Debbie Weil is a corporate blogging and social media expert, online marketing consultant, speaker and author of The Corporate Blogging Book (Portfolio). She consults with large companies, CEOs and senior executives on how to create blogs that connect with customers and attract media attention.

Been collecting these for a week or so.

• Ran across this nifty page on Robert’s Echo blog. Includes everything from the "origin" of blogs, stats on blog readership, recommended PR blogs, link to a Forrester Research executive summary, lists of internal and external corporate blogs and more.

• Another page with all things blog (including links to RSS tutorials and basic blog definitions) penned by the Singapore-based Rambling Librarian.

• Comprehensive list from Dave Taylor’s Intuitive Life blog with links to other articles.

• 101 writing tips from Kari Chisholm on writing a thought leadership blog. (He writes a grassroots advocacy blog.)

Remarkable stat courtesy of an HP Small Business Survey released last week. Thanks to CorporateBloggingBlog and Anita Campbell’s Small Business Trends blog for the link. Anita makes a key observation: while 10% of small biz owners may be including blogs in their marketing plans, half of all small businesses do not even have a Web site! The takeaway: think of a blog as a kind of Web site. If you need to make a choice? It’s a no-brainer. Launch a blog in minutes with a service like TypePad. You’ll instantly have a more powerful presence online than if you build a static site from the ground up.

Hurry on over to DoubleClick’s (free) knowledge center. If you haven’t already seen it, you can download the Q4 2004 Email Trend Report released in March 2005. Highlight: the average open rate for HTML emails continues to decline. It’s now 32.6%.

In addition, DoubleClick’s director of research Rick Bruner (he also runs BusinessBlogConsulting.com) has just published a new 22-page report: The Decade in Online Advertising: 1994 - 2004. Rick has posted his favorite chart from the report here. It’s a trip through history, starting with Mosaic in 1993 and a flatline for number of Internet users and dollars of Internet ad revenue. By the end of 2004, Internet ad revenues were $9.6 billion and number of U.S. Internet users was about 170 million. Most notable stat: no medium since B&W television has penetrated U.S. households as fast as the Internet. It took only 8 years. Compared with 9 years for radio, 10 for the VCR, 17 for personal computers, 39 for cable TV and 70 for the telephone. I.e. the Internet was virtally unheard of just over a decade ago. (There’s also a good section with blog stats.) Hey Rick, a great report! Looks like your day job suits you.

A small minority of Americans - 7 percent - according to a March 2005 study by CNN, USA Today and Gallup (as reported in eMarketer) So the wave is still cresting. Most of the attention thus far is on political blogs. Blogging as a business communications tool is still in its infancy. Good to get a reality check now and again. (Note: open access to the eMarketer article until March 31, 2005.)Tx to Sandy Gibson for the pointer.

Related Resource
An article from Wharton Business School’s Knowledge Center on Weblogs are here to stay, but where are they headed? Thanks to Linda Abraham for the pointer.

30,000 blog readers responded to Blogads’s 2nd annual survey so the results are worth paying attention to. Scroll down to see the complete results broken out by age, gender, income, industry, etc. 70% of these blog readers fall into a coveted demographic known as “influentials.” Yet… 79% do NOT have their own blog. Another notable tidbit: only 12% of the blog readers who responded actually use RSS newsreaders. Thanks to Rok Hrastnik of MarketingStudies.net for this nugget.

On a related note, see my entry in BlogWrite: Will RSS simplify your life? Short answer, no. At least for now.