He's still first in line

Famously patient "Star Wars" fan Jeff Tweiten is no longer waiting for "Episode III" at the Cinerama downtown. He's moved to the Seattle Center in pursuit of a larger vision: seeing "Episode III" on an Imax screen. Details at his blog.

Why bank branches endure

The traditional bank branch hasn't been done in by online banking -- and won't be anytime soon, according to the Washington Business Journal:

Customers with a computer and an Internet connection can do just about anything they want in terms of banking. There are a few exceptions, such as buying investment products and settling loans, which need to be done in person. But for just about everything else, the Web and ATMs have replaced an internal visit to a bank.

So then why go to a bank?

"Why do people go to department stores?" asks Ann Clair, managing director of branch banking for Provident Bank. "We are humans, and we like that face-to-face interaction."

Top picks, top clicks

What caught the interest of SeattlePI.com readers for the week of Jan. 24-30, 2005:

Top picks (most e-mailed articles):

1. In suit, foster mother alleges DSHS abuse
2. Cheney's attire panned as out of place at observance
3. State had 'big file' on child who died
4. 'Semester at Sea' research ship briefly disabled in Pacific
5. No escape from 'helicopter parents'
6. No-show snow puts ski areas on rocks
7. Revote? If Florida and Ohio go first
8. P-I Focus: The road to a draft goes through an unwilling Army
9. Black voters in United States disproportionally disenfranchised
10. Eat your vegetables every day, all nine servings of them

Top clicks (most read articles):

1. Cheney's attire panned as out of place at observance
2. Pentagon tries to explain secret group
3. Deficit likely to drop on technicalities
4. Lag continues in UW recruiting
5. Aspiring actress shot and killed in NYC
6. M's pleased with winter results
7. Dead voters won't count in Rossi's election challenge
8. Vote machine maker settles over her whistle-blower suit
9. The force of the law is against 'Star Wars' squatter
10. Microsoft reimagines its corporate home

Dumb business moments

Business 2.0 has published its list of the 101 Dumbest Moments in Business during 2004. As usual, it's a hoot.

My favorite:

4. Do as I say, not as I...hey, get a load of those!
After joining the Bank of Ireland as CEO, Michael Soden issues a dictate: No porn surfing on the job. His next dictate: The IT department is to be outsourced to Hewlett-Packard. Shortly after the outsourcing deal goes through, IT staffers, now employed by HP, discover porn on Soden's computer. Soden resigns, leaving the bank and HP scrapping over who should pay his severance, estimated at $5 million.

Hometown companies are, perhaps unfortunately, well represented. Microsoft's participation in a $50 million investment in SCO, which is suing Linux users and distributors over allegedly copyrighted code, is mentioned ("The enemy of my enemy is not necessarily -- but, under certain circumstances, might be -- my friend."). But it grabs three spots on the list for its trademark-enforcement actions:

69-71. Trademarks? We don't need no stinkin' trademarks.

Part 1 | In January, Microsoft threatens to sue Canadian teenager Mike Rowe for registering the domain name Mikerowesoft.com. After an online hue and cry, the company backs down and offers Rowe free software. "We take our trademark seriously," says spokesman Jim Desler, "but in this case maybe a little too seriously."

Part 2 | In July, Microsoft settles a trademark-infringement lawsuit with Lindows, offering to pay the Linux company $20 million to change its name to Linspire. In court testimony it comes out that Microsoft's own CD-ROM dictionary defines "windows" as a generic computer term, not a trademark.

Part 3 | In November, Microsoft sends a letter to SavvySoft, the maker of TurboExcel, demanding that the small software company change the product's name. Only one problem: Microsoft has yet to obtain a trademark for the name "Excel."

RealNetworks and its CEO, Rob Glaser, get three spots as well, for their ultimately futile efforts to crack Apple Computer's monopoly on downloadable songs that will play on the iPod. The headings pretty much sum up their evolving strategy:

7. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
8. If you can't beat 'em, and you can't join 'em, encourage people to whine about 'em.
9. If you can't beat 'em, and you can't join 'em, and you can't get people to whine about 'em...put out some half-baked software that forever alienates potential customers?

The full, wittily recounted details are on the first of the article's three freely accessible pages so I'll let you read them in full on your own.

Items 31 to 100 are walled off to non-subscribers and non-newstand buyers, but if you don't mind squinting a bit, you can scan Google's HTML rendition of the full-article PDF.

Imitation not always flattering

User-contributed media is becoming all the rage now, while homemade homages have long been part of fan culture. But a recent incident, involving a fake Volkswagen commercial that shows a "small but tough" VW Polo foiling the best-laid plans of a hapless suicide bomber, shows there's a dark side to both, according to the New York Times.

Blog summit reflections

It's been three days since the 2005 Blog Business Summit so I've had some time to reflect on the running themes and memes that I took away from the event:

There are many ways that blogs can help build a business -- but building a business out of a blog is another matter. Sustainable business models remain elusive; the most viable idea at the moment appears to be selling advertising or taking part in an ad network like Google AdSense. It's hard to judge how viable that is since Google's confidentiality agreements don't allow participants to reveal how much they make.

If someone out there has a radical, innovative, eye-opening business model, they sure weren't bragging about it.

On the other hand, I heard many persuasive arguments that blogging can be invaluable in supporting myriad objectives of an existing business. Public relations, crisis communications, customer service, guerilla marketing, fast-feedback-loop market research, internal communications, external networking or fund-raising -- blogs and related technologies can help with all of those.

Blogging is like playing with fire: you have to know what you're doing. The speakers at the summit all displayed a healthy respect, if not outright wariness at times, about blogging's potential for causing grief and impugning reputations. Firestorms of criticisms can -- and do -- erupt in blogspace from out of nowhere; they often propagate quickly and are difficult to contain.

Company blogs or employee bloggers can get a company into trouble as easily as outside critics. And a poorly thought out blogging policy can be as dangerous as having no blogging policy. (Recall the controversy over Six Apart's initial pricing scheme for Movable Type 3.0 or this week's blogcrisis at Google.)

You can't ignore what the bloggers are saying -- and you have to talk back. They have influence, they have audiences, they've become part of the media food chain. Rapid -- and thoughtful -- response can be essential to staving off a firestorm.

Monitoring, responding to and containing potential problems isn't easy, however. It requires serious investment in up-front community building and a deep understanding of the social and network dynamics of the users, customers and others who might blog about you.

I'm not saying that those are reasons for organizations not to blog, but they are important issues to consider in making the decisions of whether and how to blog.

Blogging is just a communications technology. By and large, the speakers focused on how to use blogging tools effectively; the cultural baggage of the blogging phenomenon was seldom mentioned. Yes, blogs can build communities, foster dialogue where communication was only one-way before, empower the disenfranchised and more -- but that's because blogs are just tools that can be harnessed for many uses. The technology is value-neutral. That message was no surprise, considering how summit founder Steve Broback defined blogging when I interviewed him earlier this month.

Blogging is here to stay. That may sound absurdly obvious but in past years, it was also "obvious" that community publishing, unrestricted MP3 trading and local Web portals would become permanent, ubiquitous fixtures of the online landscape. I'm sure a lot of people think or hope that blogging is just another "next big thing" fad. While specific implementations like photoblogging, videoblogging and writing personal diaries that the entire world can see may prove short-lived, I don't think blogging, as a medium or a technology, will turn out to be a fad. It could evolve into a basic "foundation" tool -- like text messaging or XML -- from which new applications, trends and businesses spring. In five years, it may have evolved into something we would barely recognize. (Of course, it's also possible that all significant development will suddenly stop, as happened with the Web.)

There's no substitute for meeting people in person. Early in the conference, I mused about whether such events made sense for an audience as interlinked and accustomed to sharing information as the blogging community. As Frank Catalano pointed out in the comments thread, the answer's unequivocably yes. Sure, technologies like IM, videoconferencing, WebEx and e-mail have eroded the disadvantages of distance but nothing can really replace meeting someone in person and talking face to face. For example, I made a point of introducing myself to Glenn Fleishman after his talk. I've been reading Glenn for years, and corresponding with him for months, but we'd never actually "met" before this week.

And let's face it, most of us don't go to conferences just to glean intelligence and info from the program. We go to network, to bounce ideas off of other people or to sit down and catch up with friends and colleagues we haven't seen in ages.

Mass ID theft

The secret list of ID theft victims is an MSNBC.com special report that delivers some stunning revelations:

MSNBC.com research and government reports suggest hundreds of thousands of American citizens are ... unknowingly lending their identity to illegal immigrants so they can work. And while several government agencies and private corporations sometimes know whose Social Security numbers are being ripped off, they won't notify the victims. That is, until they come after the victims for back taxes or unpaid loans owed by the imposter. ...

During 2002, the year with the most recent figures available, 9 million people paid taxes with mismatched names and Social Security Numbers. Some were women who had failed to notify the agency that their name changed after marriage. Some were the result of typographical errors.

But most -- between 50 and 80 percent depending on whom you talk to -- represent illegal immigrants using a stolen or manufactured Social Security number at the workplace. ...

The IRS also receives payments from mismatched names and numbers, and has access to the same no-match list created by Social Security. But according to IRS spokesman Anthony Burke, the agency doesn't check for number-name mismatches until it processes tax returns.  And it does not have a mechanism for informing the rightful Social Security number holder that someone else has filed a return using that number. ...

How can a consumer unravel the secret life of their Social Security number? In fact, since neither the government nor private industry is speaking out, there is no way. Asking the Social Security Administration or IRS won't help. ...

Telling the number's rightful holder that someone else is using it might create more panic then necessary, some Social Security investigators said -- and there's not a lot of good advice the agency could offer, anyway. There's little a victim could do at that point. Uncovering just who is the rightful owner of the Social Security number -- and who is the imposter -- could also pose a challenge. So would finding correct contact information for victims.

Vanity tax

We have "sin taxes" on alcohol and cigarettes, so why not a vanity tax on facelifts and tummy tucks?

State Sen. Karen Keiser, D-Kent, has proposed extending Washington's 6.5 percent sales tax to elective cosmetic surgery, with the proceeds earmarked for poor children's health insurance, according to the Associated Press:

"We could do Botox-for-babies parties. It might be the new thing," Keiser said. "Anyone who can afford the money for cosmetic procedures, I don't think they would be deterred by a little sales tax. You pay it on your lipstick."

B**g as a dirty word

The word "blog" really has taken on something of an unsavory, undesirable air, hasn't it? Even gossip columnists think so, as Wired News columnist Adam Penenberg notes in a piece about "gossip aggregator" David Hauslaib's Jossip:

Don't call Jossip a blog, even though, well, it is. Hauslaib prefers "online magazine." It's much simpler to sell Jossip to advertisers as a webzine than a blog because even today many advertisers can't grasp the nature of the blogosphere. They don't recognize its marketing power, or are afraid to run ad campaigns on blogs due to their risqué reputation.

"It comes down to not wanting to implicitly identify Jossip with the amateur reputation the word blog carries with it, from the horror stories of teenage bullies using blogs to torment classmates or the possibility of a negative meme spreading via blogs," he said.

So, it looks like you can build a business out of your blog ... as long as you don't call it that.

Previously: A blog by any other name.

Force wasn't with him

		Dan DeLong / P-I
	No more lounging around for Jeff Tweiten.

"They told me they didn't really want to do it. In fact, one said they felt like asses," Tweiten told Susan.

Denied a street use permit and permission to encamp on the nearby Diamond Parking lot, Tweiten says he'll just stand in line until May 19.

"I figure I can stand 16 hours a day if I take little breaks," he said. He admits it won't be comfy or easy but just the idea of being told he can't be out there fuels his motivation. "This time I'll either leave in shackles or an aid car," Tweiten vowed. "And, as soon as I get out of the hospital, I'll be back."

No 'Wardrobe Malfunction' '05

Here's an interesting promotional gimmick: the commercial that was too risque to show during the Super Bowl.

Budweiser has decided not to air a commercial spoofing Janet Jackson's halftime-show "wardrobe malfunction" with a fanciful explanation for what really caused it, USA Today reports.

It's just one example of how "good taste" is emerging as a top priority for this year's Super Bowl advertisers, according to the New York Times.

You can still see the Budweiser ad, dubbed "Wardrobe Malfunction," on the company's site. It's cute.

Scandal survivors sullied

I expect that many people have fudged their resumes to omit or gloss over periods of unemployment or unpleasant employment. That's a lot harder, though, if you built your career at a company better known for its scandals than its successes.

When Bad Companies Happen to Good People, from Worthwhile Magazine, looks at the plight of job seekers whose prior experience includes once storied, now sullied corporations such as Enron, Tyco and WorldCom:

It's the "squirm question" at job interviews -- one that often leads to hemming and hawing.

"Losing your job in a downsizing when the company survives is something you can rationalize. But if the company goes under in an embarrassing way, you're stuck with some of that loss of reputation as well as being out of work," says Mitchell Marks, a San Francisco psychologist who specializes in corporate culture and employee morale issues. "After being part of something like Enron, you may find yourself having to explain what happened to the company, even though it wasn't your fault."

When bad companies happen to good people, there may even be a tendency to share blame by those who weren't in a position to head off the disaster and didn't know anything to whistle-blow about. For some, the blame may be equivalent to the occasional castigation of crime victims as having been responsible for what happened to them.

Sexist slander law

It's 2005 but it's still against illegal in Washington state to question a woman's "virtue or chastity" in public (unless she's a prostitute). State Sen. Jeanne Kohl-Wells, D-Seattle, thinks that law, passed in 1909, is an archaic double standard and is pushing to have it overturned.

She also told the New York Times that it's a vestige of sexism and an unconstitutional affront to free speech: "Even though one type of treatment can appear on the surface to be positive and complimentary, it's also being protective and patronizing."

So far, responses in our not-altogether-serious Daily Poll indicate that many SeattlePI.com readers back her efforts.

Blog business models

John Ludwig, from Ignition Partners, wonders about the viability of blog revenue models based on Google's AdSense program: "fill a page with content to optimize your google rank, and then make money off of google ads placed on your page -- Google sources you the traffic, and then pays you for the traffic. Kind of odd, isn't Google someday going to figure out how to squeeze the guy in the middle?"

Blogs in a crisis

Still at the Blog Business Summit, Robert Scoble, Buzz Bruggeman and Anil Dash tackled the thorny topic of crisis communications. If the earlier sessions today highlighted the pitfalls of corporate blogs, this one emphasized how blogging can help when things get bad:

• A blog can project a human face or voice for an organization and help defuse negative feelings.
• A blog provides a forum for soliciting specific feedback from customers about their concerns.
• A blog makes it possible to respond quickly when a situation arises. Scoble suggested that simply posting a brief acknowledgment of a problem, to let people know that the company is aware of it, can buy time to mobilize a response.

Outside bloggers are valuable in a crisis, too. They can help disseminate your message to counter negative buzz before it becomes too serious.

The key, Scoble emphasized, is to nurture good relationships with your community of customers, and the bloggers who influence them, before a crisis hits: "Know who the gatekeepers are. When the s-storm [sic] hits you ... you have very, very little time .... Know who can get the message out, who can talk to a lot of people and can help you."

"Spend the time to know your audience even when it's not a crisis, when it's not an issue," Dash added. That way, when the inevitable criticism arises, you're better equipped to do a risk assessment because you have a better sense of whether your audience will deem it credible and how it might respond.

Should businesses blog?

There are many good reasons why a company should start a blog -- but it's not a decision any business should enter into lightly. Careful thought, planning, a willingness to change the culture and an ability to manage that change are all needed for a corporate blog to succeed.

Those were the recurring themes from today's late-morning sessions at the Blog Business Summit. Leading off a panel on corporate blogging strategy, Matthew Oliphant, founder of Business Logs, listed several reasons why a company should blog. Topping it was the notion that a company should take part in the virtual conversation about its products and services that customers are already having via blogs and message boards. That happens whether or not the company is involved -- and Oliphant argued that it couldn't afford not to be.

Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, later amplified that during his session during on marketing strategies. All of that user-generated commentary gets indexed by search engines and becomes easily accessible to potential customers doing research on a company. The most innocuous comment posted on an obscure blog can generate positive or negative buzz that impacts a company's reputation in unexpected ways. "A lot of consumer-generated media is dominating the shelf and brand impressions are being generated by this dynamic," he explained.

And it's not only consumers who use search engines for background research: journalists, analysts, lawyers and regulators do, too. "This is where companies are deeply exposed on the Internet," Blackshaw said.

Oliphant cited other benefits to blogging, too, including putting a human face on a company, increasing customer service agility and getting faster feedback.

There are drawbacks as well, of course. Lenn Pryor, director of platform evangelism at Microsoft, emphasized that a company must be prepared to take criticism and accept honest feedback. "If you have skeletons in your closet, if you have product problems, if you have customer problems, you're going to take some lumps." For many businesses, that could require extreme changes for the organizational culture.

In fact, some companies might not want to blog at all if they're not ready to participate in a dialogue. One audience member pointed out some companies simply lack the infrastructure, resources or policies to handle "bidirectional communications" with their customers.

"If you're not prepared to deal with it," Pryor agreed, "you're stepping into a pile of doodoo that you won't be able to clean up easily."

He shared a list of basic guidelines that Microsoft bloggers are asked to follow:

• In short ... "be smart" --
• Respect your existing confidentiality agreements
• Don't break news, don't disclose confidential info
• Be cautious with third party info
• Respect prior employers
• Identify yourself as being affiliated with the company
• Be cautious in how you offer support or advice
• Speak for yourself
• Think about reactions before you hit "post"

These rules are not formal policy, he emphasized. In fact, he opined that drawing up exhaustive rules that have been vetted by the lawyers is likely to confuse employees and actually discourage blogging activity.

How to pull it off successfully? Oliphant offered several tips, including experimenting with an internal blog first, perhaps for project management, and holding a "blogging mini-summit" in house to make sure all employees understand the goals and policies. He also suggested creating an internal blog or wiki for tracking and discussing topics that shouldn't be discussed on a public blog.

The ideal corporate bloggers, he said, are employees who are passionate about the company and what it does. But, he noted, anyone chosen to be the company's de facto voice needs to understand the risks and potential consequences if they do something wrong.

"You have to be open," he explained. "You have to say you may mess up, and each situation is going to be taken in turn, but potentially you could be fired, and potentially you could get a huge bonus and become the president of the company because we love you so much."

(See Jennifer Rice's write-up of the corporate blog strategy session for more tips and insights.

And see this photo of an amusing moment during Blackwell's talk.)

Smart blog design

Back to the Blog Business Summit:

Day 2 started with D.L. Byron and D. Keith Robinson delivering a practical session on good blog design. Their slide show is online so I won't bother to reiterate. (By the way, the 25-slide presentation -- all in a single HTML file -- was generated by Eric Meyer's nifty Slide Show System.)

One of their key points was that clever design can smoothly blend the elements of traditional blog layout -- posts in reverse chronological order, comments, archive links, blogrolls, et al. -- with an existing corporate site's brand identity. Some examples of it being done well:

• GM FastLane
• Business Logs
• Everything Basecamp

Those sites' designers make it look easy, but Byron and Robinson also cited examples of poor integration:

• Fast Company Now
• NYTimes.com's Times on the Trail
• USA Today's CES 2005 blog

Byron emphasized that corporate blogs need to be focused on accomplishing business goals. For example, he eschews many standard blog features and cool new technologies at Clip-n-Seal.com because they wouldn't help him sell more bag clips.

Robinson voiced a common frustration that veteran bloggers encounter: blogware is optimized for handling new and transitory content but generally makes it difficult to give prominent display to older or permanent content.

The real first MP3 player

CNet MP3.com editor Eliot Van Buskirk sets the record straight on what device can claim to be the world's very first portable MP3 player. It was not the Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300, released in 1998, as is widely believed.

The honor actually goes to the MPMan, made by Korean firm Saehan. So how did the Diamond Rio usurp its historic position? Therein lies a story. The short version: the RIAA decided to sue Diamond because it was easier than taking a foreign company to court.

Blogs people seek

The Yahoo! Buzz Index shares some interesting tidbits about the kinds of blogs people are trying to find. Spotlighted trends include searches for celebrity baby blogs, au pair blogs, photo blogs and NFL cheerleader blogs. Naturally.

Left behind in cabs

It probably won't surprise you that lots of laptops, PDAs and cell phones are left behind in taxi cabs. But a new survey puts hard numbers on just how many, Reuters reports: 11,300 laptops, 31,400 handheld and 200,000 phones were found in cabs in just the last six months.

Interestingly, owner forgetfulness varies geographically:

Londoners appear more careless than others with their laptops, while Danes are most likely to forget their mobile phones, the survey found. In Chicago in the United States, passengers often left behind handheld computers on the back seat.

Writing it right

I wasn't able to attend the final session of the day at the Summit, where Stowe Boyd and Halley Suitte discussed "the art and science of blog writing," but Jennifer Rice wrote a thought-provoking synopsis of the key points, including issues for companies seeking the right "voice" for their blogs.

Blogs sell low tech, too

Look down the list of sponsors for the Blog Business Summit and you might be forgiven for doing a double take when you see Clip-n-Seal among all those marketing and technology firms. It's described as "an innovative, patent-pending product that provides a simple, convenient, and easy way to close and reseal opened bags."

Why is a bag clip maker sponsoring a blogging conference? Clip-n-Seal's inventor, D.L. Byron, is also one of the featured speakers. A dot-com survivor, he has relied exclusively on online, blog-based marketing to get the word out about his decidedly low-tech product, as he told me over lunch a couple months back. In other words, Clip-n-Seal is a real-world example of how the tools and principles of blogging can be adapted for businesses outside the high-tech arena.

For the backstory on Byron and Clip-n-Seal, check out this P-I story from 2003.

Bucks from blogs

Blog Business Summit founder Steve Broback and well-known tech journalist Glenn Fleishman -- whose niche sites include WiFi Networking News and Droxy -- just gave conference-goers a terrific crash course on how to make money from "entrepreneurial blogs." Their joint message: Yes, you can make money blogging about the things you love.

Both shared valuable insights -- and yes, wisdom -- with the crowd. Steve started from a marketing perspective with guerilla-marketing tips on how to evaluate the revenue-generating potential of potential blog ideas. Glenn started from a content perspective, telling people to pick a topic they're "obsessed" with, a space that they can own authoritatively through original reportage and/or analysis -- then finding ways to capitalize on and monetize that authority.

The key to both is Google's AdWords, which lets people buy keywords for contextual advertising, and AdSense program, which pays bloggers for carrying ads.

For details, check out Jeff Barr's excellent writeup.

The Summit so far

My impressions of the first half of Day 1 of the first Blog Business Summit:

Keynoter Robert Scoble framed the discussion by pointing out that good bloggers had two common traits: they have passion and they speak with authority.

There's certainly lots of passion and lots of authority here. Lots of information, too. But what about wisdom? That seems to be in curiously short supply so far, given how many smart, articulate people are packed into an auditorium at the Bell Harbor Conference Center.

Partly I think it's because the whole event has an atmosphere of preaching to the converted. It says something when the speakers were often on first-name terms with all the audience members peppering them with questions.

A few recurring themes have emerged, however:

• Blogging is, at its heart, a grassroots technology and the business models it enables tend to be similarly bottom-up: contextual advertising through Google AdSense, word-of-mouth marketing via interlinking, using feeds to disseminate product info to potential consumers who then re-distribute it virally.
• One of the key advantages of blogging technology is that it's designed to help you reach people you know nothing about, and have no idea how to reach otherwise. The tools actively facilitate accidental discovery.
• One of the Summit's goals is to demystify blogging, to show businesses that it's not something to be feared. Yet the simple truth, reinforced in passing several times, is that blogging poses a real threat to any businesses that fail to understand the phenomenon. When a negative PR firestorm erupts from the blogosphere, companies that aren't prepared to deal with it -- that can't respond in the blogosphere -- are going to get smushed. Scoble cited the Kryptonite bike lock story as an example.

The group dynamics are fascinating to watch -- speakers and attendees are, in a way, still "blogging" even when they're talking to each other in the same room:

• For example, the traditional "broadcast" sessions where speakers got on stage and talked to the audience tended to be less interesting, engaging and informative than the spontaneous moments when audience members talked back or started talking to each other.
• Better ideas surface and subsume ones that aren't as good. At the start, Broback was adamantly ambivalent about letting attendees make audio and video recordings of the sessions for posting on their own sites. He cited speakers' intellectual property rights and bottom-line worries (why would anyone pay to attend if they could listen to it all online?) in requiring people to get his permission to record -- even though he promised to "enable significant recording." After the break, however, he said that some very smart people had talked him into a more enlightened approach. Now, anyone can record -- so long as the speakers are OK with it -- and post the clips on their own sites, but he still wants to be informed and wants links back to the Summit's own site.

Which raises an interesting question: Is the whole idea of a pricey offline conference antithetical to the spirit of blogging?

Also, as Dana VanDen Heuvel pointed out: "I'm not going, but I imagine that I won't feel like I missed much. The conference will be full of bloggers who are blogging the event, so you'll get almost every angle on the event."

If you want to see whether he's right, consult the Summit's home page for a list of people blogging live from the event or see what's indexed at Technorati.

At the Summit

I'll be attending the first Blog Business Summit here in Seattle the next two days. The program looks interesting and the lineup of speakers is impressive, so I expect to have some insights and observations to share.

As a side effect, there'll probably be a break from the usual collection of random notes and links.

For more on what the Summit is all about, see my earlier Q&A with founder Steve Broback.

Stop that junk mail

How I Beat Junk Mail: The Wall Street Journal's Andrew Blackman says it took him just 10 minutes, one phone call and a postcard to win a month-long respite ("so far") from unwanted credit-card offers.

Analyzing Amazon

Do customer reviews on Amazon.com really have anything to do with how well a book sells? That's the question Dartmouth professor Mikhail Gronas set out to answer, the New York Times reports:

In his study, he examined the star ratings given by readers to determine what patterns, if any, correspond to different types of books. He also analyzed the content of the reviews to see what criteria people used in making judgments and by what processes they came to those conclusions.

With the aid of a computer program that a colleague at the University of California at Berkeley developed for him, he was able to determine that reviewers gave more five-star reviews than two-star reviews, creating an upward sloping curve. Cult books, like the "Harry Potter" series, always have a steep incline - few people give them anything but five stars. Classics have a smaller incline, and newer "untested" hit books, like "The Da Vinci Code," have the smallest incline.

But the most telling variable is the one star rating. Professor Gronas found that books high on what he called the "controversiality index" are given almost as many one-star as five-star ratings, creating a horseshoe-shaped curve. As it turns out, these books also tend to have high sales.

Dartmouth is now trying to patent software that can objectively evaluate how controversial a book is.

Lack of characters

Columnist Susan Paynter muses on why 21st-century Seattle needs more characters like the Star Wars guy.

Travel with Mom & Dad

So, what do you all think about this new lifestyle trend spotted by the Wall Street Journal?

Meet the newest business travel accessory: Mom and Dad. As air fares get cheaper and the number of retirees grows, some parents are now tagging along with their road-warrior children.

Needless to say, it can make for "some uncomfortable moments" when the parental units decide to start telling business associates some of those embarrassing stories from your childhood.

Search engine confusion

The results of a new Pew Internet & American Life Project survey lead me to two conclusions:

1. The ongoing competition to build the best, most comprehensive, most intuitive search engine may well be irrelevant as far as most people are concerned.
2. We need to start teaching kids how to use search engines effectively as early as possible.

The survey found that although 84% of Internet users have employed search engines, they're "generally unsophisticated about why and how they use search engines. They are also strikingly unaware of how search engines operate and how they present their results."

More eye-opening details from the executive summary:

They tend to settle quickly on a single search engine and then stick with it, rather than switching as search technology evolves or comparing results from different search systems. Some 44% of searchers regularly use just one engine, and another 48% use just two or three. Nearly half of searchers use a search engines no more than a few times a week, and two-thirds say they could walk away from search engines without upsetting their lives very much.

Internet users trust their favorite search engines, but few say they are aware of the financial incentives that affect how search engines perform and how they present their search results.

Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or “sponsored” results and unpaid results. And only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not. This finding is ironic, since nearly half of all users say they would stop using search engines if they thought engines were not being clear about how they presented paid results.

Top picks, top clicks

Our weekly roundup of the most popular stories on SeattlePI.com, this time covering Jan. 17-23, 2005:

Top picks (most e-mailed articles):

1. In suit, foster mother alleges DSHS abuse
2. Norwegians confused by Bush salute
3. 'S factor' still relevant in election
4. Conservative group targets 'pro-homosexual' SpongeBob video
5. If students go for it, financial aid will come
6. Woman gives birth to giant baby
7. Bush changes White House rhetoric about God
8. P-I Focus: Who are those Christians?
9. Mr. Potato Head seduced by the dark side of the Force
10. Teen is co-creator of Firefox browser

Top clicks (most read articles):

1. Norwegians confused by Bush salute
2. Committee lambasts Harvard chief's remark
3. The ship has come in for local Lego artist
4. Student sent home for 'Too Gay to Function' shirt
5. One last, long campout for 'the Star Wars guy'
6. Cabinet stalled as Democrats put off confirmation votes for Rice, Gonzales
7. Idaho prof's Saturn experiment -- 18 years of work -- may be saved
8. Spiezio the odd man out?
9. Seahawks Beat: Mueller easy choice for Hawks, but also right one
10. Bush's popularity increases after terror threats announced

aacPlus primer

Slate's Paul Boutin wrote a great primer on aacPlus, the "skinny new audio format that will replace MP3s—and revolutionize Internet radio."

Phish fighters

The Philadelphia Business Journal reviews what financial institutions are doing to combat phishing scams trading on their good names.

Wheel clamps get the boot

Turns out that using wheel clamps, or "boots," to immobilize a car that's illegally parked on private property is illegal in Washington state.

Whistle-blowing's price

Positive publicity, toughened corporate accountability laws and popular mythologizing haven't made life much easier for whistle-blowers, the Christian Science Monitor reports:

Lionized by Hollywood and protected by federal law, the lone employee who stands up to a large bureaucracy has become a well-established part of American culture. In 2002, Time magazine put three whistle-blowers on its cover, lauding them as "persons of the year."

But the hard truth is that blowing the whistle is a long, tough slog in which people sacrifice careers, friends, and job security to do what they believe is right. And in a small corner of that world - environmental whistle-blowing - such sacrifices appear particularly extreme. Ironically, where complaint dismissals and court rulings have eroded whistle- blower protection, their numbers have increased. Yet where legal protections have grown, the number of whistle-blowers has stayed flat or even fallen.

Boeing blogs

As business reporter James Wallace noted in his Aerospace Notebook earlier this week, Boeing jetliner marketing guru Randy Baseler has joined the ranks of corporate bloggers.

The Financial Times (subscription required) offered this cheeky observation on the auspicious timing of its debut: "On the day Airbus cemented its position as the world's dominant civil aerospace company by launching the largest passenger jet -- complete with space for showers, casinos, and even double beds -- Boeing hit back with its own launch. A blog."

Downside of digicams

Digital cameras have been a boon for amateur and pro photographers, but does the ease of deleting unwanted images mean we'll leave an incomplete, even inaccurate, picture of our times for future generations? USA Today examines the issue, and raises some thought-provoking questions:

For more than 100 years, ever since the introduction of the Kodak handheld film camera, ordinary Americans have taken pictures of themselves, forming a massive archive of the individual and collective histories of a nation. Everything — the perfect pictures and the imperfect pictures, the ones in which eyes are closed, the frame askew, the pose unflattering, the image blurred — all of them went into photo albums and shoeboxes, to be laughed at or puzzled over later by families seeking memories or anthropologists seeking insight about a culture.

So what will future anthropologists think when they look back on our pictures (assuming there are any) from the dawn of the digital era? Will they wonder, "Why do all these people look so good?" ...

Will any imperfect pictures be preserved and printed in the future? Will their absence present an edited, even misleading, picture of our collective memories? What will happen to the billion-dollar picture printing industry? And what about the children?

What's in a name?

The answer: plenty of cultural baggage, where the French are concerned. The New York Times looks at the "society disruption" caused by a change in the law that allows parents to give newborns their mothers' last names instead of their fathers':

The reform is important primarily because of France's changing demographics. Forty-five percent of children in France these days are born out of wedlock. In the absence of declared paternity, mothers are forced to give their babies their own names. The new law will help remove the stigma of doing that.

The reform also puts France in line with rules established in 1978 by the Council of Europe, the 46-country body that promotes human rights and standard legal practices among its members. At that time, the council recommended that member countries guarantee strict equality between mothers and fathers in transmitting last names. Much of the rest of Europe has already complied. ...

Paradoxically, the reform reinforces the spirit of patriarchy, or at least tradition. Aristocratic families that have produced only female offspring no longer will have to watch helplessly as their names die out.

Medical miracle babies?

The news that a 66-year-old woman had given birth was certainly eye-opening -- but Wired News' Kristen Philipkoski cautions that younger women shouldn't think they can keep hitting the snooze button on their biological clocks:

What is often overlooked in stories like Adriana Iliescu's is the fact that the woman's own eggs were not used in the procedure. Both the eggs and the sperm used were donated. Iliescu was essentially a surrogate for strangers' DNA.

"What we're seeing here is a pregnancy, but not a woman giving birth to a biological child," said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "Which raises the question: Why would anyone put a 66-year-old woman through pregnancy?"

News reports about Iliescu's pregnancy revealed that donor eggs and sperm made the pregnancy possible, although that fact could escape headline skimmers. And many famous women who gave birth in their 40s and 50s, including Joan Lunden, Geena Davis, Cheryl Tiegs and Jane Seymour, welcome press coverage of their new children, but won't answer questions about donor eggs.

Fie on comment spam

We've installed a software patch for our Movable Type blogware that supports Google's new initiative to combat comment spam.

Gaming the No. 1 search engine's page-ranking algorithms has been a key objective of comment spammers. Google is trying to thwart them by giving Web sites a way to mark hyperlinks so they won't be indexed:

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won't get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

Several leading blogware companies are backing Google's plan, as are rival search engines MSN Search and Yahoo.

On a somewhat related note, Salon today offers a very critical look at what Microsoft is doing to fight spam of the e-mail variety. The answer, apparently, is not enough.

Appeasing the dead

Thailand is wrestling with a new issue as it recovers from the devastating tsunami, the Wall Street Journal reports:

As Thai people grapple with the physical aftereffects of December's natural disaster, they are also dealing with another serious problem: Ghosts.

For many Thais, steeped in Buddhist teachings of rebirth and even older animistic beliefs in spirits, ghosts are very real. When people die suddenly and violently, as they did in the December waves, spirits cling to their bodies and to familiar places, unsure of how to cross from the world of the living to the world of the dead, many here believe.

Psychologists say the ghosts are likely a manifestation of the mental trauma suffered by the tsunami survivors, a way for people to face their fears and come to terms with what happened. But for many, the ghosts are a problem that requires a practical solution, not therapy.

An 'FCC moment'

I think MSNBC.com may have contributed a new term to the pop-culture lexicon with this headline: Band has FCC moment at inaugural concert.

You can probably guess what happened.

Opting out of swimsuits

Turns out that some Sports Illustrated subscribers don't want the annual swimsuit issue at all, the New York Times reports:

There are, it seems, subscribers who dislike Sports Illustrated's annual swimsuit issue.

They do not want to see it and they certainly do not want it sent to them.

They view the sensuous lounging of supermodels in expensive bikinis as alien to the mission of a weekly sports magazine.

For their sake, SI recently started publicizing a toll-free number (1-866-228-1175) they can call to opt out of getting it and having their subscriptions extended by an issue instead. So far, 25,829 -- about 0.8 percent of the total subscriber base -- have taken SI up on the offer.

That's up from 21,065 opt-outees last year -- before the number was publicized.

Dashing diet delusions

In an amusing commentary, When it comes to diets, we're pretty thick, pop culture reporter D. Parvaz shines the harsh light of reality on American's dieting delusions:

Americans want to be able to eat everything, at any time, and still come out looking like Brad Pitt or Britney Spears ... er, better make that Brandy (Britney's eating too many Chee-tos these days).

When the U.S. Department of Agriculture's new diet and exercise guidelines were announced last week, Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman optimistically said that the popularity of diet books indicates "Americans are interested in leading healthier lives, but they want credible, consistent and coherent information to help them make the best possible choices."

Wrong-o, Ann.

The majority of Americans are interested in quick fixes, miracle cures and magic pills that allow them to eat all the starch/ice cream/beef they want without dealing with the inevitable pudge. It's not like the population of this country can't follow directions (which, really, is all a diet is).

People don't want to follow a weight-loss diet. Why? Because ultimately it means eating less and moving more, not just as the French, but as fit people everywhere -- even here -- do. All-you-can-eat promises and gimmicks will never deliver; unless you create an exit valve for the food you eat before it hits your stomach.

Office supplies can kill you

For proof, see the winners of this contest on MacGyvering weapons out of common office supplies. The winner was a functional bow and arrow made from wooden rulers, rubber bands, Ethernet cabling and ball point pens.

(Via Boing Boing.)

Bill G., teen heartthrob

Oh, my: Bill Gates Strikes a Pose for Teen Beat Photospread, 1983.

Update: Museum of Hoaxes concludes that these photos are genuine -- and, in fact, available from stock photo service Corbis (1 and 2) -- but were actually taken in 1985. Did they actually appear in Teen Beat? That's another question ...

Another update: Todd Bishop rounds up the explosive reaction to these photos.

Tech key to 'cool'

One of our most popular stories yesterday was Todd Bishop's Microsoft Notebook examining the competitive threat that Apple Computer's new Mac mini poses to the Windows monopoly. The experts' consensus is that while the mini will certainly help Apple's sales, it probably won't do much to dent Microsoft's overall market share.

Historian Randall Stross pointed out in Sunday's New York Times, however, that Apple already "has an absolute monopoly on the asset that is the most difficult for competitors to copy: cool." The key to that -- as illustrated by the runaway success of the iPod -- isn't astute industrial design or savvy marketing, however. No, Stross makes the more interesting argument that the iPod's coolness quotient is due largely to technological progress. Essentially, he says, the hardware has advanced to the point where it can be made cool.

Shushing cell phoners

With cell phone use in this country tripling over a decade, Americans are grappling -- some literally -- with a new etiquette crisis: How to get obnoxious cell phone users to shut up in public.

Wired News surveys some of the more creative solutions, including handing out cards bearing sort-of friendly warnings and designated, soundproof cell-phone booths in restaurants.

From clicks to bricks

How do consumer e-commerce businesses expand their markets when they already reach everyone on the Internet? By going offline. Online travel giants Expedia and Travelocity.com are both opening offline retail locations, the New York Times reports:

The companies said the change would help them reach customers who had not yet purchased travel services online and would strengthen the companies' bonds with hotels, where many of the kiosks will be located. The new locations will also help the companies get a much bigger slice of the lucrative vacation activities business, selling services like helicopter tours, luau outings and show tickets. The activities market has no dominant player, with most tourist destinations relying on regional companies to market local tours and services. ...

The kiosks underscore the latest trend among online travel agencies, which have been trying in recent years to evolve into travel retailers, rather than simply Web sites that quote published air and hotel rates and pass orders on to suppliers, according to Henry Harteveldt, an analyst with Forrester Research, a technology consultant.

Jobster to get word out

Business reporter John Cook wrote an interesting story about Jobster Inc., a new startup that plans to apply social networking principles to job recruitment:

"If you talk to any large corporation today -- in an increasing number of job categories -- no one qualified is really applying," said [Kevin Wheeler, president of Global Learning Resources Inc., a Fremont, Calif.-based human resources consulting firm]. "Therefore, recruiters have to figure out a way to get out there and find these people who are not looking, called passive candidates, and entice them into considering their opportunity. The best way to do that is to work through some kind of network."

A hosted service that uses e-mail and other online tools, Jobster helps build these networks so recruiters can mine their employees' contacts of friends, family members and former colleagues in order to find the best candidate for the job. Oftentimes, [Jobster founder Jason Goldbert] said, the best people are not actively looking for a new job.

"That's a huge untapped market," he said. "And we think that relationships are the only way you find those people."

Who needs an office?

What could be more quintessentially Seattle than running your software startup from a neighborhood coffeehouse that offers free Wi-Fi? Wired News reports on the innovative "office" arrangements of Delicious Monster.

On a side note, it's always interesting to catch up with what people you knew in college are up to, isn't it?

Twisted tech talk

The high-tech industry has bestowed many gifts upon society over the past quarter-century. Clearer English is not one of them, the Associated Press notes:

Euphemism and allegory have always been common in business -- where few get fired, but plenty get "downsized" -- but some say the tongue-twisting technology industry has gone too far.

Alan Freedman, who has been writing technology encyclopedias for 25 years, realized things were really out of hand when people started asking him to decipher technology companies' own marketing materials -- the stuff they allegedly use to entice people to buy their products. What's worse, he says, is that it sometimes took him months to wade through the buzzwords.

Darth Tater

		AP

If you thought the little Lego Darth Vader figure was cute, check out the Sith Lord's licensed Mr. Potato Head incarnation. (See more photos at StarWars.com.)

Due out next month, "Darth Tater" will include interchangeable parts including a lightsaber, cape, helmet, shoes, eyes, nose and teeth. (But alas, as one of my colleagues pointed out, no Monkey Chow.)

It will carry a suggested retail price of $7.99.

Anatomically correct art

In this post-Nipplegate era, is Seattle ready for anatomically correct male nudes in outdoor public art? We'll soon find out, according to P-I art critic Regina Hackett. She reports that the Seattle Art Museum's new Olympic Sculpture Park will likely sport a fountain featuring sculptures of male nudes, courtesy of a $1 million grant bequeathed to the city by an aficionado of such art.

Most popular last week

Jan. 10-16, 2005, was one of those weeks where the stories that drew the most readers were very different from the ones that readers passed along to others. In fact, looking at how little overlap there is between the two lists -- and the big differences in subject matter between them -- you get a sense of just how diverse our audience is.

Top clicks (most read articles)

1. Floor buffer pulled into MRI machine's magnets
2. Editors race to cover Aniston-Pitt split
3. Playboy Playmate faces assault charges
4. Holmgren staying put
5. One last, long campout for 'the Star Wars guy'
6. Seahawks at crossroad
7. Hargrove counting ways Beltre, Sexson can help
8. Holmgren had thoughts of leaving
9. GOP bid to stall Gregoire is turned back
10. Pssst! They're listening when you're on hold

Top picks (most e-mailed articles)

1. Bush administration comments on WMDs
2. Floor buffer pulled into MRI machine's magnets
3. Many parents are teaching their babies to s