What was hot in the blogosphere in 2004?

Clever… go here to see BlogPulse’s review of the year. The folks at BlogPulse sent an email announcement with a link to their year-in-review page:

“BlogPulse 2004 contains something for everyone - politics, news, social trends, international topics, silly stuff and intriguing finds. The Year in Review neatly captures the major themes, ideas, people and events that bloggers were discussing and writing about in 2004.”

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Take our 1-Minute RSS Quiz…

free_prize_inside.jpg… and enter the book giveaway to win a collector’s edition copy of Seth Godin’s Free Prize Inside. I’ve got one copy for one lucky winner. It’s packaged inside a cereal box. Very cool… Free Prize was selected by Forbes as one of the Top 10 Business Books of 2004.

“3 Reasons to Publish an E-newsletter AND a Blog” is hottest article on MarketingProfs

Cool… my article from six months ago is currently the “hottest” (i.e. most popular) article in today’s special year-end issue of MarketingProfs.com. I’m a huge fan of MProfs. If you’re not already a subscriber to their e-newsletter, I highly recommend it. Go here to sign up.

At least 3 degrees of separation for an ROI for Intelliseek’s blog

Speaking of being hard-nosed about the ROI of business blogs… take a look at Intelliseek’s clever BlogWebinar, that promotes (what else) their free webinars. Here’s how the ROI works. Intelliseek’s FREE blog promotes FREE webinars about blogging… that generate leads for their BlogPulse tool, their corporate intelligence products and other products.

An ROI for open source

Amazing… if you can, grab a copy of today’s New York Times and turn to the spread on pages A25 & A26. You’ll see a cool ad placed by the folks behind Mozilla’s open-source Firefox browser and paid for by 10,000 adopters of Firefox (aka SFX, "Support Firefox"). You can download the ad as a PDF or order it as a limited-edition print. And the connection with blogging is…

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Sherpa stats reveal “what’s working” in email

This is a nifty 17-page PDF with tons of stats in it about the current state of email marketing: click-throughs, landing pages, corporate filtering, etc. A great teaser for the complete version of MarketingSherpa’s 2005 Email Marketing Metrics Guide.

“Welcome” messages get best open rates

Useful article in MarketingSherpa about how to get the most out of the “Welcome” letter that your e-newsletter mailing service generates (or should be generating). Yes, it’s true. Your “Welcome” email to your new subscribers will most likely get the highest open rate of any message you ever send. Best practices for Welcome messages include: linking to your most recent issue, linking to a “complimentary” white paper, offering a $$-off discount coupon and beginning a sequence of email messages that build upon one another (aka an autoresponder series). You can download samples of the Welcome messages described. And here’s a 12-page how-to PDF on email autoresponders. (Note: free access to this article and, I assume, related links until Dec. 19th.)

New Morgan Stanley report gives thumbs up to blogs & RSS

Thanks to Dee Rambeau for a pointer to a 21-page PDF report from Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker and Brian Pitz on why “next generation content” (as they call it) will “gain usage / revenue traction in 2005.” Ahh, the business case for blogs. It’s coming, I’m confident. It just may be a bit hard to see right now because the “content” of blogs is so inextricably intertwined with the “technology” of blogging.

“Blog” is Word of the Year

Not a surprise really. “Blog” was the most frequently looked-up word in 2004, according to Merriam Webster Online. Followed by (you guessed it) “incumbent” and “electoral.” Thanks to Tom Parish for pointing me to the BBC link.

Bob Bly is bored with blogging…

Yup. After only one week. He emailed me this morning: “Deb, A full week in the blogosphere … already bored with the whole thing … tell me again why you like this? How much time per week do you spend writing your blog, checking your blog, and going to and reading other blogs?” Bob, great questions all. And they deserve a considered reply. So here goes…
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