A few months ago, in “Blogging takes lots of time,” I introduced you to the research work of Nora Ganim Barnes, Director of the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Now, with her colleague Eric Mattson, she has just completed a study of the Inc. 500 and their use of social media. Their report is aptly named “The Hype is Real: Social Media Invades the Inc. 500.”

First, what is the Inc. 500 list? Each year, Inc. magazine produces the Inc. 500, a list of the nation’s fastest-growing private companies. So it’s very different from the Fortune 500 list. [Note: I’m not including any URLs to the Inc. magazine because — at least today — you cannot skip a recurring ad on their home page. If you want to see the list, use Google with a “inc 500 list” query. And on the results page, click on the cached version. Sometimes, I’m wondering if some companies really want to annoy you or make business.]

Now, here is an introductory quote from the authors of the study: “The Inc. 500 are thoroughly involved in social media at an adoption rate more than twice that of the Fortune 500. Best yet, this is probably the most valid study on corporate blogging etc. done to date, with a very low error level of just +/- 3%.”

Here is a link to the full report (PDF format, 5 pages, 122 KB).And below is a chart showing how the companies which were surveyed are using social media tools (Credit: Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson).

The companies were asked if they were using the six social media discussed above and, if yes, for how long they had been using them. Again, the results are surprising. While familiarity is related to adoption, even the least familiar media of wikis has 17% adoption. All six forms of social media are far more widespread than anticipated.

As the researchers say, “The social media revolution is here. The hype is real.”

Source: Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, January 2007

You’ll find related stories by following the links below.

• Blogs
• Business
• Social Networks

It took me a while to reply to François Lamotte, from Shoob, who wanted to know how various bloggers were writing their posts. He asked us to define five key points — or principles. Personally, I have only one principle when I write, be it a report, a presentation, a personal e-mail, a postcard or a post on a blog. And it is only three words long: respect the reader. Of course, writing a blog and an academic paper are two different things. So read more to discover my personal guidelines. UPDATE (November 8, 2006): you can read the French version of these guidelines in “Comment blogue Roland Piquepaille?” published by François on Shoob.

Choose an interesting subject

For my blogs about emerging trends (ZDNet or Primidi), I usually select a subject which has not yet be treated by the mainstream media or blogs with large readership. And I’m choosing only one subject daily on more than a thousand articles that I read — partially or totally.

For the ones focused about why companies should use blogs (Blogs for Companies or ITtoolbox), my selecting process is slightly different. For example, if I want to write about the latest corporate blog launched by Intel, I’m waiting until there are enough posts to see if the blog has a future or not — according to me. Being the first to write about this blog is not interesting for me — and my readers (read this for more details).

In both cases, as I’m publishing “knowledge blogs,” I usually avoid to write about subjects which already have abundantly commented on.

Find references and pictures

Even if some bloggers say they’re dead, press releases still exist. And the mainstream media also are still alive — and well, at least for some. But often, and probably because they have to face the competition of some influent bloggers, news releases and press articles have a tendency to rush. Sometimes, they mention a researcher’s name or the name of the journal which published his latest work. When I decide to publish a post about a specific subject, I’m looking for the exact references and even previous publications from this researcher or his lab. I’m also searching for illustrations which will allow the reader to better understand what are the concepts behind a specific research work.

Check all the facts

Even if you’re reading very well established newspapers or magazines, it’s better to look at possible mistakes and to double check if their numbers are right. Like when the French news magazine L’Express wrote a few months ago that IBM had 130,000 employees: at this time, IBM employed 330,000 persons (read this for more details).

When I decided two days ago to write that an American astronomer was envisioning to build a ’sun umbrella’ to protect us from the global warming consequences, a project which could cost as much as $2,5 trillion, I searched for several confirmations. First, I wanted to know if I was not dreaming, and then, I really needed to validate such an incredible information. After checking if the information was true, I wrote a note which has now been picked in a way or another by influential blogs, such as Engadget, Defense Tech or Slashdot (read this for more details).

Laptop parts such as new laptop batteries and replacement laptop screens can now be purchased from this online computer repair store. Now you can get computer repair parts online at great prices!

If an interesting content is essential for a blog, the way the information is presented is also crucial. Even if a blog post is considered as less formal than a report to your CEO doesn’t mean that you have to ignore grammar rules. Below is a non-exhaustive list of what I’m checking before publishing a post on my blogs.

• Find a “good” title for the post (read “How to find a good title for a note“)
• Summarize the note for inclusion in various news feeds
• Spell check the text (read “Check Your Text for Formal Errors“)
• Check syntax, grammar and punctuation
• Check that all the links mentioned in the post are accessible — at least when I’m publishing the note
• Mention all the sources for the post
• Indicate the “weight” of some documents (animations and videos for example)

And always think about the potential reader

I guess you already have understood that I’m thinking about you when I’m publishing a note. Even after 4 1/2 years of blog writing, I’m still only publishing about things that passionate me — and which might interest you. This process led me to have friends all over the world. And if one day I’m getting bored, you’ll feel it. And I’ll stop blogging.

Sources: Roland Piquepaille, November 6, 2006; and various websites

You’ll find related stories by following the links below.

• Blogs
• Business
• Personal

Last week, I mentioned here a very young business blog directory. But how do you find the corporate blog of your favorite company if it’s not listed in this directory? There are many ways to find if a company has a corporate blog, as reminds us Easton Ellsworth in 10 Quick Ways to Find Corporate Blogs. But read more to discover other tips and directories.

Ellsworth’s tip #1 is obvious: ‘Use Google to search the company’s website for “blog” and variants (weblog, blogs, etc.). e.g. Honda: [site:honda.com blog].’ Please note that this last query limits the results to pages belonging to the site ‘honda.com.’

Personally, I prefer to search for a company name on both Technorati and Google Blog Search. Using this second service, you can reduce the amount of results by successively searching for ‘honda’, ‘honda blog’, ‘honda corporate blog’ and ‘honda “corporate blog”‘ (without the single quotes around the query).

If you specifically want to know if a U.S. Fortune 500 has a corporate blog, you can look at two Wiki-based directories.

The first one is maintained by Socialtext, the company headed by Ross Mayfield. Here is a link to the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki. There is a limitation: only one blog is listed for the companies appearing in this index. However, it still can give you an entry point inside a company.

The second directory is brand new and has been initiated by Easton Ellsworth who writes for several blogs, including Business Blogwire. Here is a link to this Fortune 500 Blog Project. You can participate to this collective effort if you wish. So far, this project is not so easy to navigate. For example, if you go to the Project page, you have access to the list of companies, but not directly to their corporate blogs. The only way I’ve found to know if this directory contains a corporate blog for a company is to use the search engine on the left part of all pages. But I guess the navigation process will improve in coming days.

Now, do you know if similar efforts exist in other parts of the world, especially in Europe and more specifically in France? If yes, please post your discoveries below.

Sources: Easton Ellsworth, Business Blogwire, October 10, 2006; and various websites

You’ll find related stories by following the links below.

• Blogs
• Business

In a very brief article, the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal wrote last week that a Minnetonka-based company has launched a corporate blog directory. This directory, assembled by TMA E-Marketing, currently contains 532 business blogs distributed among 213 categories. I toured the site for you and here are my first impressions.

First, what is the goal of this directory? Here is the company’s answer: “Offering the web a comprehensive collection of the world’s best corporate and Business Blogs.”

So let’s look at the contents of this site which lists business blogs by industry. Here are some of these categories, with the numbers of blogs in each of it: Advertising and Marketing (34), Aerospace and Defense (2), Automotive (9), Computer and Software (24), Public Relations (9) or Technology (24).

But you will not find the big names here, such as Sun Microsystems’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz or GM’s vice-chairman Bob Lutz. I haven’t found either the latest corporate blogs of Intel or Verizon.

And this leads me to another point. The search feature of this directory offers two options: searching something in blog posts or in the last two weeks. But, except if I’m very dumb this morning, I haven’t found a way to directly find a blog in the directory. In other words, this directory is a good thing and we need to encourage the company to improve both its contents and its search tools.

One way to improve this directory is to add your own corporate blog by filling this form to be included in this directory. And if you don’t have one, TMA E-Marketing will be happy to help you to create your own corporate blog.

Sources: Katharine Grayson, Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, October 16, 2006; and TMA E-Marketing’s business blog directory

You’ll find related stories by following the links below.

• Blogs
• Business
• Web Sites

There are many ways to evaluate the popularity of your blog. You can look at the Google PageRank (read more), the Technorati rank (read more) or at the number of readers of your feeds at FeedBurner or Bloglines. Or you can visit Bloginfluence.net which mixes several of these metrics to give you a unique number which is supposed to reflect your ‘blog influence.’ Like any metrics, this one needs to be looked at with a grain of salt. Read my analysis…

BlogInfluence.net is the result of the work of Julio Gorka, who used various APIs and a formula he devised himself. Here is the formula he’s using to give you the ‘influence number’ of your blog: [(blog+posts+web links) + (bloglines subs * 2)] * 1+(PageRank/10).

Below is a table showing the ‘blog influence numbers’ for three of my blogs, including this one. For comparison, I also put the results for “GM FastLane Blog,” a widely known corporate blog, and for “Smart Mobs,” a group blog where I’m one of the editors.

What can we learn from this small sample of blogs?

• Google PageRank doesn’t measure your blog’s popularity, but evaluates its relationship with the blogosphere. So all the blogs in this sample have almost the same PageRank values.
• The Technorati rank of FL is much higher than the one of TT, but their ‘blog influence’ numbers are almost similar. Why that? Probably because TT is older and contains more posts.
• There are only 64% more sites having linking to SM than FL, but SM’s influence is 6 times larger than FL. Why? Probably because SM contains about six new posts per day.
• The Technorati ranks of ETT and FL are almost the same, but the ‘blog influence’ number of ETT is 3 times the one of FL. Why that? I really don’t know.

Trying to find out where to get new laptop parts and spare laptop batteries? Check out this laptop repair store that offers laptop screen repairs and more computer accessories here today.

Finally, in Blog Equivalence of Page Rank, WebProNews adds that “a few more metrics added to [Bloginfluence.net] formula which would help strengthen its value.” For example, WebProNews says that Yahoo and Google News links should be incorporated in the formula (for authority) as well as FeedBurner subscribers (for readership).

What do you think of this ‘blog influence’ number? What is yours? Drop me a note.

Source: BlogInfluence.net website; Manoj Jasra, for WebProNews, September 19, 2006

You’ll find related stories by following the links below.

• Blogs
• Business
• Google
• Smart Mobs
• Websites

You probably are using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds today to discover what is new on a site or a blog. But RSS technology, like blogs, can be used by companies in various situations. RSS feeds can be used internally or externally to improve business processes, as reports the editorial of the latest issue of CIO Magazine. This article gives some details about how real companies use RSS to complement — or even replace — their e-mail systems. Some are using RSS feeds to increase employee satisfaction or to improve the way they provide information to their customers. Still, deployments are not so easy and require some hard customization work. But read more…

For those of you who want to refresh their memory about what RSS means (Really Simple Syndication? Rich Site Summary? RDF Site Summary?), I suggest you read this Wikipedia article which will tell you what you need to know about the various ’standards’ — or implementations — of RSS.

Let’s start with a first example of how RSS can be used inside a company.

Ross Szalay, IS director for the law firm Dykema, took the internal approach to turbocharge the firm’s ability to monitor current cases. For example, an attorney in charge of a specific client account gets a regular feed of all specific efforts undertaken by other attorneys for the client, so there’s a unified view of the services the client is getting — and needs to be billed for.

But RSS feeds also can be used to provide critical information to customers.

At Jets International, which provides a matching service between private-plane operators with unused seating capacity and executives who need a flight, the emphasis of RSS is external, to keep suppliers and customers up to date on available flights and customer requests, according to Nate McKelvey, who serves as both CEO and CIO of the company. Plane operators have a custom RSS reader that keeps them updated on customer requests that match the available seating.

If these deployments are useful and successful, don’t underestimate the amount of work needed to create a real world business application.

Because it isn’t yet clear how RSS will be used and where, CIOs are finding that they need to do a fair amount of custom configuring of the few tools available to meet their particular organizations’ needs.

In McKelvey’s case, he had to write a custom reader for his 350 suppliers of seats on private planes because it would have been too difficult, he judged, for his suppliers to configure a generic RSS reader themselves. The complex configuration has caused him to hold off on delivering RSS feeds to the company’s several thousand customers: “I’ll deploy it to them when there’s no configuration to support,” he says.

And how can you evaluate the ROI of such RSS-based tools? It’s not always easy, because they just provide easier ways to manage information. But every employee or customer will benefit from these tools, which don’t cost that much. “Dykema’s Szalay agrees the cost is small, in the low tens of thousands of dollars.”

Are you ready to build new business applications based on RSS technology? Have you already deployed successful ones? Drop me a note.

Sources: Galen Gruman, for CIO Magazine, September 1, 2006; and BT Business blog

You’ll find related stories by following the links below.

• Blogs
• Business
• Internet
• IT

I already wrote several times here about the free software tools that give you statistics about your audience. One of these tools is StatCounter which has recently added a new feature to its already long list. You can now view your recent visitors on a Google Map. It is quite ironic that Google Analytics also offers you to see where your visitors come from (here is an example), but not on a Google map.

Below is an example of such a map showing where the recent visitors to this blog came from.

As far as I know, there are no options to generate such a map. I have no idea if the above map represents the visitors who came during the last hour, day or week. But I guess that some optional controls will soon be added.

As this is a Google map, it is fully clickable. Just click on a marker and StatCounter will give you all the details about a particular visitor. So another desirable option would be to only display a fixed number of visitors, such as the last 100 visitors.

But overall, this is a nice addition to an already great package. If you don’t have already a web tracking tool installed on your blog, try StatCounter and you’ll be happy.

Sources: Roland Piquepaille, August 31, 2006

You’ll find related stories by following the links below.

• Blogs
• Google
• Internet

If you visit this page at Digital Inspiration, you might be surprised to be greeted by a message mentioning the city and the country where you are. In fact, it’s pretty easy to do. I gave you about some clues three months ago in “Where are your readers coming from?”

Most of you know that all Internet requests contain several HTTP fields which permit to know a little bit about you. Of course, these tiny bits of information will not reveal if you love or hate cats, but they can provide some details about the browser or the operating system you use.

And except if you use an anonymizer service, your IP address, given by your ISP provider, will show where you come from — but not always.

This is also a trick used by the software you’ve installed to gather some statistics about your visitors and which tells you they came from 236 countries yesterday (just kidding!).

Anyway, you also can put such a welcome message on your blog. You just have to customize a small Javascript provided by IP2Location and its IP2Phrase service and shown on the page mentioned above.

I just want to add a warning before you customize and install this script on your site or your blog. Some of your potential readers might not be pleased to discover that you know where they live.

Finally, please let me know if you think that this tool is useful — or not.

Sources: Amit Agarwal, Digital Inspiration, August 26, 2006; and various web sites

You’ll find related stories by following the links below.

• Blogs
• Internet

The Google PageRank is a good indicator of the popularity of your web site or of your blog. But this metrics changes sometimes. So, SEOmoz, a company based in Seattle, WA, and which provides search engine optimization services, decided to release a new tool named Page Strength. This tool uses various indicators, including Google Pagerank, to give your site a note between 0 and 10.

The Page Strength tool aggregates various pieces of information about an URL you submit, such as the number of links found in Wikipedia or at Yahoo! pointing to it, and gives you back a unique number. Unfortunately, SEOmoz, like Google, doesn’t release the algorithm it uses to compute this note.

In Page Strength versus PageRank: Why care?, Michael Martinez, who also wrote PageRank: Where it helps, where it doesn’t help, and other facts, comments on the Page Strength tool. Here are some short quotes.

If PageRank is not the universal eye-on-Google many people want it to be, will Page Strength be a universally useful tool that can replace it? I don’t think so. PageRank was devised for the purpose of helping to organize the data of a specific search engine. It is generally assumed that Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask all embrace some aspects of PageRank’s core citation-philosophy, each with the intention of helping to organize their own data.

Page Strength doesn’t influence your search rankings. But it provides a snapshot of what your general coverage in terms of visibility, connectivity, and overall Web Presence seems to be.

Of course, I checked the Page Strength tool for my blogs.

This one, that you’re currently reading, has a Google PageRank of 6/10 (today), but got only a 3/10 note with the Page Strength tool, which also sent me this comment.

Although not a considerable presence, your site/page is making inroads online. Visitor traffic and search engine visibility is within your grasp.

My other blog, Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends, was luckier. It got a Page Strength index of 7.5/10 while its Google PageRank is 7/10. And SEOmoz sent me the following comment.

You’re running with the big brands and sites, making content that engines and visitors can’t help but gobble up. All that’s left now is to leverage your power and push ever onwards, towards utter ubiquity.

Now, if you read this, try the tool with your site or your blog, and send me the results. It should be fun!

Source: SEOmoz, July 2006

In these days of information overload, we all need tools to help us speed up our online researches and readings. And even if it exists for a year, it’s a recent column by Rafe Needleman, from CNET News.com, which introduced me to Browster, a little plug-in for Internet Explorer and Firefox. It’s free, doesn’t contain any spyware or adware, and it’s a great productivity tool for browsing. Unfortunately, it only works for Windows users — no Mac or Linux versions exist. But I’ve been using it for almost a week now and here is my review of this great little tool.

So how does Browster work? After a small download and a quick installation, small icons will appear close to all links on a page you’re viewing. Move your cursor over the icon, and a pop-up window will appear with the contents of the page referenced by the link. Move back the cursor, and the window will close. No need to click on the link, no need to return to the previous page: it’s still available.

But wait, it’s even better with some sites such as Google, Yahoo! or eBay. While you’re looking at the result list, Browster reads it and preloads all the links. This means that when you move the cursor to a Browster icon, the page is immediately visible. You also can extend this prefetch feature to any site of your choice — at least in the Internet Explorer version.

And even if this was not enough, you can really browse in a Browster window: you can use the arrow keys to move up and down within a window; you can use the page-up and page-down keys to move from a link to another; and you can even visit a new link!

In the mean time, your original page is still waiting for you: what a saving of time! I’m sure your mouse and your wrist will ask you to thank Browster.

However, there are still a couple of things that could be improved — for my own usage at least. With Internet Explorer, the Browster icon can appear far from a link (on “regular” pages, but not on a Google result page), which means it disappears before you reach it. On the contrary, with Firefox — but I’m using a much greater resolution — the icons can be so close from a link that the pop-up window might appear even if you don’t want.

And of course, it would be better if a Mac and a Linux version were in the works. But it doesn’t seem to be the case anytime soon.

But for a Windows user of Firefox, this neat application really is “extraordinarily useful,” as writes Needleman.

If you want to know more before installing this plug-in on your system, you can read the Frequently Asked Questions section or the Browster Blog.

Sources: Rafe Needleman, CNET News.com, May 26, 2006; and Browster web site