We helped the Minnesota Mental Health Action Group launch a project weblog last week.

It’s a project of the Citizens League and the Minnesota Department of Human Services.

Last week’s Boston Herald had an article titled Blogs offer peeks inside small firms

Small firms, including Novidian, use blogs much as they used company Web sites, newsletters and e-mail in the past: as a way to reach existing and potential customers. Part water-cooler chat and part news-referral bulletin board, Novidian’s blog is all about “doing the old soft sell,” says company co-founder Andrew Palmer. “Our blog gives people a sense of how we speak, how we feel and how we do business,” says Palmer, a lawyer with a business degree. “We encourage everybody on the staff to contribute.”

Scroll down to the bottom of the weblog and you’ll see that there are eight contributors to the blog.

Interesting that they put the blog on a site/URL separate from the corporate site.

I’ve been invited to be on a panel discussing business weblogs for the Ad:Tech conference in NYC in December.

I’m also considering going to Blogger Con in Cambridge in early October.

I’m experimenting using Google’s AdSense service. They give you code to place on your site and it generates context-sensitive text ads automatically. When people click through to the ad’s website, you earn varying amounts of money.

I have the option of filtering out sites it selects that I don’t like. So far, it’s doing a good job of generating ads for webforum and weblog-related products and services.

If you’re a client and would like to try this service on your site, let me know.

Sep 16 update: the service apparently reads the text of the most recent weblog posts and adjusts the ads accordingly. Depending on what you post, this could be a positive or negative.