JupiterResearch reports that 35 percent of large companies plan to start corporate blogs this year and that nearly 70 will have them running by the end of this year. Only 32 percent of those surveyed said they use corporate blogs to generate word of mouth.
Within 20 years, 50% of the population will be “published authors” predicts Colin Knecht co-owner of the BookMark Self Publishing.
Tags: Media, publishing, trends
JupiterResearch reports that 35 percent of large companies plan to start corporate blogs this year and that nearly 70 will have them running by the end of this year. Only 32 percent of those surveyed said they use corporate blogs to generate word of mouth.
Tags: study business blogs
RightReading applies the science of search engine algorithms to the world of literature and tries to figure out what the page ranks of some historical celebrities might have been. He explains:
As a measure of a page’s popularity, Google assigns it a page rank (PR). Inbound links (IBLs) from pages with high PRs will raise a page’s own rank (the page has, in effect, been graced by the magic touch of a prom king or queen, bestowing a fraction of their popularity upon it). Not surprisingly, this system has been subject to a fair bit of abuse, with avaricious quarterbacks and cheerleaders selling their blessings to viagra and smut peddlers and the like.
And that’s how the celebs would have fared in this system:PR0: Emily DickinsonPR2: ShakespearePR4: Carolus LinneausPR6: Leonardo da VinciPR8: Niccolo MachievelliPR10: The Buddha I especially like the explanations for the PR 10 for The Buddha:
The Buddha’s IBLs would be of the prized kind that Google calls “natural.” And he would have a lot of them, because many of his messages would resonate with the on-line community, such as:- The essence of SEO is suffering- All traffic is transitory- There is a rank beyond page rank- No ban is permanent — all pages get reborn.
Optimizing a site for the top 4 percent of search queries will improve site search results for half of all searchers, according to a study by the Patricia Seybold Group using anonymous data from WebSideStory’s clients.
According to the data, just 4 percent of all unique search queries made up more than half of all site searches. For e-commerce sites, the number of unique queries fell to just 2 percent. (…) “Marketers should be thinking about site search with the ‘80/20 rule’ in mind, and pay attention to the areas where they’ll get the most bang for their buck,” Steve Kusmer, senior VP and general manager of WebSideStory’s search and content solutions division, told ClickZ. “They should address site search tuning by looking at the top keywords first.” (…)The site search box itself is a tremendous gift to you from your customers: they are telling you exactly what they want, in their own words,” writes Aldrich, who provides a five-step plan for site search improvement in her report.The importance of guiding site search users is magnified because those searchers are 2.7 times as likely to convert than the average site visitor, according to Kusmer. That is in part due to the nature of site search users, who are in effect pre-qualifying themselves as users interested in finding something very specific on a site. A well directed user experience created by good site search results also leads to increased conversions, he added.(Via ClickZ)
Tim Berners-Lee, seen as the inventor of the Internet, is optimistic about its future. Although he sees several causes for concern, Berners-Lee believes that the Web is ready to make a big leap forward-a leap that might transform it into the environment for open collaboration that he first envisioned. “My personal view is that a lot of it is coming together now,” Berners-Lee said. “The whole industrial environment is more exciting . . . . I get a feeling of upsurge in activity.”
