E-marketer Editorial Director Ezra Palmer manages to pull together blogging, the Sex Pistols, Cicero, and Paul Gauguin in a recent article.
Yes, it can be done! See how…
Category: Blogs
_Tim Shore is the publisher of “blogTO”:http://www.blogto.com, a city blog focused on Toronto culture, recently named by Forbes Magazine as “Best of the Web”:http://www.forbes.com/bow/b2c/category.jhtml?id=323. In his day job, he works for the interactive arm of a Toronto-based ad agency. (Tim is front right along with blogTO Managing Editor Tanja-Tiziana Burdi (left) and contributors Christine Miguel and Paul Fler. Photo by Sabrina Cariati.)_
*One Degree: What inspired you to start blogTO.com?*
I think there was both an opportunity and a need. The opportunity was that there was this great new low-cost publishing platform called a blog (not to mention a great way to experience the Internet). On the need side, there was a lack of good web sites which focused on Toronto culture. There seemed to be general consensus that “toronto.com”:http://www.toronto.com was garbage and that the rest of the media players were treating online as an afterthought.
That combined with my passion for the city and the fact that readership and ad dollars continue to migrate online, it was a no brainer.
*One Degree: Just like One Degree, BlogTO depends on a broad spectrum of contributors. I’m curious about your opinions on whether group blogs should emphasize the individual or the group. How do you balance the personality and talents of the various contributors with the need to present a somewhat consistent and/or authoritative voice to readers – or do you?*
The rise in social networks and their power over the information on the Internet has sprung another phenomenon: “Folksonomies”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy. Folksonomy is a word coined by “Thomas Vander Wal”:http://www.vanderwal.net/about.php, an online pioneer studying information structure and combines the words ‘taxonomy’ with ‘folks’. A simple definition is that folksonomies are classifications defined by people. The implications of folksonomies are much more complex.
In the beginning of folksonomies, collaborative tagging efforts by people were simple. If you posted an entry on your blog about marketing, you would classify it marketing, if you were writing on knitting, you would classify it knitting. However, with the popularity of social software like “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us, “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com and the blog search engine “Technorati”:http://www.technorati.com growing, tagging systems have become much more complex and layered. Now, if you post an entry on your blog about marketing, you might classify it as “marketing, online, emarketing, collaborative” in order to encompass a more defined description of your post.
How does this effect your business blog, then? Online marketing includes the ability to tie into these social networks. What is the sense of posting to a blog that nobody reads? In order to increase traffic, you have to interact effectively with the blogosphere. Tagging is one of the ways to do this.