Two keys to growth: stomp and yell
A new Bain study looks at what makes brands grow. As this blog sums up: "Quick, pick the best indicator a brand will grow faster than its category: Brand size? Newness? Leadership within a category? Such is conventional wisdom, but a recent Bain study of 524 brands across 100 categories found none of the above. The study "winners"-defined as any brand that beat its category's growth each year from 1997-2001-invested differentially in just two components of the marketing mix: product innovation and advertising."

Scuppering the commish skimmers
Olivier Travers, editor of Scifan, is tired of losing affiliate commissions to skimmers. "This weekend I'm going to experiment with, and most probably implement, those scripts that lock out infected users. I'm not going to sit there idly when thieves rob us out of our commissions while Sophie and I bust our asses building the best database about SF/F books out there."

Noogle link = 500 visits in 10 minutes
When Google.News (aka Noogle) pulled an obscure ABCNews.com article on Kashmiri violence onto its front page, the site got 500 referrals in ten minutes, according to Staci Kramer. (The Kashmire article had not made the front of ABCnews.com.)

Google brakes blogs?
Olivier has dropped from #2 to #7 in Google. He wonders: is Google braking blogs? Tony Pierce, once #1 for Tony, is now #11. I see Dave Winer has the same symptoms. David Weinberger notes that he has plummeted from #6 to #25, supplanted by namesakes like David Bowie, David Lynch, David Gray, David Brin, David Grisman, Harry and David.

Inspired, I just spent a couple of minutes looking for myself among the Henry clan. After 6 pages, I gave up. Note to self: create an app allowing bloggers to track their Google status.

Swing low, sweet pricing point
Seeking to cash in on (and exacerbate) the confluence of Moore's law and Baby-bust deflation, Olivier Travers launches The Happy Deflationist. As Olivier describes it: "Fresh deals and bargains found for you on eBay, Amazon.com, and elsewhere on the web. Tech products, computer hardware, books, DVDs and CDs. Stuff that you actually want to buy, and can afford as well." It's the poor man's Gizmodo.

Blog CV: my life as a blog
Jason Kottke writes: "Anyone who meets me online -- including possible friends, fellow Web design enthusiaists, or potential employers -- has access to 4+ years of my thoughts before they even have to strike up a conversation. That's damn powerful stuff." Yep, so much so that I currently feel it would be tough to hire someone who is not a blogger. It would feel like they were hiding something.

A couple weeks ago, Krzysztof Kowalczyk argued that the best resume is a blog. "My opinion is that it's impossible to tell anything from a typical resume. So a guy says he knows PHP. Does it mean that he's a PHP guru who has written 100k lines of PHP code or that he's just finished 'Learn PHP in 15 minutes'? No way to tell. My idea: blog your resume. In addition to a standard resume keep a log of all the stuff you're learning and doing. E.g. if today you wrote a 5k lines perl script that spiders the web and extracts interesting info, you would to your log a dated entry: Finished 5k line Perl script to spider the web. Used LWP::Simple module... "

Curriculum Vitae means "a summary of one's education, professional history, and job qualifications, as for a prospective employer." CVs inevitably distort and elide. History is written by the victors; likewise CVs are overwritten by our winning ideas. Our missteps, mistakes and stupidities get forgotten.

A blog captures our professional and personal accretions in real-time, records the quality of our interactions and snap-shoots our judgements. Other important factors get recorded: do we play well with the other children in our class? do we share credit? do we collaborate? listen? articulate? admit mistakes? grow?

This transparency may be a crucial selling point for Weblogs4hire. Don't hire a blogger to blog for you. Hire her because you understand her skills and personality. Because you trust her. Because she'll fit better with your team, last longer, and (not least) communicate better.

Eggers self-publishes second novel
Dave Eggers, author of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," will issue his second novel himself and "sell it only through the McSweeney's Web site and 100 or so independent bookstores. Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and other giant retailers are to be cut out of the action." The WSJournal adds:

"Mr. Eggers seems to have taken as his playbook Jason Epstein's 'Book Business.' Published last year, it ought to be required reading for serious writers everywhere. Mr. Epstein, a former editor at Random House and co-founder of the New York Review of Books, argues that the trend toward centralization in book publishing and retailing is coming to an end. In an environment where competition for bestsellers and name-brand authors has sent advances and marketing budgets soaring, profit margins among the mainstream houses are wafer thin. Chain bookstores, saddled with pricey real estate and high labor costs, must themselves bank on an ever-increasing supply of bestsellers; this reliance on quick turnover marginalizes serious, slower-selling books. But the chains are finding it ever more difficult to compete with the ruthless price slashing of Amazon, which will, at no extra cost, deliver to your doorstep. The whole middle-man apparatus of corporate publishing, argues Mr. Epstein, will totter toward obsolescence as e-book and print-on-demand technologies gain traction, reducing the need for costly warehousing and shipping. Someday, he maintains, writers will contract directly with independent editors and publicists, and the trade will revert to its roots as a cottage industry of like-minded souls banding together in fluid groupings around projects of mutual interest."

Go buy Blogads from Ken!
Ken Layne writes: "I can't stress enough just how simple it was to set up my adstrip for Weird Files. I've sold two ads this week and am running another two free ads -- for my hosting service and the crazy Fortean Times magazine." Next up, Blogads on KENLAYNE.com and LAEXAMINER.

Weblog seeding
Internet marketeer Tim Ireland offers a number of services, including "Weblog Seeding." Here's the description: "No doubt you've watched a movie or two where some mad scientist, intent on wiping out every human being on the planet with a killer virus, does so by releasing it in multiple strategic locations. The same approach needs to be taken with online viral agents. Web users are creatures of habit, and rarely venture out of a set group of communities and websites. For this reason, a multiple seeding approach is required to give your virus the best chance of wide exposure and exponential growth. Weblog seeding is by far the most effective technique of getting your viral agent in front of as many eyeballs as possible."

Double Blogad family
Congratulations to Emmanuelle Richard and Matt Welch, the first double Blogad family. Emmanuelle scores another first: a French blogad. Be sure to click and contribute the cause of blogging a la mode francaise. Finally, I'm excited that Emmanuelle pushes the envelope so nicely with her house ads, especially the one for Dot.con.

Journalism: craft or commodity?
Ken Layne writes: "The cost-cutting, personality-hating newspaper chains have done everything possible to do away with popular columnists. The most successful tactic has been to let the popular columnists die off and quickly kill all discussion of replacements by issuing the standard 'he/she could never be replaced.'"

To the folks who think great writers won't ever make a living from blogging, I can only say: what are you gonna read if they don't?

Professional journalism is being crushed by lead-coated, 19th-century overheads. Although a few true-believers fight back, each year, another 5% of the newspaper heap gets amalgamated or liquidated. Eighty percent of newspaper revenue funds executive parking garages, ad rep bonuses, printing presses, phone bills, delivery trucks, and 3-martini-lunches.

The fires of competition will boil off these impurities and slag. Wordsmiths and other idea entrepreneurs will thrive; the advertiser will get five times more bang for her buck; readers will get more and better commercial information.

Blogs selling: vinyl, columns and guaranteed classifieds
Jay Niemann writes: "This Weblog is an experiment in grassroots entrepreneurship. Specifically, it concerns the sale of unusual vinyl records."

Meanwhile, Ken Layne launches a blog called Weird Files to promote print syndication of his columns about weirdness, specifically UFOs, crop circles and Black Helicopters.

And Ben Sullivan is promoting his Blogads by advising buyers, "If you're selling something, I'll keep your ad up until it gets sold, or you tire of all the responses you receive. Something I called Guaranteed Classifieds."

Bottomless cup of craving
The Washington Post reports: In the early days, when Starbucks "had little advertising money, it used its storefronts as billboards and clustered them close together. The goals: to intercept consumers on their way to work or home or anywhere in between, and to build brand awareness through ubiquity." Today, 1 in 3 Starbucks is cannibalizing a neighboring Starbucks' sales, but those sales recover within a year. (Via Obscure Store.)

Seeking metadata standards for blogs
By creating blog metadata standards, the BlogMD Initiative hopes to make it easier for readers to find bloggers and for bloggers to find each other.

The creative revolution...
Jeff Jarvis writes: "The bottom line is that entertainment and media can build a new, more profitable and efficient bottom line if only they let the audience help them. They can eliminate many of the middlemen. ... Some companies will wise up and prosper. And many new companies and relationships will grow; I see huge opportunity in creating new collections of talent, new ways to produce, and new ways to distribute." (Via Matt Welch.)

Spooning
Here's the first report of a marriage proposal precipitated by a blog. I've speculated before about the potential for blogs to cannibalize conventions, clubs, churches, corporations, and cities,... but I didn't think about singles bars. (Via Instapundit.)

More from the Google hit factory
Mark Pilgrim writes: "I am consistently getting over 200 referrals a day from people searching [Google] for Ellen Feiss, a query for which I have ranked in the top 10 for the past 3 weeks when I discovered the Ellen Feiss store and an assortment of fan sites." Six thousand unique visitors a month for one topic: many publishers would kill for aggregate readership like that.

Congressional bloggers?
Tara Sue Grubb, 26, is being hailed as the "first congressional candidate with a weblog." She doesn't offer a bio and doesn't like linking, whether to other ideas or other community organizations or individuals. She doesn't mention her opponent by name. And she writes things like "Prudent followership in a leader yields prudent leadership for the people."

Well, we've got to start somewhere, I guess. I like the boldness of Dave Winer's claim that "in five years every member of the US House will have a weblog and will be communicating directly with the electorate." That may be true. But Dave doesn't state the corollary: 98% of Congress will be new before every member blogs. These old dogs just won't blog, or at least do it naturally enough to convince the public. Furthermore, the political infrastructure that manufactures Congressmen also will have to be junked/rewired.

Building new markets takes decades. (See prior post.) Unless armed with guillotines or AK40s, revolutions are the same.

(8/26/02: Dave has worked up a new site that includes a blogroll to Grubb's opponent.)

On building new software markets
Dave Winer writes: "Ten years isn't enough time to create a new market."

Blogrolling 'latest links' are great
Using Blogrolling, I just added a link to Hylton Jolliffe on my personal blog. I then went to Blogrolling's "latest links" page, where Jolliffe was now The Latest Link. Amazing to see the synapses wire in real time. (Time-stamps would be nice addition.)

Winer: ads in blogs "so wrong"
Continuing to fulminate against blogs earning advertising or commission revenues, Dave Winer writes: "I can't believe people still think that advertising and commissions on catalog sales have anything to do with this medium. That's so ink-stained and so wrong."

Are bloggers the biggest tippers?
Rick Bruner writes: According to Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, "it takes three types of personalities to make phenomena go epidemic: 'connectors,' who know lots of people and love putting them together; 'mavins,' who know every last detail about their subjects of interest and love sharing information, and 'salespeople,' who have a knack for gaining people's trust and pursuading behaviors. Could you possibly come up with a better definition of the blogger personality?"

What if 0.1% of the Internet likes your tune? That's 500,000 fans...
"His first album, self-published in 1992, gathered dust at local shops. Then along came the Internet. Around 1995, Nevue created his first Web page, DavidNevue.com. In 1996, he launched a site for piano enthusiasts, featuring music reviews and links to other sites, plus information on everything from sheet music to the history of the piano. Nevue also promoted his own, New Age CDs online (soon, he'll have seven of them). As a result, he now sells $1,000 worth of CDs a month and distributes his music digitally through MP3.com."

That's from Business Week, which rounds up the impact of the technology on musicians. Olga Kharif's great article enumerates the Internet's benefits to the independent artist.

It's not just about reaching bigger audiences. The margins are much fatter with no middle man; "Artists who sell their work independently usually garner $8 on a CD retailing for $16, instead of $3 or less when they record for a label."

And don't forget to give the music away. When Napster provided free versions of Janis Ian's songs, her site got 100 extra visitors a month. According to an article on Ian's site: "Of those 100 people (and these are only the ones who let us know how they'd found the site), 15 bought CDs. Not huge sales, right? No record company is interested in 180 extra sales a year. But… that translates into $2700, which is a lot of money in my book. And that doesn't include the ones who bought the CDs in stores, or who came to my shows."

As Ian puts it in another article, "Water is free, but a lot of us drink bottled water because it tastes better. You can get coffee at the office, but you're likely to go to Starbucks or the local espresso place, because it tastes better."

(Via Blogcritics.)