Marie Cousin is a journalist for L’Express, one of the most prestigious French weekly news magazines. And for three years now, she has been part of a team of five journalists writing the section “Réussir”, which talks about the working world as seen by employees. In August 2005, the team decided to start the collective blog of Réussir with the ambition to deliver fresh information not available in the paper version and to open a conversation with its readers. I recently met Marie to ask her if this collective effort was running smoothly. Here are some excerpts of this conversation (in French).

Jakob Nielsen is tracking the usability of web sites for many years now. Now, he’s looking at blogs and he recently published “Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes.” And obviously, this list reminds me that I need to update the design of this blog for several months, a task that I’m postponing day after day by telling me that the contents are more important than the design. But even if it is true, I promise you to change the design of this blog before the end of the year, and in particular to add a short biography and a photo.

So here is this list of the most common design mistakes.

• No Author Biographies
• No Author Photo
• Nondescript Posting Titles
• Links Don’t Say Where They Go
• Classic Hits are Buried
• The Calendar is the Only Navigation
• Irregular Publishing Frequency
• Mixing Topics
• Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
• Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

And for more details, please read the original article.

Jérôme Colombain is a journalist at France Info, one of the stations of Radio France, the French public broadcasting service, where he handles several audio columns focused on new technologies, such as Nouveau monde. Of course, he’s perfectly aware about the existence of blogs and this is why I wanted to ask him what a veteran journalist thought about this phenomenon. Here are some excerpts from our conversation (in French).

This new service, launched this week by Chris Pirillo, from Lockergnome, with the help of developer Shayne Sweeney, is a totally new metasearch engine very well adapted to cell phone users. This service, Gada.be, sends your query to more than 140 services which have an application programming interface (API) and a RSS feed, such as Amazon, Google, MSN ou Yahoo!. But the big innovation of gada.be is that your request is embedded in the URL you enter. For example, if you want to know what others say about this blog, here is the URL you’ll enter: http://blogworkers.gada.be. And you’ll keep it because the contents will be updated as soon as the different queried RSS feeds are updated.

For more information about this service, you can read this article from eWEEK. And the page What is gada.be? will give you more details.

Here are more examples. If I want to know what is written about me, I just have to put my name inside the URL, http://piquepaille.gada.be/.

More complex searches are also possible. If I want to know what is said about my blog about new technologies hosted by ZDNet, I’ll jump to http://emerging technology trends.gada.be.

You also can replace dots by dashes, which will mean AND. If I want to know who’s speaking of me (Roland) and ZDNet, here will be my query: http://roland-zdnet.gada.be/.

This service is brand new, and it seems that the number of servers handling the traffic is somewhat under dimensioned. As a result, Gada.be will sometimes be unavailable, or response times will be quite long.

Meanwhile, do your own experiments and tell me what you think of this great new service. Personally, I think this new service has an enormous potential, especially because it searches only other modern “open services.”

If you want to sell your house, you can ask a real-estate agent for help. But, as some U.S. individuals are successfully doing it, you also can start a blog to promote your beautiful garden or the presence of a nice school in your neighborhood. I wanted to tell you about this particular usage of blogs by very small companies — yourself — for a while now. But today, I’m wondering how two different journalists have found and interviewed the same person with almost exactly the same words. You’ll find below the first paragraphs of an article published by the Los Angeles Times in July 2005 and of another one published today by the Wall Street Journal. UPDATE (October 11, 2005): Raymond Hennessey, the editor of Tara Siegel Bernard at Dow Jones Newswires, assures me that she found and interviewed Mesha Provo independently. The fact that the details are similar comes from the source, not from the journalists.

Here is the beginning of an article by Jeff Bertolucci, published by the Los Angeles Times issued on July 24, 2005, “On bloggers’ turf” (free registration necessary).

When Mesha Provo and her husband decided last March to sell their 1,350-square-foot home in El Sobrante, a Bay Area suburb, she saw green in her garden. A self-styled “fanatical gardener,” she recognized the potential draw of her labors — and she hoped to find a buyer who would appreciate her garden’s beauty.

So in addition to hiring an agent to list the property, Provo started an Internet Web log — blog for short — and told her real estate agent to include the Web address on her home’s Multiple Listing Service information.

Each day, she wrote about and posted photos of her daisies, jasmine and roses to entice prospects.

“I had this idea that I would first tease them with pictures of the garden,” said Provo, 52, who is the national sales manager for Ballentine Vineyards in Napa Valley. Later, she added shots of the home’s interior and exterior.

Her clever marketing appeared to work. The house sold for $612,000 — $43,000 more than the original asking price — to another gardener who read her blog.

And now is the beginning of an article by Tara Siegel Bernard, from Dow Jones Newswires, published today on the Wall Street Journal web site, “Home Sellers Turn to Blogs To Make Properties Stand Out” (paid registration necessary).

When Mesha Provo, an avid gardener, decided to sell her home in El Sobrante, Calif., she wanted to showcase her property — with its arbor blanketed with wisteria — to appeal to other plant lovers. She started a blog detailing her garden’s story through passionate postings and vibrant close-ups of her flowers, and eventually added pictures of the house.

A gardener found her blog — through a flyer put together by a real-estate agent — fell in love with the house, and ultimately paid $612,000 for it, $43,000 more than the asking price.

“What the blog did was take a buyer, before he walked through my door, and sold him on my house,” said the 53-year-old Ms. Provo, national sales director of Ballentine Vineyards in Napa Valley.

As you can see, Tara Siegel Bernard has used exactly the same example as Jeff Bertolucci. The only difference is that Mesha Provo is now one year older than in July But of course, we’re in October now.

Several weeks ago, I read in Workforce.com that Honeywell was about to launch blogs to ease its hiring process of young students in the U.S. The starting idea looked promising: leave the animation of these blogs to recent recruits by the company. And to be sure to put fresh content on these blogs, these new recruits would write only for a period of three months before being replaced by new ones. After doing some investigation, I sincerely think that this initiative will be a flop.

First, here are some details provided by Workforce.com.

To reach candidates with different backgrounds, Honeywell has enlisted people from IT, human resources and the supply chain to write three weekly entries on topics they choose. The idea, [says Kevin Gill, the company’s director of global staffing,] is for content to lean toward ideas about career development instead of dry talk about benefits. To keep content fresh, three people will blog for three months, then relinquish their duties to new bloggers. All writers are volunteers who are recent recruits to Honeywell and hold graduate degrees.

Gill says the bloggers will help one another to ensure that posts comply with corporate governance standards, decency and grammar. As long as those requirements are satisfied, bloggers will be free to write about anything that they want, including negative experiences. “The sites will exist to relay what’s gone on in your job,” Gill says, “whether something is working out well or not.

Now, let’s discover how this experiment is progressing by visiting the home page of these recruiting blogs. What is available here? The blogs from Caralyn B (Marketing, Specialty Materials, 2 notes, 10 comments, last note dated September 15), Kara K (Human Resources, Aerospace, 2 notes, 7 comments, last note dated September 19) et Jon K (Integrated Supply Chain, Aerospace, 3 notes, 5 comments, last note dated October 3).

In other words, our new bloggers have not reached their objectives. The starting idea was good, but its execution is pretty poor. If this situation doesn’t improve soon, do you think that this experiment will be a success or a failure?

In March 2005, I told you that there were 2,800 active blogs at IBM. Seven months later, a document published by IBM, “Blogging means Business,” and analyzed by Neville Hobson for WebProNews reveals that this number has been multiplied by four, even if the company doesn’t know the real number.

In this IBM document, two vice presidents of IBM give their opinions about the power of building communities in the marketplace, Willy Chiu (Vice President of High Performance On Demand Solutions) and Harriet Pearson (Vice President of Corporate Affairs and Chief Privacy Officer for IBM).

Here is what they say about the number of blogs written by IBM employees.

Harriet Pearson: “By last count we have about twelve to fourteen thousand active bloggers in IBM who are active from — can you believe it? — about seventy or seventy-three countries at the last moment.”

Willy Chiu: “We have an internal IBM blog facility that’s called Blog Central. We have over 12,000 users that, that post blog pages regularly.”

So, 12,000 or 14,000? This is not very important. What is more important is that these two VPs have understood how employee blogs could benefit the company.

Willy Chiu: “You immediately create credibility on the Internet with these blogs and the blog postings and the customers who reach out and look for those for content, identify who the experts are. And you begin to build this relationship.”

Harriet Pearson: “I think people are motivated to share their expertise and to share what they know. And I think if you can tap into people’s desire to share what they know and to be relevant and important, you can tap into a very powerful motivator.”

So what do you think? Will you follow the example of IBM and start blogs in your company?

The Scottish group Franz Ferdinand is releasing today its second album, “You Could Have It So Much Better.” And to ensure that the sales of this album will be at least as good as the ones of the first album (four millions copies sold worldwide), the group from Glasgow asked the agency DS.Emotion to revamp its web site. But the agency decided to go further and asked the four musicians to start individual blogs. Here is the address where you can read the blogs of Alex, Nick, Bob and Paul, which in fact are not exactly blogs.

Each of these blogs has its own page, but there are no permanent links to individual notes, no system for managing comments, and even the dates look somewhat strange.

At least the words used by the musicians look personal enough. Here is an example from Nick’s blog about his discovery of Salt Lake City — the group is currently touring the U.S.

Salt Lake City was one of the most amazing places I’ve been to. It’s well worth a trip.
We didn’t actually play anywhere near the city but in an old building called Saltair that used to be part of the salt lake holiday resort in the teens and twenties and maybe even before that. It’s like the Taj Mahal but in not quite as good a shape. There’s a website dedicated to it and it’s worth a look. Nobody actually swims in the Lake anymore because thhey think it’s ‘gros’, which is a great shame because it’s 30 percent salt and you swim right on top of the water. Oh well.
The place is now owned by about ten guys, half of them with mowhawks, running it on their own terms.
Well I must say the Saltlake city audience was amazing as well, thank you very much indeed and I even beat Parker, our soundguy at table tennis.
Oh what a perfect day.
On our way to Seattle, the place where my parents met. Maybe I’ll visit their old house or the place where it used to be, because I think it was destroyed by a landslide.

So what do you think? Is this possible that this kind of — almost — fake blogs can help the promotion of the album?

Almost simultaneously, two new surveys exploring how enterprises are deploying and using blogs have been launched in the U.S. The first one, which was supposed to expire on September 30, but is still available, was born from an initiative of iUpload and the
Guidewire Group. The other survey is the result of a collaboration between Technorati and Edelman.

Here is a link to the press release announcing the first survey.

Corporate blogging solutions provider iUpload, and Guidewire Group, the firm behind the BlogOn conference, are calling for interested people in Marketing, Media, Communications and IT fields to participate in a survey exploring how enterprises are deploying and benefiting from blog-related initiatives.

And here is a link to the form to fill to participate in this survey.

More logically, Technorati decided to announce its own survey on its blog.

Technorati and Edelman are partnering in an attempt to better understand how blogging and traditional PR intersect, and what bloggers think about communication from mainstream companies. Edelman is a global public relations firm representing brands such as Xbox, Nissan, and Dove. Working together, we created a 18-question survey to better understand the blogging community and your preferred methods of hearing from companies.

You can fill the questionnaire by clicking on this link.