I am thinking about jumping in the video blogging space. LIFT gets me a lot of contact with amazing people that I usually try to meet for a coffee or something. And these conversations might interest the readers of this blog.

For example, I met this week with Ben Segal (who told me the inner story of the birth of the WWW at the CERN), Paul Elosegui (one of the founders of Liberty Surf in Spain) and Thierry Maillet.

Could anybody recommend a good camera? Ideally it would be very easy to carry around, with good autonomy, and not much conversion work after wards. Any idea? Robert? Raymond?

Ingo Haupt, a German business student at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, contacted me about an interesting study on Business Blogs. The idea it to understand “what quality aspects of business blogs are most important for consumers and how companies can use their weblogs to create and strengthen consumer loyalty”.

Sounds like an interesting program, your individual data will be kept confidential and the results public.

So if you have 10 minutes to invest in a nice research click here and be sure to check Ingo’s blog to get the results when they become available. Thanks for your help!

Stowe Boyd gives a follow up to Robert Scoble’s advice about how to raise more attention (and consequently send more important ‘snowball’ as in Stowe’s terminology). I.E. it’s a how to for improving one’s blog and one’s sphere of influence. For those who had not read, Robert’s ideas were: learn how to use technorati properly (claiming a blog, putting cathy phrases, a picture…), use graphics/screenshots (be visual), be different (more pleasing to the eyes), give personality, tag tag tag and connect with others (which means: have conversations).

Some excerpts of Stowe Boyd’s advice:

1. True Voice—authentic and empassioned writing, clearly expressing a consistent and value-based perspective
2. Throw Yourself Into Dialog— Most great posts are a response to the writing of others.
3. Draw The Line, Over And Over Again—At any given time, successful, engaged bloggers are pursuing a set of themes or topics. (…) State your position and defend it.
4. The Big Idea—Every once in a while, work on one of those big posts, that outlines an idea that may have big implications.
5. Sharpen Your Pencil, And Then Write. (…) You should write—at a minimum—every day.
6. Courage—(…) Accept the occasional (or even consistent) vitriol from detractors and nay-sayers. If you stand up and say something is great, or pointless, or the most likely trend for the future, you can be sure that there are others that will disagree, and they will be happy to say so. Fine. But you can’t hedge, and middle-of-the-road platitudes or cautious optimism
7. Technology—(…) Learn how search engines work, and do the obvious things. Expressive titles, especially with people’s and products’ names help greatly. Tagging with detailed terms helps search engines and people alike. By all means, make your blog visually pleasing, accessible, and easy to read. Use graphics when appropriate, such as screen shots or diagrams. Link to all the people and stories you reference, and include people discussed as tags. [My favorite but hard to follow on a regular basis -nicolas]
8. Timing Matters—I am not suggesting blowing hot and cold on themes, but rather try to build on stories when they are still new and in people’s thoughts.
9. Human Sized Pieces—People are busy, and so your posts should generally not be 20 page dissertations.
10. Respond to comments—(…) Engage them when they come. But never feed the trolls.

Structured Blogging seems to be the new buzzword lately. It’s defined as “a way to get more information on the web in a way that’s more usable. You can enter information in this form and it’ll get published on your blog like a normal entry, but it will also be published in a machine-readable format so that other services can read and understand it.” Although the idea is interesting, the way it could be implemented is rather weak. Let’s play the party pooper:

Some of the potential flaws are:

it will fail because people don’t want their music review to look like everybody else’s… they want the variablility of the Web that we have come to expect. But I expect we will accumulate dozens of reasons why not in the upcoming months. (according to Stowe Boyd)

People are lazy: There is simply not enough benefit to the average blogger to compensate for the added irritation of having to pull up a separate form for each type of content you post. It’s a little like the reason why the average Outlook user has around 2,000 emails in their inbox at any time: The cognitive effort of classification is enough to keep people from bothering. The same logic holds for structured blogging (according to Paul Kedrosky),