When someone says "you should blog in your business", what does that really mean? Most people know that blogging is like a personal diary; the domain of young people; perhaps politically motivated; or someone who is fascinated with cats. However, if someone is telling you to blog for your business, they’re probably right; they realize that you could achieve greater organic search visibility; or they might understand that you could connect with your target audience at a deeper level; or they instinctively know that you could sell your products or service your customers with less effort and better results. The next question is how?

If a friend advises you to get on a plane and fly to Boston to sell your latest product to a recommended prospect, one of the first things you'd probably do is book a flight. Did you consider building your own airplane? So why do so many businesses (when advised to blog) immediately assume they should build and maintain their own blogging solution?

This is a difficult question to answer; more likely it’s because people typically hire products to perform jobs that products can do better than they could. This is no different than renting a backhoe when you need to dig a ditch, or renting a car when you arrive in Boston. Businesses make good decisions about outsourcing every day. Choosing the right solution for your advertorial marketing tasks is no different.

MyST Blogsite™ is an advertorial marketing platform that can do the job far better than you could ever hope to achieve on your own with a free blog, a cheap blog, or your own internally-developed blogging application. Why? Because the blogging component of advertorial marketing and participating in the conversational web is a small fraction of the tasks required for success.

This is an important distinction because (as a business), you also have far more important tasks and obligations to attend to than all of the details and nuances of “blogging”. At MyST we've raised the bar on business blogging and transformed it into advertorial marketing science - behind every detail, is another detail that you don’t have to think about. Every day we look closely at the challenges that business and marketing organizations face, and we improve the solution to make it possible to do less and achieve more with your blogsite.

Businesses and marketing organizations should never aspire to be “bloggers” unless they are in the business of blogging. Instead, they should remain focused on what they do well to earn money, and how to benefit from participating in the blogosphere and the conversational web. Do you want to be a "blogger" or a business person that blogs?

To really understand how we’ve advanced the science of advertorial marketing, you need to spend about 45 minutes in a free (and interactive) online technical immersion seminar designed specifically to meet your business and marketing requirements. We’re happy to provide these presentations because we know how important the business blogging decision can be. Complete this form and well design a presentation that’s relevant and informative for your staff.

In the seminar we’ll cover the topics listed below and answer direct questions that will help you shape your advertorial marketing strategy while gaining a deep understanding of business blogging and how our platform will address your business requirements.

• Introduction of blogs, business blogging, and advertorial marketing.
• Participating in the blogosphere and the conversational web.
• The science of content publishing and findability.
• Simplifying your tasks.
• Amplifying your effort.Maintaining high content quality.
• Doing less while achieving more.
• Behind the scenes (the stuff you needn’t worry about).

Give us a shout; challenge us to educate you in context with your business objectives; fill out the form today.

Deltina Hay recently wrote about social media newsrooms citing (among many things)... the quote at right.

Her vision is not unlike the general vision of a common newsroom. The premise is that [organizationally], everything about a business or a person is collected into one location for easier findability. This is a noble undertaking – something that will typically pay big dividends if achieved. However, the topology of Web 2.0 creates (and even rewards) the reverse polarity of this idea.

Memberships in various social networks have managed to scatter your information, not aggregate it. Publishing a blog that is fundamentally separated from your website creates additional content separation; many business people have multiple blogs or regularly contribute in a variety of publishing forums. A del.ici.ous page adds one more place that contains lots of links, but it’s still one additional place where your “presence” is represented. Your Twitter timeline adds to the horizontal disparateness of who you are, where you are, and what you think. Your Jott account scatters information about your future business tasks, and Google Docs (and Google OS) will soon toss another layer of separated business information to the wind. ;-).

Luckily, all these platforms share one thing in common – XML. They each recognize the benefit of content sharing. However, none of them can serve as the central location where all content can be aggregated – not even Wordpress (as suggested by the author).

To collect everything suggested by Ms. Hay and present it in a unified way, you need an aggregation server; a piece of technology that can collect, sort, transform, mashup, and present all these disparate information objects as “proxy” objects. You can’t copy the objects because they frequently change – you must aggregate them in a way that allows them to change in their native locations, while also allowing new conversations (comments) to occur on their representational forms in your social media newsroom.

To demonstrate (a little), if you point your browser to Global Technologies Corporation (GTC), you’ll see what appears to be a normal website. But the upper right nav pane includes Guest Weblogs – two of which are mine. Blogsite: What’s New exists within the GTC site, and also Peripheral Vision, another completely different blog that I write. Each are separate blogs but both are available as seamlessly aggregated content into my consulting company website. Note the URL’s – they are each using the MyST aggregation engine.

You can see a more pronounced example at Health Commentary, a blogsite designed to aggregate in authors from around the world on the subject of health care. Instead of forcing all the contributors to learn the Health Commentary platform, we simply “aggregate” select information from wherever these authors are already writing their articles and blog posts.

Building a unified collection of content about a specific individual (for social media newsrooms) is approximately the same challenge. But it’s not all a bed of roses – consider that many social networks are not making feeds publicly available. This represents another challenge for the social media newsroom – you need another piece of Web 2.0 machinery – the ability to harvest content via secure means; we do that as well.

Deltina is most definitely on the right track concerning social media newsrooms. If you'd like to explore the idea of your own social media newsroom, give me a shout.

See Also

• Social Media Newsrooms: The Ultimate Web 2.0 Tool for Your Business
  Imagine having just one place to send the media, prospective clients, book reviewers, or anyone who wants to know all about you, your business, or your book-a place...

While Google is big, their notions and philosophies about doing business online are relatively simple and straightforward. Recently, the Google User Experience Team (UX) convened to publish the principles that ought to guide Google design teams worldwide. There are only ten guidelines, and they are indeed simple.

A reputable design consultant told me in 1995 – “Never underestimate the power of whitespace.”. The Google homepage obviously embraces this philosophy, although iGoogle represents a slight shift away from the simplicity of this irresistible search solution.

However, there are some that believe the Google user experience is a bit outdated, perhaps needing an AJAX face-lift. This is especially the sentiment for applications such as GMail. I think there’s a big difference between a search engine and a business application – GMail and other Google Apps need to address usability issues that are fundamentally different from user expectations involving search.

Principle #1 - Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams.

With this principle in mind, consider how you use search in your daily work. Are you a “ruthless” searcher? Do you use Google and other search tools to find and focus on exactly what you want?

Typically, you start with Google (worldwide) and you find a domain (preferably a specific page) that provides the exact content you were looking for. Bypassing a home page and going directly to the page that meets your information quest is far more desirable than starting at a home page and browsing for answers. You aren’t alone – in 2008, about 75% of Internet users behave this way because they have learned how to find and access deep-links that provide answers. Part of the reason this percentage is so high is the advent of perma-links – these are page links that represent a specific idea or answer, or topic. Largely, blogs are responsible for creating perma-links but many content management systems are now using this approach to create more findable and sustainable content.

Terry Heaton recently wrote about this in concert with new statistics from Jacob Neilsen. The data is clear and supports my past hunches about searchers that hop over short tail terms to access the long-tail of content. These newly recognized trends also support a hunch I had about the new definition of a home page - every page is the "home page". ;-)

See Also

• Web users 'getting more ruthless'
  The annual report into web habits by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows people are becoming much less patient when they go online.
• MyTH: Organic Search Rankings Lower Than Page 3 Achieve Little. | MyST Blogsite®
  Consumers are adapting to the changing Internet topology by using search queries that are more discrete and browsing well beyond the first three search page results to find what they're looking for.
• The Cost of Interaction
  COST OF INTERACTION: A form of web currency ? the price users are required to pay to view, use, consume or interact with web content.

Do you wonder how often visitors abandon your Web page before it has finished loading? In his book, Designing Web Usability, Jakob Nielsen states that a fast load time should be your most important design consideration. This comes from the Internet's leading usability guru.

Have you noticed [sometimes] when you have lots of posts, your blog page begins to slow down? You might be thinking the problem is your blog server, the blog platform you use, or your blogging service provider. But you shouldn't assume the problem is so easily diagnosed. Before jumping to conclusion, take your blogsite URL over to WebsiteOptimization.com and get a detailed analysis of the performance (or lack thereof). This tool will provide some insights concerning your blog (or website) performance.

Typically, the problem is related to a high number of images or embedded objects. This is usually not a problem for websites because those pages are generally static and contain few embedded objects and images. However, blogs have a greater likelihood of containing things like YouTube videos, flash components that show real estate search and features. Blogs are also a high-velocity content environment -more pages are written in a blogsite in one month than most websites see in a year. So blogs have a higher incidence of performance problems.

If you use lots of photos or embedded resources (IDX is a popular one for real estate) that require scripts and iFrames, your are likely to see display degradation for your pages, especially since most blogs show all posts for the current month or some portion of an adjacent month. Imagine 20 posts, and two thirds of them reference a script-based plugin that is on another server. Each of the 13 requests for the embedded script components must execute across the web to the servers where the information is retrieved before the next embedded object request can be serviced. And your blogsite home page cannot render until all requests are completed. Frankly, I'm surprised this works as well as it does - good thing most of your visitors have a T1, or do they? ;-)

The same issue holds true for images. While your blogsite home page may be just 30k bytes in text, the images might be another 3 to 7 megabytes. All those image requests must come down to the browser and from servers that are likely not where your blog text content is hosted. I see lots of folks using Flickr - notoriously sluggish (at times). But your visitor's browser must wait patiently for all images to fully download before rendering your blog pages unless you've meticulously added HTML height and width attributes for all the images in your pages.

Addressing this issue is not easy, but we've taken an approach in our own platform that's unique and seems to help. We determined that performance issues could be mitigated if blog posts had a "display context". This means that when posts are viewed as a collection (i.e., lots of posts together on your blogsite home page), what is displayed could (or should) be different from that which is shown when the post is displayed by itself.

Imagine a post that contains an embedded script component. It displays fully when someone searches Google and lands on that specific post as a page by itself. But, when the post is displayed as part of a collection of many posts, it magically detects the display context and suppresses any calls to the embedded script. You can see an example here - this post displays the embedded video component when it is shown by itself. But when it is in a collection of posts (such as the April archive), the video is suppressed.

We call this approach "context scoping" and we've designed a wide range of "scopes" that authors can use to control the display context of any embedded objects, images, videos, graphical quotes, etc. Other interesting use cases for context scoping are immediately apparent once you grasp this idea.

• Imagine embedded property ads that display at the footer of your site when (and only when) the visitor is viewing a specific post.
• Imagine a contact form that is displayed only when a specific category of post is being viewed.
• Imagine a syndicated feed about related news is displayed embedded in a post.
• Imagine certain images are displayed in a post only when you are logged into your blog as an author.

As the velocity, volume, and types of information objects grow in your Web 2.0 content strategy, a key success factor will become performance and agility; display context provides the agility to affect performance (and useability) in positive ways.

See Also

• Web Site Optimization: Speed Up Your Site website optimization web speed optimize web site performance company
  Website optimization speeds up slow web sites, increases website traffic, and improves conversion rates. Our web optimization services increase website performance, decrease bailout rates, and improve search engine rankings.

Widgets and gadgets are becoming more popular with the recent introduction of application frameworks such as iGoogle and OpenSocial, and these tools represent new ways to spread your message. Google Gadgets and WidgetBox are two of the most popular frameworks for creating gadget applications.

Google Gadgets and WidgetBox both provide universal components for syndicating blogsite content without requiring any significant gadgetry expertise. With just a little experimentation you can easily place your blogsite web feeds on your website or enable other sites to use your content. Gadgets can provide...

• Direct syndication of MyST Blogsite channels (feeds, posts, etc) to any web page or the Google Desktop without any HTML, XML, or script programming.
• Integration of MyST Blogsite channels into any post or site-wide Captyx component. This makes it possible to easily syndicate blog channels from one blogsite into any other blogsite without any programming.
• Utilization of MyST Blogsite feeds without fear of too many requests or server overload issues. The Gadgets handle all caching and maintain compliance with MyST SlimeGate™.
• Fully configurable and brandable components.

Here is a new MyST Widgetbox widget that tracks the latest posting from the What's New channel at blogsite.com.  This widget can be easily dropped into any blog or web site.  Plus, you can very easily customize the color scheme, size, and whether to display just headlines or headlines with text (as shown here.)

An equally useful MyST Google Gadget is available to syndicate our What's New channel, but this gadget is designed to work with any MyST Blogsite feed by simply entering the channel ID into the configuration. This gadget also works in iGoogle, the personalized home page provided by Google.

If you have requirements for special gadgets or would like to create a branded gadget, don't hesitate to contact us.

See Also

• Get the MyST Blogsite Widget at Widgetbox
  Quickly and easily customize the MyST Blogsite widget and then drop it into your blog or web site.
• Get the MyST Blogsite Google Gadget to Publish Your Own Blogsite Feed
  Quickly and easily customize this Google Gadget with your own content and then drop it into your blog or web site.

Cenzic, the innovative leader in application security risk management, vulnerable assessment, and compliance solutions launched their MyST Blogsite yesterday (blog.cenzic.com).

Aside from a very polished and clean design, this site has already begun to set the tone for high quality content.

Erin Swanson, Senior Director for Product and Strategic Marketing (and Blogsite expert), has created corporate blogsites before at two previous employers (Solid Core and Enviance); and it shows - she really has a clear understanding of marketing advertorials and how to create compelling content.

In just a few days effort, MyST was able to transform her vision into a thriving business advertorial presence that covers web vulnerability, security news, and web application security insights. If these subjects interest you, be sure to subscribe to their news feed.

See Also

• Web Application Security Testing & Assessment | Cenzic
  Cenzic is the innovative leader in application security risk management, vulnerable assessment, and compliance solutions.

One might morph the popular real estate adage for applicability to marketing websites:  Security, security, security.

A recent posting by Roberta Murphy describes how her WordPress-based San Diego Real Estate blog was viciously attacked by unknown entities who tried to delete everything ever written at San Diego Previews, Luxury Homes Digest, and 18 or so other real estate blog sites.  Roberta is understandably angry about the incident which took her site down, leaving some wondering if she was still in the San Diego real estate business.  But more deeply, she was left wondering, Why someone would bother to hack her site since it did not contain credit card numbers or other sensitive data?

Having been responsible for the security side of the MyST Blogsite infrastructure almost five years now, I certainly sympathize with Roberta.  And while I also wonder why some people are driven to such such abusive acts, I have absolutely no doubt that there are lots of such people in the world.  Whether its so-called "script kiddies" doing the Internet equivalent of the joy riding, sophisticated criminals executing well-planned schemes, or well-intended (but not so skilled) programmers trying to address legitimate integration requirements, the Internet is teeming with nefarious activity.

Here's a simple rule of thumb:  If your site has any significant visibility at all, it will be attacked at some point.

As I described in my FAS Talk blog, last month I discovered that a federation of hacked WordPress servers—over a thousand servers to date—were (and still are) being used to try to hack into our company web site.  At the time I first noticed slower-than-normal server response times, that site was receiving over 50,000 requests per day attempting to gain authoring access.  Thankfully, our company web site, like every other advertorial marketing site powered by MyST Blogsite, is protected by multiple security layers and was never actually hacked.

MyST SlimeGate™ is one of the security layers that protect all commercial sites powered by MyST Blogsite.  (There are others; see, for example, Fighting Back Against Big, Hungry, Orange Alligators.)  This layer serves as a blogsite's immune system by killing nefarious requests before they ever reach the blogsite itself and by restricting subsequent access by offending machines through dynamic firewall technology.  Once this immune system layer "learned" to recognize requests from compromised WordPress servers, the 50,000 number quickly dropped to about 20 and response times returned to normal.

See Also

• Hacked and Attacked: Why?
  April 18, 2008: San Diego Real Estate Blog
• Compromised WordPress Blogs Become an Army of Hacker Zombies
  Somewhere in the shadowy underbelly of the Web, there is an intelligent, and slimy, hacker exploiting WordPress security holes.
• Fighting Back Against Big, Hungry, Orange Alligators
  Overly aggressive RSS feed aggregators can cause server performance problems; MyST Blogsite introduces new technology to detect (and reject) egregious offenders.

Microsoft Word is an extremely popular—and extremely capable—word processor. For many people, Word is their preferred content authoring tool. Thus, it is common practice for bloggers to compose new blog posts in Word and then simply paste the content into their blogsite.  Composing content in Word offers many advantages, e.g., powerful spelling and grammar checking tools, built-in thesaurus, automatic backups while writing, off-line authoring, and so on. However, Word also has a dark side.

When you paste content into an HTML editor (such as the MyST Blogsite editor), Word includes a great deal of unwanted content formatting.

The problem is Word follows the philosophy that pasted content should look exactly like it did in the Word document. While this philosophy is great when you are pasting content between various office documents, it is inappropriate for a blogsite. In a blogsite, we want pasted content to look exactly like it was authored in (and for) the blogsite. A MyST Blogsite is carefully branded and includes specific typefaces, colors, spacing, and so on.

So, when pasting content from Word, it is important to optimize the pasted content, removing the unwanted Word-supplied formatting codes, leaving the blogsite free to present the content according to the blogsite's design. Doing so ensures the pasted content looks right at home in the blogsite. In addition, should the blogsite ever be re-skinned using different styles, the pasted content will automatically adapt to the new styling. But manually removing Word styling is tedious and time-consuming. That's why the MyST Blogsite editor includes a tool that optimizes pasted content.

Content Optimizer for Microsoft Word

The MyST Blogsite editor includes a new Content Optimizer for Microsoft Word toolbar. This toolbar lets you specify your preferences about when MyST Blogsite should automatically optimize Word content. First, the "Optimize Now" button lets you request immediate content optimization. This button works in either rich text editing or raw HTML editing modes.

Two checkbox options let you request automatic content optimization upon pasting new content and/or upon saving an item. In most cases, its good to leave both of these checked.

QA Assurance Reporting

MyST Blogsite automatically analyzes all public content weekly and produces a Public Content Quality report that identifies specific content quality issues in the publicly visible portions of your blogsite. This report now identifies occurrences of content containing unwanted Microsoft Word formatting that should be optimized for the blogsite. Such items are indicated by the following QA notice:

content contains non-optimized Microsoft Word formatting

Using the content optimizer toolbar makes addressing such QA issues very easy. Simply click the icon to edit the offending content, ensure that the "Auto optimize on Save" check box is checked (you're preferences will be remembered), then click Save. Optionally, you may click the "Optimize Now" button before clicking Save to review the optimized content before actually saving the change.

A blogsite (like a Lexus) is durable.

Very few people think about their blog content or blog architecture in the context of durability. When I mention it to people they say --

“What? How can you wear out your blog?”

Understanding blog and content durability requires a deeper understanding of the likelihood of future changes that would constrain or otherwise obsolete your content.

There’s no question there will be future innovations that will render the way blogs work today, as obsolete in a future context. Durable blogs will possess attributes that allow them to transform and reshape themselves with little effort. Non-durable blogs will require complete rethinking, rewrites and reformatting of large portions of content and application code bases; non-durable content will require significant reshaping to migrate into new use cases.

MyST Blogsite® was built on a platform of agile XML and XSLT services that are completely unrelated to blogging or blog architectures. We provide an advertorial platform based on sound information architecture design.

One example of content durability is how we meld Captyx components into your posts. My hunch is that not a single MyST Blogsite® customer has recognized that Captyx components (such as embedded videos) do not display in RSS feeds. This is intentional and done so for many reasons – far too complex to go into in this post. But the behavior is critical to creating and managing a durable content system because it makes it possible to create, manage, and integrate content items with (and without) embedded objects.

This agility is critical to future requirements that have not [yet] been invented. Imagine the day comes when you have 10,000 posts and you suddenly need to utilize your content in ways that heavy objects (such as video components) are not able to be included. Your competitors (who have embedded video code directly into their content) will not be able to participate in such a new use case without significant friction – they are busy creating non-durable content that assumes all objects in a post must be included in that post regardless of the use case.

Examples of durability abound in MyST Blogsite® - from the native MyST-ML [XML] markup language available universally across the platform, to the URL-based XML API from which a variety of XML formats can be accessed. In between we find filter patterns that allow you to scope RSS feeds and subsets of your content as HTML, Topic Cloud, which dissects all keywords into a relational map to your posts, and Link Properties that can exist as reference bibliographies in HTML or free-standing syndication feeds. MyST Blogsite® is designed with one assumption - change is coming. ;-)

See Also

• Centralizing the creation and maintenance of an enterprise-wide information architecture
  I do not believe you can create a durable information architecture without knowing and understanding the content, the users' interaction with the content as both creators and seekers and the context(s) in which the content is used.
• "agility" Topic Cloud | MyST Blogsite®
  "agility" Topic Cloud for MyST Blogsite

Everyone agrees that relevant, high-quality links improve the overall value of a blog post.  But for a busy business person, it is easy to overlook nitty-gritty "blogging" details such as choosing the most effective title or synopsis text for a link property.  In fact, while trying to be diligent about such things in my own blogging, it finally dawned on me that most of the time, the MyST Blogsite editor could automate those details for me.  Not only would it save me time, it would often do a better job at it than I would do.

So, once again, necessity (or laziness) has become the mother of invention.

The MyST Blogsite editor now includes a "Smart Link Verify" tool that verifies a link URL and suggests meaningful title and synopsis text for that link.  To make the workflow even easier, simply hitting ENTER after entering a link URL automatically invokes the Smart Link tool for that link.  The short video here shows the tool in action adding the link properties to this post.

Since its earliest incarnation, MyST Blogsite has supported distinct link properties that allow authors to create an annotated bibliography of links related to each post.  These properties are leveraged in a variety of ways by the MyST Blogsite platform, and offer many distinct and unique advantages over personal blogging tools that support only embedded hyperlinks.  Now, with the new Smart Link feature, it has become even easier to take full advantage of link properties.

See Also

• SES NYC the value of authoritative links | Sally Falkow
  Good PR (public relations, not PageRank) can influence search ranking
• Don't Cut Corners on Technical or Content Quality | MyST Blogsite®
  Content quality has a significant impact on search and discoverability of your information - don't risk all your blogging effort with substandard publishing practices.