Josh Bancroft's Linkblog

This is a weird statistic:

Some of the largest and medium-sized U.S. airports report close to 637,000 laptops lost each year, according to the Ponemon Institute survey released Monday. Laptops are most commonly lost at security checkpoints, according to the survey. Close to 10,278 laptops are reported lost every week at 36 of the largest U.S. airports, and 65 percent of those laptops are not reclaimed, the survey said. Around 2,000 laptops are recorded lost at the medium-sized airports, and 69 percent are not reclaimed. Travelers seem to lack confidence that they will recover lost laptops. About 77 percent of people surveyed said they had no hope of recovering a lost laptop at the airport, with 16 percent saying they wouldn't do anything if they lost their laptop during business travel. About 53 percent said that laptops contain confidential company information, with 65 percent taking no steps to protect the information.

I don't know how to generalize that to a total number of lost laptops in the U.S.; let's call it 750,000. At $1,000 per laptop -- a very conservative estimate -- that's $750 million in lost laptops annually. Most are lost at security checkpoints, and I'm sure the numbers went up considerably since those checkpoints got more annoying after 9/11. There aren't a lot of real numbers about the costs of increased airport security. We pay in time, in anxiety, in inconvenience. But we also pay in goods. TSA employees steal out of suitcases. And opportunists steal hundreds of millions of dollars of laptops annually.

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Do you like money?

Thank you to the few people who have contributed to the MID Wiki!  We have the first few winners selected and will be posting their names shortly.  Sadly, we're not getting as many submissions as we were hoping.  Since there is a $100 weekly prize for the winning submission each week, the only logical conclusion is that MID developers do not like money.  I wish I didn't work for Intel, because then I could enter the contest and I really like money.  I could add information about developing for the iPhone or Google Android. I could create articles discussing the distribution methods for the different device applications. I could create articles talking about the challenges of developing for small screens, or how to help manage connectivity on always mobile devices.

Fortunately for all the people who don't work for Intel and might want to enter, there are some new articles in the wiki from Intel engineers that you can start adding to.  For example, we've started publishing some internal information like "Connecting Wirelessly from a MID" and "Linux Profiling on MID".   More are on the way.

We're also trying something by taking some content that was planned for a PDF formatted "white paper" and putting it in the MID Wiki instead.  Now it will be easier for us to keep up to date in addition to getting input from people who find it the content helpful.  Loc Nguyen was the first to give this a try with his information on using the D-Bus message bus.  Feedback (and contributions) are welcome!

Hopefully some of this helps give you ideas on where to contribute to the MID Wiki.  And if you just don't like money, you can certainly contribute for the glory of it all!

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Hey! When did Ars get a full text feed?! How awesome!

http://arstechnica.com/everything.rssx

Apple quietly slashed the price of the SSD MacBook Air this week, bringing it down from nearly $3,100 to just under $2,600. While still pricier than the lower-end, hard-drive based model ($1,799), $500 is no small change and represents a pretty major price drop in roughly six months since introduction.

First spotted by AppleInsider, the markdown appears to be thanks to two separate components: the SSD drive and the processor. The 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo inside the machine has apparently been dropped down to $200 (a price drop of $100), while the 64GB solid-state drive is now just $599 instead of $999 (a $400 drop). 

Aside from "yay, discounts!," this development means two things. One, you can now buy a refurbished SSD MacBook Air for more than it costs to buy a new one. Oops. Two, it means that if you want to upgrade the 1.6GHz MacBook Air to an SSD drive (forgoing the 1.8GHz processor upgrade), you can do so for a total of only $2400 now.  

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When this gets to the point where it will synchronize extensions, I'll try it. And likely fall in love with it. :-)

Mozilla Labs has announced the availability of Weave 0.2, the third major release of its experimental Firefox synchronization add-on. This version brings a broader feature set, improved reliability, and streamlined notification support. Although it is still in the early testing stage, Weave is already effective and easy to use.

When Mozilla launched Weave in December, the add-on offered basic support for storing the user's Firefox bookmarks and history in the cloud, allowing the synchronization of the data between computers. The latest version extends this functionality to also cover cookies, passwords, tabs, and form contents. Future versions will go further and also support synchronizing the user's extensions, themes, and search plugins. Mozilla intends to eventually implement an API that will enable third-party Firefox extensions to leverage Weave's synchronization capabilities for other kinds of user data.

The new version is a lot more polished than previous releases. The installation process is reasonably intuitive and requires very little configuration. After a user installs the Weave extension from the services.mozilla.com web site and restarts their browser, Weave will launch automatically and present a registration wizard. The registration process—which requires users to select a username, password, and encryption key—is finished in only a few steps.

There are a few documented bugs that could impact some users. Weave did not function properly when I tried to use it with the Firefox build that comes with my Linux distribution. In order to test Weave on my Ubuntu desktop computer, I had to use one of Mozilla's official Firefox builds from the getfirefox.com web site.

All of the user data that is synchronized by Weave is stored in an encrypted JSON format on Mozilla's servers via the WebDAV protocol. The synchronization and encryption logic is handled entirely client-side and the server does very little besides registration, authentication, and storage. This will make it easy for other providers to offer Weave storage services.

The new version of Weave takes advantage of the native JSON parsing capabilities in Firefox 3 to boost performance. The main JSON file for each category of stored data contains a basic snapshot of the information from a specific time. A second JSON file, which is updated incrementally, contains the changes that have been made since the snapshot.

Weave has always used encryption to protect sensitive user data. The information is encrypted before it is transmitted to the servers, so even Mozilla never has the ability to see the Weave data that it is storing. The original version of Weave used a JavaScript implementation of the XXTEA encryption algorithm, but the new version uses a superior native implementation of 256-bit AES.

This version also uses a more elaborate key system that will make it possible for users to securely share their bookmarks with other users. The UI for configuring sharing isn't operational yet, and the current security model only facilitates an all-or-nothing approach to sharing, but future versions will provide a higher level of granularity. The developers also intend to implement a notification system for sharing on top of the XMPP protocol.

Despite its early stage of development, Weave shows a lot of promise. When I discussed future plans for the service with Mozilla Labs manager Chris Beard in March, he informed me that the eventual goal is to transform Weave into an entire platform. A server-side API will eventually make it possible for third-party developers to build web mashups on top of Weave. Beard is also collaborating with Mozilla Mobile director Jay Sullivan, who hopes to find seamless and transparent ways to move the user's browsing session between the desktop and mobile devices.

Further reading

• Mozilla Labs: Major Update to Weave Prototype, 0.2 Development Milestone

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Oh, the stupidity?

It's sad that the least weird of these headlines is "Giraffe helps camels, zebras, escape from circus".

An air traveller in Canada is first told by an airline employee that it is "illegal" to say certain words, and then that if he raised a fuss he would be falsely accused:

When we boarded a little later, I asked for the ninny's name. He refused and hissed, "If you make a scene, I'll call the pilot and you won't be flying tonight."

More on the British war on photographers. A British man is forced to give up his hobby of photographing busses due to harrassment.

The credit controller, from Gloucester, says he now suffers "appalling" abuse from the authorities and public who doubt his motives. The bus-spotter, officially known as an omnibologist, said: "Since the 9/11 attacks there has been a crackdown. "The past two years have absolutely been the worst. I have had the most appalling abuse from the public, drivers and police over-exercising their authority. Mr McCaffery, who is married, added: "We just want to enjoy our hobby without harassment. "I can deal with the fact someone might think I'm a terrorist, but when they start saying you're a paedophile it really hurts."

Is everything illegal and damaging now terrorism?

Israeli authorities are investigating why a Palestinian resident of Jerusalem rammed his bulldozer into several cars and buses Wednesday, killing three people before Israeli police shot him dead. Israeli authorities are labeling it a terrorist attack, although they say there is no clear motive and the man -- a construction worker -- acted alone. It is not known if he had links to any terrorist organization.

Boston public school locked down after someone saw a ninja:

Turns out the ninja was actually a camp counselor dressed in black karate garb and carrying a plastic sword. Police tell the Asbury Park Press the man was late to a costume-themed day at a nearby middle school.

And finally, not terrorism-related but a fine newspaper headline: "Giraffe helps camels, zebras escape from circus":

Amsterdam police say 15 camels, two zebras and an undetermined number of llamas and potbellied swine briefly escaped from a traveling Dutch circus after a giraffe kicked a hole in their cage.

Are llamas really that hard to count?

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Woo hoo! Google Talk for the iPhone, finally! Can't wait to try it out.

Hat tip to Steve Rubel via Twitter.

Attention iPhone owners! You can now chat with all your Google Talk buddies while on the go. Our new version of Google Talk is designed specifically for the iPhone and runs in the iPhone's browser, so you don't need to download or install anything. Just visit www.google.com/talk on your iPhone, sign in, and start chatting. And because it is built for the browser, it will work on today's iPhones as well as on tomorrow's 3G iPhones.

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Awesome Pipe by Dawn. I couldn't get it to take my identi.ca name as a parameter, but when I saved myself a copy and just put my name is as the default, it works great. Now I can see when people @reply to me there! Thanks, Dawn! :-)

It looks like a few of us are starting to play with Identi.ca. It’s just like Twitter, but without the community and without any real tools to support it

Anyway, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to track @replies. I’ve put together a quick Yahoo pipe that will catch at least some of your replies. This is highly experimental (pre-alpha stage maybe). Welcome to the Identi.ca Reply Sniffer Pipe.

I’ll try to make some improvements to it over the next couple of days, but in the meantime, feel free to leave me suggestions in the comments on this post.

Usage:

1. Go to the Identi.ca Reply Sniffer Pipe
2. Enter your username and click “run pipe”
3. Grab the RSS feed output

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts:

• FriendFeed Minus Twitter
• Yahoo Pipes Twitter Reply Sniffer: More Improvements
• Find Top Blog Posts Using Yahoo Pipes with AideRSS
• The Power (and Pain) of Yahoo Pipes for RSS Aggregation

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Been looking forward to this movie. I had heard that it sucked, so it's nice to see at least one positive review.

Drunken flying and a surly sneer won't win this movie's antihero any friends. But humor and heart, delivered by a nice-guy actor with charm to spare, redeem the summer's most unlikely superhero.

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Rick speaks the truth. You can get Cory's books (all of them) for free in whatever reading medium you prefer - dead tree or digital. And they're great stories. They make you think. They make you want to stand up for rights that megacorporations are taking away from you every day.

A couple weeks back, my friend Mike Marusin from Naperville updated Twitter that Cory Doctorow would be appearing at Andersen’s Bookstore in my old hometown, Naperville, IL, for a book signing. He’d just published Little Brother, and I was jealous that Mike got to meet Cory. I’ve long been an admirer of Cory’s, and a few days later I stopped by Cory’s site to check it out.

Imagine my shock to find that I could download all of Cory’s books and short stories for free, pre-formatted for ebook readers. That meant I was able to grab a copy and throw it on my Kindle… which I did, but was in the middle of reading White House Ghosts (yes, I’m a junkie) so I forgot about it. I had some time on Sunday afternoon, so I pulled out the Kindle and started Little Brother. I finished it last night, and it was spectacular.

I’ve seen other reviews peg it as a young adult novel, which I think is a load of crap. It’s a good story, pure and simple. That its protagonist happens to be a 17 year-old is immaterial, I think, to the target audience. Anyone who wants to know more about the technology shaping our society should read the book – and Cory does a great job of explaining complex issues (cryptography, hacking, open source software, tunneling, to name a few) in ways that non-techies will be able to appreciate. (I’ve seen a couple reviews knock him for these explications, suggesting it drags the narrative down… I disagree. If you’ve ever hung out with an obsessive, talented geek who is spectacularly good at this stuff, you’ll know they can spend hours explaining what they’re working on. The only difference with Cory is that his explanations often make sense to the uninitiated.)

The book is a fast read, and it’s a great ride. Cory nails the technology, the politics are spot on, and the implications about our growing surveillance society are laid out in an uncomfortable progression that you’ll want to give thought to. I told Robin last night that if I’d read this book as a teenager, it would have changed my life: Marcus (the main character) is a remarkable kid, and I have no doubt that I would have aspired to his blend of political commitment and technical mastery.

If you spend any time thinking about politics and technology (and if you don’t, what in God’s name are you doing hanging out at this blog?!), you’ll want to get yourself a copy of Little Brother.

A postscript: as I noted, Cory gives his books away for free. He’s also a full-time author, leading some to wonder why the hell he encourages people to download his books for free. From his intro:

For me — for pretty much every writer — the big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity (thanks to Tim O’Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy. Mega-hit best-sellers in science fiction sell half a million copies — in a world where 175,000 attend the San Diego Comic Con alone, you’ve got to figure that most of the people who “like science fiction” (and related geeky stuff like comics, games, Linux, and so on) just don’t really buy books. I’m more interested in getting more of that wider audience into the tent than making sure that everyone who’s in the tent bought a ticket to be there.

Ebooks are verbs, not nouns. You copy them, it’s in their nature. And many of those copies have a destination, a person they’re intended for, a hand-wrought transfer from one person to another, embodying a personal recommendation between two people who trust each other enough to share bits. That’s the kind of thing that authors (should) dream of, the proverbial sealing of the deal. By making my books available for free pass-along, I make it easy for people who love them to help other people love them.
Now here’s a particularly cool twist: Cory points out that many readers, after enjoying the free ebook, ask him if they can send him some money. He doesn’t want that – to do would be to encourage people to bypass his publisher, which he doesn’t want. Instead, he keeps a list running of librarians who need copies, and he invites readers to contribute copies to those schools/libraries.

I just bought four and had Amazon send them on their way… now 3 schools and 1 public library will have a copy of a book I think is critical for younger kids to read, and hopefully be inspired by. How cool is that?

I’ll repeat what I said four years ago: Cory Doctorow is a genius.

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Some really cool stuff I bet you didn't know VLC could do.

Cross-platform media player VLC is often referred to as the "Swiss Army knife of media applications" for good reason: Not only does VLC play nearly any file you throw at it (you even voted it the best desktop media player), but it can do so much more. From ripping DVDs to converting files to iPod-friendly formats, let's take a look at the four coolest things you can do with VLC and start you on your way to becoming a VLC ninja. Photo by R'eyes.

NOTE: Many of these VLC tricks use the same dialogs, so rather than repeat the same steps every time, I'll be doing a thorough step-by-step once and then highlighting only the differences in the subsequent mini-guides. I'm using Windows in most of my examples, but since VLC is cross-platform, most of the same tricks should work just as well on any platform. VLC has a Streaming and Transcoding Wizard that's supposed to make this process even easier, but it's been buggy for me in all my tests, so I decided to go with the slightly more difficult method detailed below.

Rip Any DVD

You may have thought that you needed some fancy DVD ripping tools to rip DVDs to your hard drive, but VLC can actually rip any DVD with ease. As reader joelena pointed out, since VLC plays the DVD in order to encode it, it can bypass any copy protection. Here's how it works:

1. Open the Disc and Find the Correct Title: Insert your DVD and open it with File -> Open Disc. We need to find the right title to rip from the DVD, so at this point we're going to preview titles from the disc one by one. To do this, start with 0 as your title number and increment one number at a time until you find the title you want to rip. I've found it's quicker if you choose DVD rather than DVD (menus) at the top of the Open dialog so you only have to wade through actual video.
2. Pick a Folder to Save the Rip and Name It: Now that you've find the right track, you just need to tell VLC that you want to save it. To do so, tick the Stream/Save checkbox, then click Settings. Here you need to tell VLC where to save the file, so tick the File checkbox and pick a folder to save it to and then give it a name (e.g., My DVD Rip.mpg).
3. Determine Video and Audio Settings: Now you're ready to tweak the final settings before it's time to rip. Tick the Video codec and Audio codec, then choose the output codecs you prefer. This is really up to you, and if you don't have a preference I've had good results using the defaults described in this excellent VLC rip guide: mp1v for the video codec and mp3 for audio. If you need a specific file format for a mobile device, you may want to choose a difference encapsulation method and codec. Hit OK when you're done.
4. Rip Away: You've made it. Just hit OK again (make sure Stream/Save is checked) and it should start ripping.

VLC will rip the DVD faster than real-time playback, and when it's done (you can follow the ripping process in the corner of the VLC window.

Convert Any Video for Your iPod or iPhone with a Drag and Drop Batch Script

If you regularly convert files to a specific file format—say, for your iPod—you can set up a batch file with VLC that will make video conversions as easy as dragging and dropping the to-be-converted file onto the script.

Create a new text file and save it as VLC Converter.bat. Make sure your filesystem is showing file extensions so you aren't saving it as a text file (you don't want to end up with something like VLC Converter.bat.txt). You need to make sure it's saving with the BAT extension.

If you were building the script from scratch, at this point you'd open up the file you just created and paste "C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" %1 in the first line. Now you need to get the command line options that describe how VLC should convert the file. For that, you can use the text generated by the Target textbox at the top of the Stream/Save Settings window described in steps two and three of the DVD ripping guide above, which displays the command line options you need for your batch file. Luckily a user at the iPod forums at iLounge already put together a VLC batch conversion script for iPods, so we can just use those settings, which look like this:

That's a lot of text, but it's just telling VLC everything you would normally tell it in the Settings dialog. The %1 variable will be replaced by the name of the file you drop on the script. Copy and paste all of that text (and only that text) into your batch file and save it. That's all there is to it. Next time you have a video file you want to convert for your iPod, just drag and drop it on your newly created batch script. The script was built specifically for converting videos to an iPod-compatible format, but you can build your own scripts to do virtually common conversions you want.

Stream Media to Other Computers

Now that you're using VLC to rip your DVDs, you've got gigabyte after gigabyte of your videos on your desktop. Rather than copying all of those files to any other computer you'd like to play them on, VLC allows you to stream video over your network or even over the internet.

First, go to File -> Open File. Browse to the file you'd like to stream, and then—like above—tick the Stream/Save checkbox and click Settings. This time, rather than outputting the stream as a file, we're going to tick the UDP box and enter the local IP address of the computer you'd like to stream to. On Windows, you can find your computer's local IP address by opening the command prompt (Win-R, type cmd, and hit Enter), and then type ipconfig and hit Enter.

Once you've got that, enter it in the computer you're streaming from in the text box next to the UDP checkbox you just enabled. Hit OK to accept your settings, then OK again to finish the setup. While you're still on the streaming computer, go to Settings -> Add Interface -> Web Interface.

Now it's time to start the stream on your other computer, and doing so is a breeze. Just open VLC on your second computer, go to File -> Open Network Stream, and—assuming the UDP choice is selected and the port matches the port you used in the setup above (unless you changed it, they should both default to 1234), just hit OK to start the stream.

You're presented with a slight problem streaming the video using VLC this way, namely that you can't control the playback from the remote VLC interface. Luckily you already enabled the web interface, so on the computer you're streaming to, open a web browser and point it to the VLC web interface. If you're streaming over a local network, find your streaming computer's IP address the same way you did with the remote computer's address above, then enter it into your browser with port 8080 appended to the end. Mine looks like http://192.168.1.2:8080. Through the web interface on the remote computer, you can control all of VLC's playback. Handy, huh?

You can stream video over the internet and not just over your local network, but you'll need to either have a static external IP address or assign a domain name to your computer to do so easily. For more details on streaming with VLC, check out Engadget's previous guide.

Play Ripped DVDs

If you prefer keeping ripped DVDs entirely in tact with you rip them to your computer, VLC may not be your tool of choice for ripping. Instead I'd recommend an alternate ripping tool like our one-click DVD ripping solution DVD Rip or one of the other DVD ripping methods we've covered in the past. Once you've ripped the full DVD to your hard, VLC comes in handy once again to play that ripped DVD, menus and all.

We've highlighted how to play full ripped DVDs with VLC before, but for an even easier solution, check out DVD Play, a Lifehacker Code original that works as a more attractive front end to playing back full DVD rips with VLC.

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We've really only scratched the surface of all the awesome things you can do with VLC, so if you've got a favorite VLC technique of your own (or even favorite encoding settings), let's hear about it in the comments.

Adam Pash is a senior editor for Lifehacker who practices his VLC kung-fu regularly. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

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Interesting that this probe gets an announced-long-in-advance press conference for whatever its news is, and the Mars Phoenix rover has been giving us its updates (like when it discovered ice) directly in almost real time, via Twitter. I wonder if the Mercury news will be bigger or smaller, accordingly?

NASA to Reveal New Discoveries from Mercury, NASA

NASA will host a media teleconference Thursday, July 3, at 2 p.m. EDT, to discuss analysis of data from the Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft's flyby of Mercury earlier this year.

The spacecraft is the first designed to orbit the planet closest to the sun. It flew past Mercury on Jan. 14, 2008, and made the first up-close measurements since Mariner 10's final flyby in 1975.

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Ouch. I thought we had it bad with $175 ETFs in the U.S. :-(

This is usury:

An Early Cancellation Fee (EECF) applies if, for any reason, your service is terminated prior to the end of the service agreement. The ECF is the greater of (ii) $1100 or (iii) $220 per month remaining in the service agreement, to a maximum of 400 (plus applicable taxes), and applies on each line in the plan that is terminated.

Outrageous.

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Interesting. I've always wondered how Twitter plans to make money.

Twitter’s not going to make their money with advertising. So how can they be a Billion Dollar Company in a year? By listening to me.

Twitter should take full advantage of their messaging platform, user base and user disposition to lead in the P2P mobile payments space. They can become the next PayPal, and are more poised to become that than PayPal itself.

Let’s rewind for a second. Last year, I wrote an in depth analysis about mobile payments and concluded that, in order to move forward:

The best option is probably not doing a stand alone payment system. What I mean by that is that mobile payments need to be integrated into a larger online presence, especially if you have a site which is membership based.

…

With WAP and SMS having low penetration (again, sub-50%!), it will be the responsibility of those with an online presence already to move folks onto mobile platforms and mobile payment systems, as carriers and PayPal (VeriSign and Visa Mobile as well) can only do so much.

That was then. Now, Twitter has the growing social network, noteworthy penetration, and is building the core infrastructure to make this happen. Here’s how:

Ubiquity & Penetration

Forget infrastructure, forget great partnerships: the most important place a mobile payments system can start with is ubiquity.

Twitter is far from being a ubiquitous mobile platform, but they have more penetration and usage than any other mobile service and their current user base is the same important group of technology early adopters that PayPal enjoyed when it convinced the world that you could send money to an email address.

Twitterers Know/Learn Machine Language

One of the most missed facts in the mobile payments space is that users of a system have to be comfortable communicating using machine language. This is to say, one must remember and follow certain semantics so the system knows how much you’re paying and to whom.

Twitter users are already trained in this important action. Every time a Twitterer uses the “@,” “d” or even “#” to direct Twitter or annotate the messages it sends through the system, people are using the exact sort of machine language they’d need to use for mobile payments to work.

Having users already comfortable speaking in machine lanaguage is already a huge plus for Twitter. I already “d” you a direct message. Now I’d like to “p” you $5.

Carrier Independent Messaging Infrastructure

Forget, for a moment, that Twitter has had serious scaling problems and buy into, for a moment, to the fact that Twitter is currently rebuilding their entire infrastructure to function like a messaging system.

The significance of this is how Twitter will continue to wrap itself around (not to) the mobile carriers and further integrate with our mobile devices.

When the rearchitecting is all said and done, Twitter will be a carrier independent social messaging platform — one that can harness both the power of the social web AND mobile messaging infrastructure, which will be a powerful one-two punch in the mobile P2P payment space.

Conclusion

If Twitter had a P2P payments system in place today, it would become the most used mobile payments system overnight. Having the ability to send a message like “p innonate $5″ for that beer I just bought you would integrate seamlessly with the way Twitter’s users already interact with their system.

Layering on a payments system would not only make the feature instantly used, it would position Twitter to revolutionize how money is collected and exchanged on the Internet (think of what Twitter’s done for flashmobs and how it could effect fundraising).

Twitter, I hope you’re listening.

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Yes. Yes, they are. ;-)

Yes and no. Many corporate blogs are neglected, dull, and unimaginative, but they don’t have to be like this.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

Many businesses have launched corporate blogs in an effort to better communicate with customers and capture a little Web-2.0 mojo. But Huffington Post they ain’t: Not only are these corporate blogs boring as paint, but the businesses behind admit they don’t have much value. (quoted from the WSJ Business Technology blog)

The WSJ article also refers to a Forrester report (I don’t have access to Forrester data):

Forrester found that most B2B blogs are “dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion.” Seventy percent stuck to business or technical topics, 74% rarely get comments, and 56% simply regurgitated press releases or other already-public news. Not surprisingly, 53% of B2B marketers say that blogging has marginal significance or is irrelevant to their strategies—the rest call it somewhat or highly significant–and the number of new corporate blogs among the companies Forrester tracks has dropped from 36 in 2006 to just three in 2008. (quoted from the WSJ Business Technology blog)

This doesn’t surprise me. I’ve seen many corporate blogs that were as dull as dirt: filled with press release content, marketing fluff, and old content. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Corporate blogs can be interesting and useful with a little focus and time devoted to it.

Here are a few tips to help turn your boring corporate blog into something successful

• Have a person who is responsible for your blog (probably part of someone’s job). He or she will need to be responsible for driving (but not necessarily writing all of) the content for the blog. Nagging and writing will be a big part of this person’s job.
• Create a content roadmap to map out the next 5-10 posts, identify an author for each post, and make sure that the author has everything needed to complete the post (data, etc.)
• Diverge from the content roadmap frequently to allow for serendipitous blogging.
• Monitor popular blogs, news sources, and events in your industry and respond to what others are saying. Join the conversation.
• Focus on thought leadership. Blog about the things in your industry where your employees have expertise that can be shared with the world. Don’t just talk about your products; focus on your entire industry.
• Talk about a variety of topics. Don’t get stuck in a rut where all of your posts have essentially the same or similar content.
• Monitor and respond to comments on your blog. Also monitor what people are saying about you on other blogs, forums, Twitter, etc. and respond where appropriate.
• Have fun. Don’t be so serious. You can include interesting things that are happening within your company that aren’t necessarily work related (photos from a company ski trip).

Examples

There are a few companies that do a good job of corporate blogging from a content perspective.

• Vidoop. A wide variety of employees pitch in on the corporate blog (not just the execs) to talk about a wide variety of topics. You’ll find some very interesting perspectives and thoughts about their industry (OpenID, identity, etc.) mixed in with links to important industry news, interviews, new features, announcements, site maintenance, and more. One of the more interesting topics lately is a series describing their move from Tulsa, OK to Portland, OR.
• Google. While this blog has a lot of posts that look like they could be press releases for new products, most of them don’t read like press releases. Google has a pretty good mix of product pieces along with general information (keeping kids safe online, fighting spam, etc.) and a few fun posts about activities that Googlers participate in.
• Southwest. Along with announcements about when booking opens for the winter holiday flights, the Southwest blog talks about environmental concerns, awards, burgers, beer, and water balloons.
• Zappos. This is probably one of the most fun corporate blogs I’ve seen in a while. They talk about the origin of French heels, running tips, history of the penny loafer, baby quail, rock band, Mexican food, and much more.

I have noticed that corporate blogs, even many of the good ones, tend to get fewer comments than other types of blogs, but I’m not sure that the number of comments is a good measure for the success of a corporate blog. I would be curious to hear in the comments whether others have noticed a similar trend. Does it matter how many comments you get on a corporate blog post?

With a little effort, you can have a successful corporate blog. It just takes focus, dedication and resources; however, the payoff in search engine optimization and thought leadership in your industry is well worth the time and effort to put together a great corporate blog.

Related Fast Wonder Blog posts

• Corporate Blogging Tips
• Starter Kit: Social Media and Social Networking Best Practices for Business
• Wordpress: Host it Yourself or Host on Wordpress.com

U.S. customers on AT&T's cellular network will get 3G iPhones for $200 (8GB model) or $300 (16GB), and pay $70 a month for the most basic service plan, which includes unlimited data, 450 daytime minutes, and 5000 night and weekend minutes. Overages are charged at 45 cents a minute.

For $90, subscribers get 900 day minutes and unlimited off-peak use. Additional minutes are 40 cents each. A $110 package bumps daytime use to 1350 minutes a month, and drops the overage rate to 35 cents. The $130 plan has unlimited everything.

Family plans begin at $130 for 700 daytime minutes, unlimited off-peak minutes, and the 45 cent overage rate. They top out at $360 for 6000 voice minutes with a 20 cent overage rate. Extra lines are usually $40 each, in addition to the cost of the handset, but if you pay $130 per line, a special unlimited-use family plan becomes available for $260.

Yes, they've thought about it so you don't have to!

Current iPhone owners who want to upgrade will pay an $18 fee and get the handsets for $400 or $500 $200 or $300, incurring a two-year contract extension just as with a new line of service. This is a terrible slightly bum deal, for only the most brain-damaged cultists happy to live under the contract yoke in perpetuity (and I still think you may as well get it without a two-year contract, for $600 or $700, and breath free and easy).

Text messages are sold separately: $5 for 200, $10 for 1500, or $20 for unlimited use on standard plans, or $30 for unlimited use on family plans.

iPhone 3G: What you need to know [AT&T]

Shared by Josh Bancroft
Hey @davewiner - this sounds just like what you were talking about yesterday. Looks promising...

What Gnip Does Now

The primary service that Gnip offers at launch today is to capture user data updates from any web application and then serve up the very latest information to anyone else who requests it. Your application doesn't have to ping Flickr, YouTube, etc. etc. every few minutes and ask "have any of our users done anything on your individual service?" Now with Gnip, Flickr (a launch partner in fact) can report user data updates to Gnip, which can then pass that data along to consuming parties, along with data from all the other social media services of interest.

It's about scalability and decreasing latency to near zero. It sounds like a great idea.