Wigley and Associates

Today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune has a piece titled, Businesses use blogs to help get their name out there (Print edition uses the headline “Blogs help businesses get their names out: Web journals find commercial uses.”)

Again, quotes from me and Andrew Eklund, CEO of Ciceron in Minneapolis, a web-marketing firm. Also, a mention of Norman Butler and his Chapati restaurant and Contented Cow pub. And in the print edition, a thumbnail picture of both Northfield Construction Company and, somewhat oddly, my media site, Real Joe.

A plus: quotes from David Weinberger, author of Small Pieces, Loosely Jointed: A Unified Theory of the Web and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual.

This morning I sent a note to Dan Bricklin

co-creator of VisiCalc, the first PC spreadsheet, telling him about the Pioneer Press story on business blogging.

On my weblogs page, I frequently point potential weblog clients to his article, Small Business Blogging that he wrote last summer.

He’s blogged my email.

Today’s St. Paul Pioneer Press has an article titled, Blogging for Business by Julio Ojeda-Zapata. The technology section version of the article is titled Biz blogging break out.

It includes quotes from me and Andrew Eklund

CEO of Ciceron in Minneapolis, a web-marketing firm. (Eklund’s got a blog entry today titled Abuzz About Blogging.)

And it profiles a couple of clients: Ray Cox, MN legislator and owner of Northfield Construction; and Scott Neal, Eden Prairie city manager.

This in-depth piece on Salon has a section about how Google may have tweaked its search algorithm. (The article may be part of Salon Premium and thus require a paid subscription.)

The Google backlash: The king of search rules the Web — but now some of the natives are growing restless.

“In recent months, many pundits have complained that Google’s results were getting clogged with blogs. In March, Andrew Orlowski, a writer for the Register, an online tech daily, pointed out a phenomenon he called “Googlewashing” — a practice in which bloggers, working together, can essentially redefine some important cultural or political concept in Google. The idea was not exactly new. Since Google relies heavily on “link analysis,” and since bloggers are the Web’s most indefatigable linkers, the search engine has always given them great weight — and bloggers found out last year that if a whole lot of them started linking to the same thing at more or less the same time, they could affect Google’s results…. On June 15, Google began updating its servers to a new index called Esmerelda… What happened? Did Google decide that it did not, after all, want to demote blogs? Had the company determined that the heat from bloggers — who, remember, are also now one of the company’s key constituents — was too great?”

Kuhlman Auction Services is now up, with the beginnings of a revamped web site and a weblog, of course.

In today’s NY Times: The Corporate Blog Is Catching On

You should notice a new interface when you edit or compose a post for your Blogger weblog. They’re calling it Dano. It’s on a more stable and faster server, too.

The changes all seem for the better and not too confusing. Let me know if you have questions.

If you’re a weblog/website client and would like to analyze your site’s traffic for the month or any other time period, let me know. I can also show you how to view the stats yourself.

I’ve been using a spam filter called POPFile for the past two months and am very pleased with it, as are my wife and a couple of friends who tried it.

It’s not only effective… it’s open source, ie, free. You can install it yourself — it’s a little tricky, but not bad — or let me know if you’d like help.

With a $3/month account at Audblog, you can pick up any phone, record a 2-minute message, and have it automatically posted to your weblog.

Like this:

audblog audio post

Did you know you can post to your weblog using email? Blogger Pro has this feature.

You can choose between having your email posted to your blog immediately, or just having it stored as a draft.

This blog posting was sent via email.

In today’s NY Times: A Blogger’s Big-Fish Fantasy

Beyond paid sponsorships and self-generated promotion, networking in the blog world is a matter of courting other readers and bloggers via links. “Linking prolifically gets links,” said David L. Sifry, co-founder of Technorati (www.technorati.com), a site that ranks blogs and tracks blog updates. “It sounds counterintuitive, but by being generous with links, you’re contributing a significant amount of information to your readers.” Readers will, in turn, come back to blogs they are getting good information from, Mr. Sifry added.

I’m in the middle of revamping Kent Nerburn’s site and have added a Movable Type weblog to the home page.

The weblog for the Citizens League of Minnesota is now up, with its new president, Sean Kershaw, posting good stuff already. More changes coming for the revamped site, including some document delivery and online ordering from GovDocs.

Scott Neal, City Manager for the City of Eden Prairie, MN, has gotten the hang of photoblogging in his Blog from City Hall using the little camera built into his Sony Clie handheld.

Next up: posting photos to your blog via your camera-equipped cellphone, like Blogger’s Business Dev guy, Jason Shellen at his wireless blog.