508 guidelines.
Earlier this year I posted about finding hidden gems in your web stats. Of course half the battle is knowing what you are looking at. Stephen talks about seeing his competition checking him out via his web stats which reminded me of a funny story.
About 10 years ago when I was working for a web firm when we had an 'experience' with a local competitor. We knew the people that were starting up this new firm and we questioned their technical knowledge. This lack of knowledge was soon confirmed.
We were easily able to guess the domain name of the firm and visited their site. For quite a few days all that was online was the standard 'Welcome to Apache' home page. Periodic checks over the next week showed that the server was down more than it was up.
Then one day the owner of the new web firm showed up at our door and claimed, "You've hacked my web server and I have the logs to prove it" He was waving a stack of printouts for emphasis. He continued, "I've already called my attorney and the police." Of course we hadn't done anything.
We looked at the 'log files' and told him, "These are web server logs, this just shows that we've visited your web site a total of 10 times over the past week."
At first he didn't believe us, until we showed him what our Apache logs looked like. The icing on the cake was doing a grep for his IP space. Sure enough he had visited our site, or using his logic, 'hacked our web server'.
A while ago I signed up for a teleseminar and now I receive the standard e-mail reminders for other teleseminars. One arrived today that started out:
Hi Josh,
Do you have 90 minutes and $1 to spare?
Are you blogging yet for your business? Or, if you are, are you getting the results you want with your blog?
The reason I ask is because I know many of you have heard all the hype about blogging and may be wary to jump in because it is the latest marketing fad....
Uh, yeah I blog :-) It's going pretty good so far.
E-mail blasts are a double-edged sword. Yes it's great that you can send out information to your massive opt-in list to inform/promote/sell. Then again you can come across sounding dumb if you don't know your recipients. When I receive an e-mail address from somebody I make it a point to visit their web site (if they have one) and make the necessary notes for future follow-up. When I do a mass e-mail (which is very rare) I make sure that I am not putting my foot in my mouth when talking to people within the industry. (Jeremy Zawodny recounts a recent e-mail/mail-merge snafu he received.)
On a related note, many years ago when I ran a web development firm I was cold-called by a competing web firm. They had hired a group of college students to go through the phone book and call businesses asking them if they were interested in a web site (sounds great doesn't it). Knowing nothing about the firms they were contacting they ending up calling me. In hindsight I should have strung them along, but at the time I was sort of dumbstruck. The person on the line asked, "Do you have a web site?" Yes... "Are you happy with it? We would like to offer you a free web site evaluation..." No thanks.
Hey look a new iPod, the Nano and the much talked about iTunes phone. Of course like many Apple products, what draws you in about the Nano is the form factor. Then you review the specs and realize it's only 4GB. I have enough trouble squeezing my music and podcasts on to my 1st Gen 5GB model (which is still going strong).
As for the iTunes Phone it will transfer up to 100 songs via USB. I think the killer app would be the ability to subscribe to podcast feeds via the phone and use GPRS to download the new content.
Another related item I found interesting was that today's announcement caused a number of gadget sites to go down from the load.
Publix has been celebrating their 75th anniversary for a few months now, but today is the actual 75th anniversary date. On September 6, 1930 George Jenkins opened the first Publix in Winter Haven, Florida.
In honor of the date there was a small event held this morning at the original Winter Haven location. The exterior of the store was remade to look like it did in 1930. (The current tenant in the location is Scores Sports Bar - Plazes Link).
You can review Publix's official history for their complete story or read the article from today's Ledger.
Kaye Trammell has written an op-ed, Slogging, and Blogging, Through Katrina for the Washington Post today.
These blogs no longer belong to the blogger but to the community, as a centralized mechanism for communication and comfort in the face of natural disaster. They amend the coverage in several ways.
Kaye ends the piece with this simple line:
Blogging will not change the world in crisis, but it will make it more human.
I was honored that Kaye mentioned me along with Rex Hammock when calling for better cooperation between cities and governments with bloggers. Kaye was referencing this post I wrote earlier this week.
After my initial review last night I have spent some more time playing around with Technorati's new Blog Finder service. I have also read other reviews by Neville, Tris, Michael and BL Ochman on the new service.
To be fair David Sifry did comment on my original post that they're working on some of the issues I noted.
Continue reading "Further Analysis of Technorati's Blog Finder" »
While battling reliability and scaling issues Technorati is forging ahead with new services. David Sifry announced the launch of their Blog Finder service. The basic premise is to rank blogs by category or technically speaking, by tags. David says in his blog that new service answers the question, "How can you find authoritative blogs on a subject?" This is what Robert Scoble was asking for on Monday.
I took a quick look around at the new service this evening and here are my initial impressions.
The initial version of the listings was built by using category and tag data that blogs had already submitted. Right out of the box, the lists are very BETA. For example, some bloggers use the category 'PR' instead of 'Public Relations'. As such, Neville Hobson's blog is listed as the Most Authorative blog on 'PR' but is nowhere to be found on the list for 'Public Relations' blogs. This blog is listed as the 11th Most Authorative Blog for 'Public Relations' and 'PR'. Jeremy Pepper would get a kick out of this since he and I have talked about the fact that I'm not really a true PR blogger :-)
I am also listed as the Most Authorative blog for 'Orlando' even though I rarely write about Orlando. Why? I guess becuase I have tagged more posts Orlando than other bloggers.
There are other issues as well. In the 'PR' search, Neville's blog is listed in three places, under three different URLs. (nevon.net/nevon/, nevon.typepad.com and nevon.typepad.com/nevon/) This is due to the fracturing of data within Technorati's index. If you remember Neville discovered this when he was having problems with Technorati's search tool.
Also Steve Rubel is not listed under 'PR' or 'Public Relations', but he is second for 'Podcasting' behind Dave Winer.
If you have a Technorati account and have claimed your blog, you can specify the tags you want associated with your blog. I looked at this option and it does allow you to specify up to 20 tags for your blog. One problem I noticed though was it didn't always save my changes. I removed a few generic tags such as 'Stuff' (one of my categories) and replaced it with something else. A few minutes later I returned to the entry screen and a number of tags were repeated and some of my original tags were no longer there. Hopefully they'll fix this.
Overall this should be a very talked about feature. The initial bugs I noticed should be able to be cleaned up. We'll see how the rest of the blogosphere reacts in the coming days. And unfortunately, we'll also see how soon the spammers begin to manipulate the results.
Update 9.2.05 #1 Robert Scoble has noticed one of the issues I saw last night. Robert was able to make his blog the Most Authorative blog about 'Apple'.
Last night I entered the tag 'Tampa' for my blog via Technorati's configuration tool and I became the Most Authorative blog about Tampa, even though I never write about Tampa.
Update 9.2.05 #2 BL says she's surprised that her blog is #1 for 'Public Relations'.
Update 9.2.05 #3 Tris Hussey has his review/thoughts on the new service.
Update 9.2.05 #4 I've posted some further analysis on Blog Finder.
