billso.com

I see more white and silver laptops than black models when I walk around campus and the shopping mall these days. Colored laptops might look nice in the home, but do people really want to live with one color choice for 2 or more years?

If you don’t like the stock color of your device, Colorware will sell you a custom painted Blackberry, iPhone, iPod, game console or laptop. They’ll also paint your equipment. Their process takes a few days, and you have to wait for the mail or FedEx, though.

It’s easy to wrap a laptop in decals. Students and programmers like to do this, because it’s a great way to personalize a computer. The decals also help the user identify their computer easily.

But I’m not sure I’d go to a job interview with a laptop covered in bumper stickers, unless I knew the client well enough. An accountant might not visit carry a bright purple computer with Astroturf on the lid to a major client meeting.

Erica DeWolff has posted a nice article about this issue at Professionalism and computer color: What do you think? The comments on that article are fun to read.

Skinit.com, schtickers.com, skinvo.net and other companies sell a variety of large, colorful stickers that are custom cut each model’s dimensions - and some companies will let you design your own laptop skin.

The Honolulu Advertiser, like other Gannett newspapers, has spent a considerable amount of time and effort to set up a hyperlocal blog network at blogs.honoluluadvertiser.com. The Advertiser’s web site is littered with small graphical ads that promote individual blogs with the same cookie-cutter approach: the blog’s name, along with the author’s name and picture, with an uninspired tagline such as “A blog by…” or “Blog with…”

Advertiser Editor Mark Platte wrote a progress report in this Honolulu Advertiser op-ed article called Blogs a hit, and we’d love more. One section of this article is interesting:

I’m always on the lookout for new blogs, specifically in areas that aren’t already covered, and I am always asking staffers and those outside the staff if they are interested in blogging. Some have started blogs and decided the time commitment is more than they bargained for, so they drop out. But blogging is about experimenting, and if a blog doesn’t work, there’s no problem replacing it with another authored by someone with a fresh perspective.

This Poinography article from the same day, 15 June 2008, called Editor wants more hits and ad revenue, er, bloggers examined the same section with a cynical view.It’s true that print and broacast advertising revenues have been on the decline for years, as advertisers make more online media buys. The title of this TechCrunch article is a good starting point: Top 100 Advertisers Shifted $1 Billion To the Web Last Year At The Expense Of TV And Newspapers.

As Advertising Age notes, the economy has something to do with this trend: Top 100’s Ad-Spend Growth Grinds to Halt.

The Advertiser has been involved in a long-running labor dispute with its writing staff. The blog network is one way to recruit new, non-union writers who could provide online content during a strike or walkout.

Many of the Advertiser’s bloggers are already union journalists for the newspaper, but the majority of the neighborhood bloggers are new recruits to the Advertiser.

Authority and timeliness

A newspaper’s blogs should be as authoritative and reliable as the print and online editions. I enjoy reading the New York Times’ blogs, especially Bits and The Lede. The blogs provide Some of the Times’ blog articles are a draft or preview of a longer article that appears a few hours later in the print and online editions of the newspaper itself.

A few of the Advertiser’s 36 bloggers need assistance in learning how to blog. Kim Fassler, in an article called Friday Tidbits in her Quarterlife Cafe blog, mentioned that she has problems finding topics for her blog posts:

I suppose Quarterlife Cafe would probably fall into the category of “meaningless fluff” designed to entice the twenty-something crowd into reading the newspaper. But, hey, if I can get just one more apathetic twenty-something to read just one more article and learn just one more important aspect of some Hawaii issue, then I’ll write all the meaningless fluff I can muster.

That post had five subheadings in it, with Kim’s comments on Iran, teenage pregnancy, and cloning. I would have split that single post into 4 articles posted throughout the day.

Some of the comments on Kim’s story were excellent. One person noted that the Advertiser’s blog software seems slow, for example. Their pages do resolve at a lazy pace, but that’s some a good server-side cache could fix.

Tomorrow I’ll post an announcement about a new direction for my blog.

IDG, the publisher of InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, MacWorld and other technology magazines has been shifting away from paper to online editions. This New York Times article mentions that the transition has generated more revenue than the company expected:

Today, I.D.G. says, the InfoWorld Web site is generating ad revenue of $1.6 million a month with operating profit margins of 37 percent. A year earlier, when it had both print and online versions, InfoWorld had a slight operating loss on monthly revenue of $1.5 million.

This is remarkable given that some IDG titles like CIO magazine are distributed free of free of charge. Advertisers subsidize the content for both the web-based and print editions. While some IDG titles like InfoWorld are online only, CIO is still available in a twice-monthly print edition, largely because advertisers believe the target audience is less likely to read the online version. CIO also features longer articles than InfoWorld these days.

IDG has also added multiple RSS feeds to its web sites, to capture readers who prefer to use feed aggregators.

Many of these IDG magazines have been cited in previous billso.com articles, such as this post from 7 May 2008. I also list some of these titles on my references page, which contains many reliable and authoritative sources for researchers, managers and my students.

As business blogging becomes a key success factor in some industries, business bloggers sometimes face pressure to produce excellent metrics right from the start. Their managers sometimes try shortcuts to success, only to find that the online community can see through these tricks.

SEO 2.0 has posted an excellent list of 10 things a business blog should not do. These include:

Number 1) Writing under an assumed name. I use an old email address (billso) for my domain name (billso.com). My real name is listed on my about page.

Number 9) Requiring employees to read, rank and promote the blog. I do not require my employees or students to comment or rank my blog articles. I do assign blog articles for my students to read with their assignments. My blog articles provide up-to-date examples that my course textbooks cannot provide.

Building reputation and authority

SEO is an acronym that means search engine optimization. There are thousands of blogs and online businesses that offer advice on getting more advertising revenue, more readers and a higher Google rank.

Many bloggers get caught up in revenue generation, as I mentioned in my billso.com article of 27 March 2008. It’s much more difficult to build a blog’s reputation and authority. These attributes can be measured by counting the number and kinds of inbound links to a blog, a blog’s search engine ranking, and quotes in the mainstream media.

For readers, reputation and authority are difficult concepts. It takes little effort to lose these attributes. SEO Chicks has some more good examples of what not to do with a business blog. It’s a bad idea to set up a flog, especially in the United Kingdom:

A ‘flog’ is a fake blog usually created by a PR or online marketing firm for the purpose of falsely representing themselves as a consumer, usually for the purposes of creating a buzz around a specific product or brand. Sometimes this is done as a brand or online reputation management activity.

There’s usually hell to pay when the mainstream media or the blogosphere discovers a flog or a fake.

Related posts on billso.com

• 8 April 2008: Blogging and teaching
• 5 April 2008: Blogging can kill you
• 27 March 2008: Blogging as a business model
• 14 March 2008: Social media in action
• 25 February 2008: Social Media 101
• 11 June 2007: Blogging for a living

Sunday’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin features an investigation of the Honolulu City Council’s travel expenses for the mass transit project.

Council member Todd Apo had an interesting quote:

“We’re making a huge decision… If people have not made the effort to get themselves fully educated, then I’d be concerned.”

Perhaps Apo was referring to fellow council members Charles Djou and Barbara Marshall. Both Djou and Marshall have argued against the project.

Marshall hasn’t spent a dime on travel related to the proposed project. Is it possible that she hasn’t been on one single trip to study transit systems in other cities?

Thrifty or shifty?

Djou has made several trips but has only charged the city US$26. He paid for his own travel:

“It’s a very expensive project and I’m trying to be careful with taxpayer dollars… These transit trips paid for by the taxpayer and by the transit manufacturers are nothing more than junkets.”

It helps to keep an open mind about these trips. Vendors do want to fund these trips, but that does not mean that council members would be swayed towards their bids.

Yes, the travel expenses could have been used to fill potholes. But common sense dictates that our council members should be studying existing systems that resemble the current proposal. Isn’t that the Council’s job?

Djou recently declared his candidacy for Neil Abercrombie’s congressional seat - in the 2010 election. If Abercrombie needs to go, why doesn’t Djou run now, in 2008? Djou has been plotting this run since 2006. He ran unopposed for reelection, but he still ran political advertisements telling voters to “[r]emember the name, Charles Djou”.

Djou and Marshall need to stop voting “no”, as they risk joining former council member Rene Mansho on Honolulu’s transit hall of shame.

Where the rubber meets the road

Honolulu needs mass transit solutions now. Our city has tried and failed to select a comprehensive fixed guideway solution twice before. In today’s Star-Bulletin, council member Romy Cachola states he may support fixed guideway buses instead of steel-on-steel rail. He also wants construction to start with a segment from Aloha Stadium to downtown, via Salt Lake Boulevard. That’s through his district.

Cachola used his swing vote last year to get the system rerouted away from Honolulu International Airport and through his district. For many taxpayers, this move made no sense. The proposed mass transit system would help tourists and residents get to and from the airport, and avoid high parking fees. Any reasonable proposal that gets more rental cars of the road would be welcome on Oahu.

Cachola is also ranked number 2 among council members in terms of their travel spending for the proposed project. Romy’s op-ed piece this morning is another veiled threat that he may vote “no”, because he is placing his district’s needs ahead of the island’s.

Related posts on billso.com

• 2 April 2008: Still on track?
• 20 March 2008: Like a fifth wheel
• 21 February 2008: Delhi catches monorail fever: Is Honolulu next?
• 6 February 2008: Hawaii has highest car ownership costs in the USA
• 21 June 2007: Mayor: state could pay for airport mass transit line
• 19 June 2007: City council, planners still arguing over mass transit routes, modes