GENERATING INTEREST

One of the most popular ways to incorporate blog content in your site is to incorporate timely, related content into your public site. Veer talks graphic design, Kicksology KLOG talks shoes and basketball, XPLANE xBlog talks user experience and design, Signal vs. Noise talks usability, and GreenCine Daily talks movies.

PROMOTION

Besides just talking about topics of interest, companies are now starting to talk about themselves. Welcome to blogs as promotional vehicles. Instead of the typical Flash-based movie site, Susan Orleans hired Jason Kottke to write Regarding: Adaptation — a blog about her upcoming movie Adaptation. Heck, even Barbie Blogs.

SELF-MADE EXPERTS

Better than just talking about yourself, these folks are making themselves experts. R.Bird, a NYC-based branding and package design firm, uses their Ask Marivi blog to establish themselves as experts in Latino packaging and brand design appeal (Google search for "Latino Design"). BizNetTravel's Travel Log keeps their clients impressed with tips, tidbits, and alerts regarding the business travel industry. Martin Schwimmer demonstrates he knows his stuff daily at The Trademark Blog. The Gartner Group gives away some knowledge, but charges some clients access to their network of blogs.

TRANSCRIPTS

Aside from talking about you, your company, or other ideas related to your specific business, blogs are great for posting transcripts and notes from meetings, email exchanges, phone calls, conferences, seminars, workshops, FAQs, and more. Cameron Barret posted a real-time transcript from a conversation between Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., Jeff Barr, Amazon.com, and Jeffrey McManus, eBay at the OSCON: Bill of Rights for Web Services Panel. Another example of blogging a conference in real-time.

BLOGS AS BUSINESSES

There are even blogs that are businesses. Gizmodo is the blog for gadget lovers. Gawker (one of Time's 50 best sites) is a mix of NYC media, gossip, entertainment, fashion, and real estate snippets. The site is updated more than a dozen times a day. WatchBlog facilitates political discourse — and disgust. PVRblog talks Tivo. Puzzleblog is another creative way to try to make a buck with blogging. Companies like TechDirt will set up an enterprise blog for your company — complete with all the news, summaries, opinion, and commentary they find on the web about your company or a topic of interest.

SCRAPBOOKING

Another natural use of the blog format for business is keeping track of press clippings/mentions, progress, new product launches/features, etc. Meetup uses a photolog to dynamically create a visual "behind the scenes" scrapbook of their growth. Speaking of Meetup, their entire press section is simply a blog. Clip-n-Seal blogs customer uses/mentions, new distributors/merchants, and promotion announcements. FOX Searchlight blogs positive media reports, box office statistics, and links to actor interviews for some of its films.

PRODUCT/SERVICE SUPPORT

Providing support and product updates via the blog format is a natural. Everything TypePad is where Six Apart posts development news, tips and tricks, links to TypePad-related and weblogging resources and general information for the TypePad user. Macromedia recently had five of its "community managers" create their own weblogs. In fact, they even have an aggregator that shows posts from around web about a specific Macromedia product.

MICRO-CONTENT

Sites don't need to be 100% blog driven. The United Center's calendar of events is a blog driven. Inc. Magazine's Fresh Inc section keeps the home page fresh while the feature items stay static. In the summers, Fox Sports New England syndicates the "Bambino's Curse" blog to keep their home page fresh (and in the winter, they hire a blogger to talk about the Celtics).

PROJECT MANAGEMENT AND "KLOGS"

Businesses are starting to use blogs internally to share knowledge, disseminate information across the entire organization, and manage projects. Some advantages of using internal blogs include: We use a homegrown, blog-based tool called Basecamp to manage projects and knowledge. Basecamp will be available for others to use (based on a hosted subscription model) in January 2004.
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