Recently in Business Category

Sometimes the most amazing things arrive from one of our overseas offices:

Six Apart has flogged Livejournal, home of my very first blog, to a Russian media outfit that rejoices in the name Sup. Business Week has a good analysis of what this might mean.

There's a couple of good points in the article:

Aside from the professional blog software Movable Type, hosted blogging software TypePad, and free ad-supported blog site Vox, there was LiveJournal, which hosted a different demographic and was built on a different code base and platform that the company never updated. "I think the world of LiveJournal, but we felt like we needed to figure out our focus," Alden says. "It's all about [Six Apart] growing up."

Livejournal initially looked like a good fit into Six Apart, but with the launch of Vox, which offers much of the same functionality as Livejournal as well as having Perl-underpinnings like MT and Typepad, it increasingly looked like the red-headed stepchild. If Chris Alden spotted this and has both clarified the company's technological focus and released some cash for reinvestment, this could be good news for the firm.

Sup, on the other hand, have a vested interest in investing in Livejournal, because of the heavy Russian user base.

Win-win? Valleywag doesn't seem to think so:

Sup already operates the Russian-language version of the site, and is run by Andrew Paulson, an American entrepreneur. But let's be real: This is a company operating in Vladimir Putin's Russia, where the media increasingly is falling under state control, either explicitly or tacitly. One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to find this prospect discomfiting.

That said, Livejournal Inc, which will run the site, is actually based in the US, which seems like a sensible move, in the circumstances….

Peter Whitehead, FT Digital Business Editor, said that they discovered over time that podcasts can't be repackaged content from the existing outlets, but something in its own right. Low quality "office chat" or high quality, radio-like atmosphere? Going for the latter, but a long way yet to go.

Trevor Dann, director of the Radio Academy: Podcasting leading the radio insustry. The FT's content is radio, delivered by podcasting. Once you include video, you lose portability — that's the great strength of radio, it's a secondary medium. You can do something else while listening to it.

Peter: not dangerous, not doing live, another channel to distribute our content. The listeners are niche audiences, but very valuable. iTunes putting FT logo on their podcasting homepage quadrupled number of downloads instantly.

Trevor: used to licensed, governed radio. The internet is a fantastic opportunity to converse abouit subjects with audiences. Radio has to be impartial. Podcasts don't. The audience won't want glorified adverts, they want authenticity.

Free vrs paid for:

At moment difficult to monetise. Will come. Might be slower than we'd like.

Time for closing drinks, I think.

An interesting panel discussion on marketing and advertising in social media just finished. If nothing else, it was interesting because the conclusions seemed to be that no-one really knew how it will pan out.

Antony Mayfield was busy wishing himself out of a job: he wants to see the end of PR director and search engine marketing as job titles - his former and current jobs! He also thinks that companies shouldn't advertise on blogs (boo!), they should spend the money on understanding them.

Smart the square, Helga the dominatrix - were two brand personalities represented on MySpace, and which have been fairly successful, according to Ian Delaney.

More from Mayfield: "Search engine tricks aren't going to work - they're no longer looking for sites that look like the best websites, but those that are."

General warning: Beware the flying penises in Second Life! Users can invade your PR event with some, uh, unconventional interruptions. And Anthony reports visiting branded spaces within the online world, and being the only person there.

And widgets with your brand on them are a brilliant idea, if they're useful, apparently.

If you're running a blogging or social-media related conference, offer free WiFi and power at the desks. Otherwise, you're crippling the ability of people to blog about your conference - and thus do your publicity for you.

Yes, I'm at Blogging4Business in London and, after coughing up £20 for WiFi access, I'm finally online.

You can see liveblogging from this morning, including the panel I was on, at the Blogging4Business blog.

The Technorati tag "blogging4business" is worth following, too.

Oh, missed this yesterday:

After Six Apart, what should I do ? : Loic Le Meur Blog:

"Six Apart just announced my partner for more than 10 years, Olivier Creiche, got my role as head of Europe at Six Apart. Congratulations, Olivier, and thanks for being such an amazing partner for so many years. "

I've been dealing with Olivier for the last nine months, since we've been using Movable Type Enterprise at RBI, and have found him a pleasure to deal with. Indeed, I'm sharing a stage with him next week…

Given the recent controversy around Loïc and his involvement with the Sarkozy campaign this feels like the right decision, and Six Apart's Europe office looks to be in very capable hands.

Finally, here's my write-up of the closing Blogher keynote. I've had this one on the back-burner, because it's very much in my field — online publishing — and I wanted to mull over the issues it raised, but also because jet lag really, really gave me a kicking on the trip back from New York. (And now I'm writing this while I wait for a flight to Dublin. Ah, the jet-setting blogger lifestyle.)

This is by no means a complete write-up. You can find one of those on Licence to Roam.

The panel were four women from the major media in various stripes: Debi Fine, iVillage president; Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Poducts and User Experience at Google; Redbook Magazine editor in chief Stacy Morrison; and WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive CEO Caroline Little.

So, what do they think is needed for a media company to survive in the Web 2.0 world? Google has a fluid structure because analysts suggested that “organisations tend to mirror the process they're putting into place,” Marissa Mayer. You have a hierarchical process, you'll end up with a hierarchical company - and an inability to move quickly in a web world.

Caroline Little suggested that you have to be flexible and try different things. Interestingly, the firm had created a “skunk works” group filled with rather extreme programmers who are young and very creative, and thus able to get new things live very quickly.

Mayer suggested that Google's “free day” policy - giving employees 20% of their time to work on personal projects - lead to 50% of the firm's new launches. The message coming out of this loud and clear was that you need to free people up from the mundane routine of the day-to-day to create something special.

But what is that “something special”. Stacy Morrison of Redbook (nicely profiled on Six Log) described it as creating delight - “That's what makes people come back”. That sounds a lot like one of my pet theories; that it's magazines which strike an emotional relationship with their readers rather than a purely utilitarian one that create real relationships.

Just back from a quick coffee with a blog friend, slightly damp (it's raining) and leaping into a session about interacting with bloggers (slightly ironic given the blogging around what some of my US colleagues have been doing. More on that later.)

I'm going to mash my write-up of two different sessions together, because they overlap in an interesting way.

Before lunch I dipped into the Metrics track at Blogher, and boy, did the organisers misjudge the appeal of this session. While the main ballroom session on "Should I Blog?" is very quiet, this session is packed. People are sitting on the floor, people are sitting outside…

Elise Bauer gave an excellent presentation which amounted to "link, link, and link some more". And it's amazing how many people wrestle with this idea — and how many misconceptions there are. For instance, some people were concerned that every outbound link neutralised an inbound link in your Google pagerank. Others worried that linking out would lead to a one way flow of traffic away from your blog.

Elise made the excellent point that worrying about sending traffic to your competition is totally the wrong mindset. You should be thinking about providing the best and most useful content to your readers, and if there's something great on the competition, link to them!

Vanessa Fox from Google was on hand to debunk some of the myths around Google's ranking system.