Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: publishing

Why I Haven’t Been Blogging Much Lately: Micro-Blogging!

August 28, 2008 / / 1 Comment

So, here’s a chart that shows what I’ve been doing lately instead of blogging here.  Yep, micro-blogging on Twitter. There’s a free service for us twitterers (or, as some call us, "tweeple") — it’s called TweetRush, and it lets us graph our recent Twitter activity. Pretty cool. Graemetwitterusage_2

So, for you blog readers out there that may have been wondering why I’m so quiet, I’m really not!  🙂  Heck, 232 tweets since July 19th is pretty darn active, wouldn’t you say?  And virtually none of these tweets is about what I’m eating for breakfast, or some lame thing like that, which is what a lot of Twitter detractors think people do there. Darn near all my tweets or "micro-posts" are news items or insights that I think my "followers" — approaching 400 now — would be interested in. Occasionally, some are replies to certain followers, too — though I prefer to do a lot of that privately via what Twitter calls "Direct Message" or DM.  Some people go nuts with Twitter replies, though — almost using it like group email or IM. Letting everyone sort of be voyeurs into their personal, one-on-one conversations. But I find that quite silly, actually, for the most part. I much prefer to use Twitter to publish useful tidbits and, especially, links that open people up to even more connected knowledge out there — and create conversations on the back channel, whether via DM or email. Twitter is having huge implications in marketing and PR. Game changing, as a matter of fact. I even have a friend — a reporter — who’s about to publish a book called "Twitter Means Business," which gets into a lot of that. (He interviewed me and people from about three dozen other companies.)

Do you use Twitter?  Are you following me there?  If not, please set up your own free account, and then click "follow" here: www.twitter.com/graemethickins. If you’ve already been using it, what do you think of it?  Is it changing your online life, as it is mine?

Eurekster: With Passive Collaboration, Who Needs Tagging?

March 26, 2006 / / 1 Comment

One of the past firms that launched at PC Forum and was in attendance at this year’s event was Eurekster, a Web 2.0 search personalization company. This company debuted two years previous at the 2004 PC Forum. I sat down with CEO Steve Marder to get an update on what’s been happening lately with the company. Marder recounted how, in November 2005, his company introduced “Swickis,” which are community-powered search engines for personal and small-business websites. (Search + wicki = swicki.) He described that launch as a “self-service beta.” [Prior to PC Forum, I had actually taken Eureksterlogo advantage of that service and created a swicki for my own blog, which I set up and took live in about 15 minutes. You can see it at the right, complete with what’s called the “buzz cloud” within the widget itself.] In its announcement, Eurekster said publishers are invited to create their own swickis, free of charge, with the Eurekster SwickiBuilder here, and “can opt to share in the search-related advertising revenue, a feature that will be available soon.” Harder told me some 5000 blogs have signed up so far and set up a swicki.

Marder continued: “We operate on the ASP model. And it’s easy to integrate our look-and-feel into your site.” He said he and his co-founder, Grant Ryan, Ph.D., who is based in New Zealand, had previously cofounded another technology company, which was focused in enterprise search. That firm is SLI Systems, which Marder said is profitable, and both he and Ryan continue to serve on that firm’s board.

“Eurekster is all about the end user,” said Marder. “Our engine learns from your community. We enable personal networks.”

But, in addition to targeting “the rest of the Web,” as Marder put it, with the swicki concept (meaning the smaller sites), Eurekster also has an offering called SearchPublisher, which is an enterprise-level platform for delivering a highly customized, branded search feature on large web sites. Customers include such companies as Bolt, Gartner, Friendster, Hollywood.com, Community Connect, and Locker Gnome. Eurekster also announced, on the first of day of PC Forum, that Popular Science, the world’s largest science and technology magazine, had integrated Eurekster’s SearchPublisher community search platform into its website, PopSci.com. That site is a destination for readers interested in the latest developments in science and technology, including cars, electronics, communications, tools, space and aviation, among other topics.

“We allow passive collaboration, with no tagging. It’s the concept of ‘auto-tagging’,” said Marder. “Your users are communicating with you via search.” He said Eurekster gives the publisher control. “Small or large, they have community. We harness the collective intelligence of that community, while leveraging the expertise of the publisher.”

Eurekster is a privately held firm based in San Francisco and currently has 20 employees, with R&D based in New Zealand. It received angel backing in December 2004. What’s on tap for the company? Marder had this heads-up for me: “Monetization is coming next.”

Marketers: “Think Like a Publisher”

March 2, 2006 / / 0 Comments

The best piece of advice I’ve seen lately for marketing people in this age of new media comes from David Meerman Scott in this excellent piece on MarketingProfs.com called “The New Rules for PR”. It’s this:

“Think like a publisher. Marketers at the most enlightened organizations recognize that they are now purveyors of information, and they manage content as a valuable asset with the care of a publishing company.”

I think David has it right. I’ve never met him, but I told him in an email I’ve been wanting to articulate that very same thought, but I like his version. In fact, his message about the importance of content to marketing is so good, so relevant to our times, that I went right over to Amazon and bought his latest book: “Cashing In With Content: How Innovative Marketers Use Digital Information to Turn Browsers Into Buyers”. (See it at the right under “Reading.”)

Have you noticed how the terms “marketing” and “PR” are starting to blend together? At least in the tech world… PR people I know everywhere are now more like marketers, and (somewhat) vice versa. Is PR coming into its own — kind of a new era for the profession? I say yes. Long ago, I gave up reading the legacy marketing titles like Ad Age and AdWeek. Now I read PR Week. The disciplines of PR and marketing are coming closer and closer together. And this is a good thing.

David Meerman Scott captures the key point: content is what runs through it all. And you won’t do well in either discipline these days if you don’t understand, generate, nurture, and encourage it. Really live and breath it. Content isn’t just king in consumer media and the new world of social media/Web 2.0. The same thing applies to business — the purview of professional marketers. Content has a direct impact on the viability and growth of any organization. David comes to all this with an excellent background: here’s his bio. He has a great blog, too, which I’m adding to my regular reading, and my blog roll. The man gets it.

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