In fact, it’s not entirely true, but Southwest Airlines blog really took off last week. Nuts about Southwest is a moderated blog hosted by about 20 employees who write about their jobs at the airline, but also about the travel industry. So you’ll find posts from managers and mechanics as well as captains or flying attendants. The airline says it will welcome comments from customers, but one thing is sure: these comments might be edited — or not published. Anyway, when will we see an official blog from Air France?

But let’s look at the Southwest Airlines blog user’s guide.

Our goal with this blog is to give our readers the opportunity to take a look inside Southwest Airlines and to interact with us. This is as much your blog as it is ours. We have lined up a crew of bloggers representing a diverse cross-section of our Company. The most current postings will be found on the home page, and we have organized the archives by category. We want to build a personal relationship between our bloggers and you, and we need your participation. You are the “other half” of this blog, and our bloggers can’t wait to communicate with you, so get busy posting.

Nice words: it almost looks like a press release. But wait, there is more.

This is the point where we insert the “fine print” and discuss the guidelines for posting. The Southwest Blog is starting out as a moderated site because we want to ensure that everyone stays on topic. We would LUV for you to post your thoughts, comments, suggestions, and questions, but when you post, make sure that they are of general interest to most readers. Of course, profanity, racial and ethnic slurs, and rude behavior like disparaging personal remarks won’t be tolerated nor published.

The key word here is “moderated.” I’m sure some of you will object to this, but this is exactly what I’m doing here. I only accept relevant comments — no spam, no rude language.

So what do you think about this Southwest Airlines blog? Is this a PR trick or a real effort by the company to connect with its customers?

After buying Weblogs Inc. last year, AOL has decided to open another blog network, bloggingstocks.com, dedicated to individual stocks. So far, this new network is composed of eight blogs and the writers are supposed to follow strict guidelines about the stocks they’re commenting upon. For the moment, AOL is covering technology companies such as Apple, eBay, Google, Microsoft or Yahoo!, but also mainstream ones like General Electric, Time Warner — AOL parent company — and Wal-Mart.

Here are two quotes from the welcome note posted on the new blog network on April 27, 2006.

If you’re visiting Blogging Stocks around the time of this post’s publication, you’re one of the first to view the beginnings of what will be a revolution in the quality, depth and passion of online stock news and analysis. Sure, you can get stock charts (and good ones!) anywhere.

But nowhere can you get opinion and quality meta-analysis that goes deep into the stocks you care about - the ones you hold in your portfolio - like that you’ll see here. Nowhere can you get passion that runs as red, yellow, green, black and blue.

Here are the direct links to the first eight stocks of AOL network in alphabetical order: Apple Computer, eBay Inc., General Electric, Google, Inc., Microsoft Corp., Time Warner, Wal-Mart Stores and Yahoo Inc..

Are there potential conflicts of interest between the bloggers and the companies they will follow? AOL has posted a code of conduct for the bloggers. Here is an excerpt.

Transparency is […] one of our most dearly-held company values. Therefore our writers each disclose all of the stock holdings of the writers or their immediate families in their biography page (that you can read simply by clicking on the link at the bottom of each writers’ post), with the exception of the individual stocks held in the writer’s mutual funds. Our bloggers will publically disclose when buying or selling stock, except through stock purchase plans.

In fact, I’ve only looked at a couple of bios of the bloggers and found which stocks they own, but not the number of shares.

Now, does anyone in France want to start a similar blog network?

If you publish a blog, even a personal one, I’m sure that you’ve already received comments unrelated to the contents of your blog. Most of the time, these unsolicited messages are sent to you to promote such things as gambling, sex or drugs. In a recent article, “Blogosphere suffers spam explosion,” CNET News.com described the problem.

For example, Boing Boing, a blog which attracts 400,000 visitors daily, has totally banned comments for two years. And even if it’s an extreme attitude, what can you do when you receive 20 or 100 spam messages every day?

Here is a short description of what you can do depending on your blog publishing tool features.

• Accept all comments, but there is a risk: the ‘bots’ — or software robots — used to post spam messages often target old pages that you are not reading; and their messages might be illegal depending on where you live.
• Rely on the spam filters provided by you blogging platform, but you’re not sure if these filters are efficient.
• Establish ‘blacklists’ of people or IP addresses you want to ban; alternatively, you can build ‘whitelists’ of people from which you accept comments.
• Moderate comments and review them for approval before publication.
• Ask commenters to identify themselves via valid names and e-mail addresses: unfortunately, it’s easy to forge an a valid address for miscreants; and valid commenters might not like the idea to give you their identity or simply to spend some extra time just to tell you what they think.
• Ask your visitors to use passwords or ‘pass-strings’: this can be efficient to keep ‘bots’ at bay, but it might be a pain for people who would just want to send you a useful feedback.
• Reject all comments: this is an extreme measure, but it might be the only solution with some blogging tools.

In my four years of blogging, I’ve used all of these techniques at a moment or another. None of them is fully satisfactory. Some take lots of time while others don’t really encourage conversations.

So what kind of tool do you use to deal with spam? Send me your thoughts.

Like blogs, podcasts are all the rage these days. But what is the future of this communication tool? I can’t give you a definitive answer, but you’ll find below why podcasts can be attractive for publishers and somewhat less appealing for consumers. Several research companies estimate that the future is bright for podcasts in terms of audience and dollars. But because podcasting is almost not searchable and doesn’t encourage interaction, this is not the right medium for me. So read on and tell me what you think.

Before going further, what is a podcast? Basically, it is an audio file — or sometimes a video recording — available on a Web site. It can be (more or less automatically) downloaded and listened later at any time on a variety of media players.

Now that we have a definition of what is a podcast, why would you start to produce one? Basically because it’s cheap.

• You don’t need some fancy equipment: even a cheap microphone is enough to start and there are plenty of free or inexpensive software to help you to start.
• You don’t need to foolproof your text: even if someone listens to your podcast, he’ll soon forget the errors.
• You’ll also need an host to store your wonderful creations, but there are plenty of inexpensive storage solutions these days.

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• First, you need to locate a podcast. Of course, you can use mainstream search engines or rely on specialized ones, such as Podcast.net. But you might lose some time searching through the more than 50,000 different sources available today.
• And even if the title of a podcast looks interesting to you, what about the contents? Is the producer knowledgeable? How long lasts the podcast? Very few podcasts publish a detailed summary of their contents. And if you’re a podcaster, I encourage you to follow the model of the Engadget podcasts. With their table of contents, you know you can skip the first 8 minutes and listen to the 20 seconds of interest to you.
• Some other podcasters also publish a textual transcription of their audio files, but they are very few to do it and respect their audience, even if again, there are plenty of free or inexpensive software to help producers.
• In other words, once you’ve located and downloaded a podcast, you can only listen to it until the end, even if the contents are boring or useless: maybe you’ll have to listen to 15 minutes of uninteresting content before a real gem appears.
• So you’re like an hostage or a prisoner. It can be fine if you’re already in such a situation, for example if you’re trapped in a traffic jam. But personally I cherish my freedom.
• Finally there is a last aspect from a consumer point of view. You read several times faster than you listen to words. This is why I can read or scan several hundreds of articles everyday, something which would be totally impossible with audio files.

Even if these issues are real, several market research companies see a rosy market for podcasts. Here are some examples.

• According to FeedBurner, podcasts outnumber radio stations (Ben Charny, eWEEK, April 17, 2006). “FeedBurner now distributes 47,000 different podcasts, which means there are more podcasters than radio stations. And the rate at which new podcasters emerge on the scene has doubled in the last six months, the company said.” Still, it’s easier to turn on and off your radio than to find a podcast.
• Internet researcher eMarketer forecasts that the total US audience for podcasts could reach 10 million in 2006, 25 million by 2008, and perhaps 50 million by 2010. For more information, you can read Podcasting: Who’s Tuning In? (Mike Chapman, March 2006, 7 Pages, 10 Charts, $695).
• In another report, Blog, Podcast and RSS Advertising Outlook (April 2006, $995), PQ Media writes that the “podcast ad spending reached $3.1 million in 2005, and is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 154.4% from 2006 to 2010,” when it reaches $327.0 million (please note the decimals!!!).
• Finally, you might want to read Podcasts are huge; it’s just the audience that’s tiny (John Paczkowski, Good Morning Silicon Valley, April 6, 2006) which mentions a Forrester report, Podcasting Hits The Charts (Charlene Li, Forrester Research, March 28, 2006, 6 pages, $249). “Who’s listening to podcasts? Apparently no one. According to a new report from Forrester, only 1 percent of online households in North America regularly download and listen to podcasts. ‘Podcasts have hit the mainstream consciousness but have not yet seen widespread use,’ Forrester analyst Charlene Li explains.”

Now that you have enough qualitative and quantitative elements to forge your opinion, let me summarize why podcasts might be good for you, but not for me.

• The contents of podcasts are not searchable — at least by mainstream search engines: with very few exceptions, there is no possibility to find a text version of a podcast.
• Podcasting is a one-way medium: a producer talks to consumers. There is no interaction between both except through posts on blogs.
• In other words, podcasting is not a collaborative medium. On the contrary, it follows the traditional one-to-many communication model. Sorry, after several years of blogging, I like to be able to start a conversation.

So today, a very small percentage of online users is listening to podcasts. Do you think that this number will grow like research firms are thinking? Have you listened — and enjoyed podcasts yourself? Send me your thoughts.

Two months ago, I wrote about the economic weight of the blogs, concluding that it was quite small. In the last two weeks, several reports confirmed my opinion and showed that I was even too optimistic.

Let’s start with two quotes from “Online ad spending hits record in 2005” (Elinor Mills, CNET News.com, April 21, 2006).

The amount of money spent on Internet advertising in the U.S. rose by 30 percent last year to a record $12.5 billion, according to a report released Thursday by advertising trade group the Interactive Advertising Bureau and independent auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Keyword search ads led the sector, representing 41 percent market share and $5.1 billion in revenue, followed by total display advertising, with 34 percent market share and $4.3 billion in revenue, and classified advertising with 17 percent market share and $2.1 billion in revenue.

So in the U.S. alone, keyword search ads alone are representing more than $5 billion. Pretty impressive for a market which didn’t exist a few years ago and which is largely dominated by Google.

By the way, have you seen the last stellar financial results of Google for the last quarter? Read for example “Google’s Giant Stride” (Burt Helm, Business Week Online, April 21, 2006).

Google’s revenues for the quarter soared 79%, to $2.25 billion, over the year-earlier quarter, while earnings surged 60%, to $592.3 million. Excluding fees paid to its advertising partners, revenues were $1.53 billion.

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Combined blog, podcast and RSS ad spend by the end of 2005 totaled $20.4 million, a 198.4 percent increase over the 2004 levels for user-generated online media - and is projected to climb 144.9 percent in 2006, reaching $49.8 million, according to a new report, “Blog, Podcast & RSS Advertising Outlook,” from PQ Media. Total spending on user-generated online media is forecast to grow at a compound annual rate of 106.1 percent from 2005 to 2010, reaching $757.0 million in 2010.

The blog ad market is the largest of the three, at $16.6 million accounting for 81.4 percent of total advertising in 2005, followed by podcast advertising at $3.1 million and RSS at $650,000.

For more information, you can read the PQ Media press release or buy its report, “Blog, Podcast and RSS Advertising Outlook” for $995!!

Obviously, I have no way to check if these numbers are right. But if they are, it means that the blog ad market for 2005 in the U.S. was valued at $16.6 million when online advertising represented more than $12 billion. In other words, the ad blog market represents less than 0.1 percent of the online ad market — excluding the indirect market.

Pretty small isn’t? It would be interesting to know what are the numbers for Europe and Asia. Please send me your comments if you know more about the size of these markets.

Before starting our regular selection about the use of blogs by companies, let me tell you about an achievement which made me very proud. Two weeks ago, Le Monde published a two-page article about “15 blogueurs leaders d’opinion sur la Toile” (or “The 15 bloggers which are opinion leaders on the Net”) which mentioned me as one of these bloggers. Olivier Zilbertin, the journalist who wrote the article, was kind enough to send me a copy of it and here is a link to his full column (PDF format, 2 pages, 533 KB) (Text and images: Copyright Le Monde).

Of course, the title was meant to be a teaser and neither me nor the other bloggers mentioned in the article are really forging the opinion. We are just informants. And a single article on page one of Le Monde has more influence than all of our daily posts.

And as several bloggers noticed two weeks ago, it’s interesting to note that only one woman appeared in this list of 15 bloggers at a moment where several surveys show that the number of women using the Web starts to exceed the number of men.

That said, I was particularly pleased to appear in the most prestigious French newspaper. I’m reading it for about 40 years now and I’m “sentimentally” attached to it. In fact, even if I’m working behind a computer screen for more than 30 years and if I started to publish on the Internet about 15 years ago, I still like to physically touch the printed newspaper.

Recent studies show that young people read less and less the printed press. This is not the case for me. During my walks throughout Paris, I choose everyday a different newsstand to buy my copy of Le Monde, partly to exchange a few words with the vendor. Of course, I’m also reading the headlines online from time to time, especially on Sundays when Le Monde doesn’t hit the stands.

During all these years, many friends told me that a subscription to Le Monde, in its printed form or online, will save me money. This is absolutely true, but I prefer to pay for my daily dose of printed news.

And you, what is your relationship with newspapers in 2006? Do you buy them? Do you even read them? Please let me know.

Today is the grand opening of “Blogs for Companies,” which is the successor to two blogs I’ve opened last year and which were closed for various reasons. The general theme is identical: why companies should use blogs and other modern communication tools to launch conversations with their customers, but also with their employees.

Here is how I welcomed you in January 2005.

Here is the blog you were expecting for a while. It will be dedicated to all the possible usages of blogs by companies.

Before going further, why a company should use blogs in 2005? The answer is extremely simple: to remain competitive.

Depending on days, I’ll write about internal blogs used to manage projects or to motivate teams. You’ll also find entries about external blogs which will allow you to efficiently reach your customers and your partners as well as improve your products.

All these subjects will be covered under different angles: advises and tips, case studies, interviews, legal aspects, publication policies, etc.

Of course, things have changed in a year. And I was the first one to realize it when I resurrected the posts of 2005. The format also will be slightly different. All the posts will be written in English, with occasionally some parts in French clearly identified by a light color background.

Otherwise, you’ll find here several posts per week which will bring you tips, advises, news, and some surprises from time to time.

And you can post your comments, send me your feedback or stories you want to be mentioned here. You might even sponsor this blog if you feel it can be useful for you or your company.

See you tomorrow for the first new post of 2006.