Other important benefits from blogs cited in the survey included access to journalists and customers, establishing thought leadership, and generating leads: 

MarketingSherpa cited three important factors that contributed to a blog’s success:

• Genuine, heartfelt content
• Regular updates
• Focus

As with personal blogs, corporate blogs need to find a niche, engage readers and keep them reading. Content feels “genuine” when blog posts “stand out in contrast to the massaged language of corporate marketing and PR materials. Like sitting next to an expert on a plane, the best blogs provide highly useful information in a brief and informal setting.”

If you’ve blogged for any length of time, you’ve probably seen the old academic maxim proven: publish or perish. With blogs, the “perish” comes especially quickly. The most successful corporate blogs have a content strategy—usually dedicated time or even employees assigned to blogging.

Finally, MarketingSherpa points out that in many industries where blogging is already popular, you need to focus on a niche, “provid[ing] an innovative lens on their content – usually by being highly focused on an under-reported aspect of their industry.” On the other hand, if not many in your industry are blogging, you can easily establish yourself in a more general topic area.

What do you think—what successes has your blog brought to you and your business?

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Many bloggers have reportedly left. The group behind TVSquad is doing something a little different, though. They haven’t left, but much of the team has launched a directly competing blog called CliqueClack. The writers continue to punch the time clock at AOL, but my guess is their heart and soul is going into the new blog. The topical overlap is 100%.

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A big part of Google’s rise to search engine leadership was an algorithm called PageRank that assesses a specific page’s importance by how many other Web pages link to it and by the importance of those linking pages. Microsoft researchers and academic collaborators, though, detailed an idea this week it calls BrowseRank that seeks to bring more of a human touch to that assessment.

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Gmail has finally added a very useful security feature: tracking open sessions. If you log in to Gmail from more than one computer and you forget to sign out, you’ll be able to see the list of locations where your account can still be accessed. 

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Over 85 percent of available addresses are already allocated with the rest to run out by 2011; predicts the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). We’re not talking addresses that you randomly type into your respective browser/s, rather numerical Internet Protocol (IP) addresses basic to what we call the Internet.

The bone of contention: the current IP system (IPv4), originally introduced in 1981 with space for just four-billion addresses, is ill-equipped to support the burgeoning Internet. Since its inception the addresses provided for have been all but gobbled up. But the Internet continues to grow in leaps and bounds and so do the addresses ; the irony being there’s no room for all of it.

The perceived digital doomsday is somewhat like global warming; you can’t see it happening but it affects you alright. With the Internet running out of addresses, speeds will drop, newer services will become dearer – worse still, unavailable.

The Internet Engineering Task Force (the international community in charge of smooth operation and evolution of the Internet) claims it is prepared for the onslaught — with the successor of IPv4 named IPv6. Hell, we’ve been hearing about this one for more than a decade now! Which brings us back to where we started: what happens after 1,272 days.  

IPv6 has to be the Solution and the time has really come to put it forward. 

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Until now, search engine web crawlers have had lots of trouble accurately indexing text and links that appear in Flash files. For years this roadblock has been the cause of many headaches for web designers, website owners and online marketers alike. (Not to mention searchers who may be missing out on valuable content.) But the bottle of ibuprofen may be going back in the medicine cabinet.

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Last month’s release of Firefox 3 marked the latest iteration of the second most popular browser behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. To mark the occasion, the Firefox 3 team looked to set a world record for the number of downloads in a day.

Firefox 3 was a shoe-in to set the Guinness World Record for most software downloads in a day since the record didn’t previously exist. The record was made official today with Guinness certifying that Firefox 3 was downloaded 8,002,530 times in the first 24 hours of its launch. That number weeds out all duplicate downloads and automated downloads.

Even though Firefox 3 holds the record for most downloads in a day, it still holds a fraction of the browser market that number one Internet Explorer has. According to The Wall Street Journal Firefox held 19.03% of the browser market in June while Internet Explorer captured 73% of the total browser market.

Firefox and other browsers are gaining ground on Microsoft– albeit slowly. According to The Wall Street Journal, Internet Explorer lost about half a percentage point of market share per month for the last 12 months.

Mozilla announced its record setting attempt with much pomp and fanfare on June 17 and to commemorate the occasion the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft even sent over a cake.

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Although it varies from model to model, input is generally through a QWERTY keypad or a touchscreen and stylus combo, either of which allows you to effortlessly write or type messages. Business users are usually attracted to push e-mail capabilities of PDA-phones, where new inbox messages are transferred directly to the mobile device. To set up push e-mail, a Microsoft Exchange or BlackBerry Enterprise Server is usually required, although personal and other third-party solutions are available through network carriers.

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Along with 80 other CEOs of small- to mid-size businesses, Hogg was attending an executive retreat sponsored by the Virginia Council of CEOs. With the lush Williamsburg landscape as their backdrop, the attendees traded tips, networked and discussed their growth strategies in small groups.

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