HERE’S an interesting New York Times article that takes a look at blogging as a “low-cost, high return marketing tool.”

Excerpt:

But while blogs may be useful to many more small businesses, even blogging experts do not recommend it for the majority.

Guy Kawasaki, a serial entrepreneur, managing partner of Garage Technology Ventures and a prolific blogger, put it this way: “If you’re a clothing manufacturer or a restaurant, blogging is probably not as high on your list as making good food or good clothes.”

Blogging requires a large time commitment and some writing skills, which not every small business has on hand.

But some companies are suited to blogging. The most obvious candidates, said Aliza Sherman Risdahl, author of “The Everything Blogging Book” (Adams Media 2006), are consultants. “They are experts in their fields and are in the business of telling people what to do.”

HERE’S an interesting entry from my erstwhile fellow CNET Asia tech blogger (before I gave up the gig to concentrate on managing INQUIRER.net’s blog network and my other responsibilities as gaming and multimedia editor) Ignatius Javellana, who wrote about the news coverage of the Glorietta 2 blast by both mainstream media and citizen journalists.

Excerpt:

It’s this type of speed and efficiency that frightens me. For one thing, back in the day, when events such as these would occur, it would take a while for actual coverage of the event to even reach those who would probably be only a few blocks away. Take the first EDSA Revolution back in 1986—I was still a kid then but it took hours for people to mobilize, and for the news to reach us. But when it happened again in 2001, within minutes I received an SMS and Inquirer.net (then Inq7.net) already had it on their headline. Because technology affords us this speed and efficiency—wireless connectivity, portable digital cameras, 3G cellphones and more—any newsworthy event can be broadcast in seconds.

And because of the growing popularity of blogging among Filipinos, news of this latest terrible event spread like wildfire. Already within an hour there were hundreds of blogs writing about the explosion, all with their own speculations and theories as to what happened. Hundreds of photos of the carnage were being sent over email, posted on photo blogs. And even better, actual, first-hand accounts of the incident began to spring up—from people who were right there when it happened to people who knew other people that were there even to people at the emergency room of the Makati Medical Center where most of the victims of the explosion were brought. And to think this happened during the afternoon, during a time when loads of people are still online, getting updates from friends’ and friends of friends’ blogs.

My friend Azrael was one such person. Within an hour of the explosion, he was watching the news and already posting images he’d taken from ANC on his blog. An hour after that, another guy on Multiply started talking about his first hand experience of the explosion, even posting images he’d taken himself while he was there.

Indeed, news travels with blinding speed in the age of online media and citizen journalism — and so does fear.

The Chinese have a curse: May you live in interesting times. We’re living in that kind of world right now.

APART from blog entries and photos of the Glorietta 2 blast, citizen journalists have also uploaded video clips to sites such as YouTube.

Here are two such clips from a concerned citizen that Tonyo Cruz uploaded to YouTube — thanks to Tonyo for the heads up.

Here’s the first clip.

And here’s the second clip.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

MSNBC.COM has made its first acquisition in its 11 years of existence, shelling out an undisclosed amount to purchase citizen journalism/participatory news site Newsvine.

Here’s an excerpt from the Computerworld article:

Mike Davidson, CEO and co-founder of Newsvine, noted that the deal will allow more people to contribute to the site and helps “further the cause” of citizen journalism.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has started blogging.

In its first post, the Canadian official writes:

With this tool, we hope to make the activities of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner more accessible to Canadians and to increase contact between the Office and Canadians interested about privacy issues and legislation.

As an Officer of Parliament, the Privacy Commissioner has a mandate to protect the privacy rights of individuals and promote the privacy protections available to Canadians.

HERE are some of the entries on the Estrada verdict that were posted by Filipino bloggers minutes after the Sandiganbayan found the former Philippine president guilty of plunder.

DJB Rizalist included an MP3 audio file of the promulgation in his blog entry.

Tonyo posted an entry on the “Opportunist view of Estrada guilty verdict.”

Here’s the entry of Chef Tonios Popcorn.

And here’s Grace’s entry for Filipino Soul.

By Erwin Oliva
INQUIRER.net

BANGKOK, Thailand–Filipino blogger Abe Olandres, popularly known as yuga, announced the sale of his homegrown blog ranking service Pinoy Top Blogs to Enthropia Philippines for an undisclosed amount.

“After several months of negotiations, I have finally agreed to sell the Pinoy Top Blogs project. It’s a decision that was very hard to make but I figured that the future of the project will be more secured with the new owners,” he said in a recent entry on his personal blog.

Admitting that the service has been bleeding money, Olandres said he could no longer manage the site because he did not have enough time to review submissions, monitor blogs that violated its policies, and filter spam. “I’m way too far behind the backlogs,” he added.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

IS a 107-year-old great grandmother of seven in Australia the world’s oldest blogger? For that matter, she might be the world’s oldest YouTube user.

You can check out her blog and read the Metro.co.uk article.

Here’s an excerpt:

Her blog, The Life of Riley, also reveals how she left Broken Hill in the 1920s as a single mother with three children in tow.

However, Mrs Riley admits she has ‘got no idea about computers’ and relies on friend and film maker Mike Rubbo, who suggested she start a blog, along with another friend from her nursing home, to help post them.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

A-LIST blogger Robert Scoble posed this question recently, as he weighed on the impact of social networking service and other innovations like Twitter on top bloggers.

I theorized that was due to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce’s rise. Most of the non-A-list bloggers have been showing up on those places in droves. After all, if you are only writing a blog to tell your family what your new kid is doing then something like Facebook is a lot better for that.

A-list bloggers are the celebrities in blogosphere. They’re today’s newspaper columnists who write about almost anything.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

THIS news item attests to the power of citizen journalism in circumventing censorship laws that might shackle mainstream media.

BEIJING–In the strictly controlled media world of communist China, “citizen journalism” is beating a way through censorship, breaking taboos and offering a pressure valve for social tensions.

In one striking example this month, the Internet was largely responsible for breaking open a slave scandal in two Chinese provinces that some local authorities had been complicit in.

A letter posted on the Internet by 400 parents of children working as slaves in brickyards was the trigger for the national press to finally report on the scandal that some rights groups say had been going on for years.