Today I read an article on ABC News entitled “Silicon Insider: Forbes Fumbles the Blogosphere.” The article is in response to a Forbes Magazine piece called Attack of the Blogs (soul crushing, free registration required), in which Daniel Lyons starts off with:

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective.

The article basically goes on to paint a picture of bloggers as anti-corporate militias with the sole purpose of attacking perfectly innocent companies for no other purpose than to make a couple of AdSense bucks. In fact, Lyons says “Dry treatises on patent law and trade policy don’t drive traffic (or ad sales) for bloggers and hosts; blood sport does.”

The ABC News article points out that:

Forbes magazine NEVER, EVER gets the big stuff right. It is, in fact, one of the best technology counter-indicators I know of. If you want to learn about mutual funds or the annual incomes of dead celebrities, Forbes is the place to go. But when it comes to tech, read Fortune because if Forbes says something ain’t so, by God it certainly is.

So Malone thinks that Lyons doesn’t get it, and for the most part, he’s right. Sure, there are plenty of bloggers out there complaining about products and falsely accusing companies of evil deeds. And there are some that will come up with unsubstantiated stories just to get a couple of clicks on their ads. But a key word there is some.

One thing that is missed in the Forbes piece is that bloggers, by nature, want people to read what they write. They strive to develop a repeat readership: people that keep coming back because they are finding quality content. Blogs that just attack a company or companies may get small spikes in traffic when they’re first discovered, but I don’t see them as having a sustainable stickyness.

Then there are the bloggers that are actually using the medium effectively and are ethical. They’re not blogging in the hopes that they will be getting a fat check from Google at the end of the month. They’re putting out actual useful content that people are searching for.

And when the dust settles and all the splogs and comment spam are filtered out, these are the blogs that will still be standing.

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I want to thank Denise Howell of Bag and Baggage for her post linking to MassLawBlog, OpenSourceLegal, and ConsortiumInfo.org. I remember when I was trying to set up a blog for a client, asking him which blogs he liked. He stopped me mid sentence and brought up Bag and Baggage. He explained to me that this was the best legal blog of all, it is the God of blogs.

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The firm I do development/marketing work for is doing a great job maintaining and adding fresh content to their blogs. Now it’s time to get potential clients to notice them.

I’ve already gone the traditional web marketing route of submitting the blogs to directories and feed aggregators (see TopRank Online Marketing’s Monster Blog Directory List to submit your blog.), and I’ve asked for links on relevant and complimentary blogs. However, these resources aren’t necessarily where potential clients are going for their information.

So I had a brainstorm the other day: why not try to get some newspapers to write an article about us?

News sources need content and stories for their articles, and blogging is a hot topic right now. It’s early enough in the evolution of blogging that writing about them is fresh. I decided to contact some reporters, and so far, it’s working.

If you’re trying to go this route, I have one piece of advice: Make sure you actually have a news story, not just a fluff marketing piece that is nothing more than a press release for your firm. No one wants that. Why would they? If you don’t have a compelling story and want to be covered in a magazine or industry paper, contact the advertising department. It’s not news.

It’s not guaranteed that you’ll be covered. In fact, I’m sure the majority of news sources will reject your offer. But there’s a great residual result that can be just as beneficial: you show up on a reporter’s radar. If a news story comes up in the future, the reporter may turn to you for commentary.

So make sure you spread out your marketing efforts. Web marketing is great and necessary, but make sure you can be seen where your client base is looking.

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I am trying out Flock, a new web browser, and although it is unfamiliar, it has some neatly integrated features that are good for blogging. It’s strange……it doesn’t seem like Flock is a competitor in the browser market, and they are very mysterious about the aims of Flock. The FAQ says:

So why doesn’t Flock just build an extension?
We want to deliver a complete user experience (including the download, updates, support etc.). We also want to make sure that you can run both Flock and Firefox at the same time should you choose to do so (we actually recommend that you not uninstall your default browser in place of Flock since we are still barely past the concept stage right now).

How are you related to Mozilla?
Flock is completely independent from Mozilla. Some of us have been involved with Mozilla as staff, community volunteers, or have worked on Mozilla code in previous jobs. We plan to contribute to the success of the Mozilla platform and to contribute back to the community.

So right now I’m just trying it out, and it’s kind of like driving a new car. It’s not completely unfamiliar, but it’ll take some time to adjust.

This morning, while looking at some blog posts, I saw a list that was compiled by TopRank Online Marketing called the TopRank Monster Blog Directory List. If you haven’t spent much time submitting your blawg to directories and engines, stop reading this post right now, and go to the list!! It won’t take too much time to submit your site, as this list brings you directly to each engine/directory’s submit form.

Though I can’t say whether you’ll get much traffic from each of these directories and engines, it’s worth the time just to have a link. Right now, there’s no single power player in the blog search category. Instead, there are lots of small engines popping up trying to be the Google of blog search. At some point, one of the engines will take off. Might as well try to get your site indexed early.

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One of the sites I develop is Peter Moldave’s OpenSourceLegal.org. Peter is an expert in the field of Open Source software legal issues, and the site’s main aim is to establish Peter as an expert. It is also a resource for people who have questions about open source licensing.

The “meat” of the site is the Open Source License Database. It compares the different open source licenses and explains which software uses which licenses, etc.

But other than adding news to the site, there wasn’t much updating going on. So rather than offering timely content, the site was more like a pointer to other resources. So, predictably, I suggested Peter keep a blog [I've just set it up, so it's not the live home page yet: It can be seen here]. It seemed like a very natural transition, as he was adding his own comments on the news stories he posts.

I then took a step back to look at the situation strategically, and although we did it in a strange order, I think it’s an interesting idea: having a site around a blog (in our case, it was vice versa).

The site is relatively small and simple, and has great information for his visitors. If people visit his blog and want more information, rather than going to other sites, they can just go to the rest of the site and read his articles. It presents great opportunities for internal linking.

Note: Here’s what the home page will look like once it goes live: I really like the way adding the blog post titles to the home page adds a new information source to the home page.

I’m not sure what you’d call this, but I know that I haven’t seen it before (though I know it exists): a site built around a blog.

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