The recently inaugurated "celebrity/grass-roots/pundit elite/progressive/whatever" blog tickles me no end. It's the Arianna Huffington coop blog. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/. It reminds me of the Page Three fever Urban Middle India is in the grip of, right now. In case you're wondering - like the apocryphal Martian - who AH is, let the widely syndicated conservative columnist, Michelle Malkin, describe her. "Arianna is very good at [collecting] people like curios and [throwing] sprawling house parties for them - parties that attract never-ending hordes of looky-loos simultaneously bemused and repulsed by the grand spectacle of obsequiousness and megalomania dressed up as political dialogue." She thinks it will be a success ("Despite ourselves."), though, because many of us "…will go to the site and crane our necks to see who's making an ass of himself in Huffington's virtual living room, who's passed out in the powder room, who's plotting in the library, and who's kissy-kissing in the foyer." http://michellemalkin.com/archives/002380.htm.

"The blog equivalent of the 70's Studio 54," Darleen Click http://www.darleenclick.com/weblog/ calls it in her 9 May post at Darleen's Place ("Politics, parenting and other prattlings."). Or, the ever-popular Page Three, if you want the print equivalent. Also worth a look are http://huffington.isfullofcrap.com/ and http://huffingtonstoast.com/, parodies both. Michelle Malkin especially recommends the former saying Laurence Simon's "deserving blogs" better get "some traffic". "Do it for the little people!" is her punch line.

The Formidable Arianna, with her stable of 300 contributors, is as dismissive of blogging as she is of "the unwashed non-celebrity public masses". Here's what she said to Howard Kurtz (The Washington Post): "The great thing about blogging is that your thoughts don't have to have a beginning, middle and end."

THE PREZ DID IT AGAIN. Made 'our boys' lose the ACM test!

The blame game is on. The target? The US President, no less. He's being held at least partially 'responsible' for the decline in the programming skills of his compatriots. The accuser? Patterson, a University of California (Berkeley) computer science professor and the president of the Association for Computing Machinery. This group runs a global coding contest for students. Patterson says that the US Presidents send wrong signals by meeting the winners of the Superbowl football championship but not the winners of the programming contest. In April, US youngsters made their worst showing in the 29-year history of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest. The number of entrants this year was more than 4,100, up from fewer than 650 teams in 1994, though.

The last time a U.S. school won the world championship was in 1997. This April, the top U.S. school finished in a tie (17th place). Students from China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University won the top honours. This marks the gradual rise of Asian and Eastern European schools during the past decade. Patterson had a key role in developing the so-called reduced instruction set computers (RISC) as well as in a Berkeley networking project that evolved the technology used by Internet companies such as Inktomi. He knows what he's talking about when he says that the ACM contest is "more problem-solving" than mere coding. "What's happened in the last 10 or 15 years is information technology has been spreading through a bunch of these countries, many of which do not have great economies and find information technology very attractive. It's not capital intensive. It's a nonpolluting technology. And nations think of themselves as good at things. If you think you're good at math and science - like the Russians, I think, do, and Indians and Chinese - if they think, 'Gee this is something we're good at,' IT becomes a target," he explained to CNET News.com after the latest ACM results. It was in this context that he said that, in Russia, the ACM contest winners get to meet the Russian President while, in the US, that honour is reserved strictly for the Superbowl heroes. http://techrepublic.com.com/2008-22_11-5675770.html?tag=nl.e019. Maybe, from now on, the United States which "is used to being No.1 in everything" (in Patterson's words) would employ WMD against all those countries who deny it that pleasure in the ACM contest.

BLOGS FOR CRM. What else is new, bro?

A Deloitte report on CRM 2005trends predicts that leading companies will start to use blogs - which "are becoming, in essence, part of the word-of-mouth marketing school of thought" - to "engage hard-to-reach customers at lower incremental costs". For instance, Microsoft recently said it would start a blog "to educate consumers and businesses about its forthcoming operating system, Longhorn". Similarly, Sun Microsystems has been pursuing the blog route vigorously to establish an alternative medium of communication with its end users. Many analysts believe that blogs are becoming another marketing or even CRM tool. "But the CRM applications need to become better at handling unstructured data - most blog data is unstructured," warns Yankee Group analyst, Sheryl Kingstone. "CRM is all about leveraging and controlling information. Until vendors figure out how to leverage unstructured data, I see blogs as being more of a collaborative tool for companies than a formal CRM tool - at least for now." http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=012000008T8C.

ONE MORE 'PRETEND' BLOG. Get real, Sparkle dolls.

'Faux' or fake blogs are no strangers to this column. In 'BLOGPLOITATION. A McDonald "special".' http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1248021,00030007.htm, and even earlier (Dr Pepper/7 Up's Raging Cow last year) http://www.businessblogconsulting.com/2004/06/raging_cow_the_.html, we had met them. Now I want to recommend to you a Proctor & Gamble 'character' blog ('Where the Sparkles Girls Get Real') http://www.sparklebodyspray.com/. I find it rather well-written fun piece of work - in fact, tightly 'written to brief', i.e., perfectly matching the psychographics and sociographics of the US teenage girl at whom the product is targeted. I've no 'moral' objection to blogs being used for marketing. There's a whole storm raging out there in blogosphere right now kicked up by purists enraged by this 'misuse' of blogging. For instance, read 'P & G Launches Character Blog, Purists Freak, Reality to Set In' for an excellent situation summary. http://www.adrants.com/2005/05/p-g-launches-character-blog-purists.php#more. By the way, I agree with Nick Denton, the much talked-and-written-about publisher of Gawker and other high profile blogs, when he says in his New York Times interview: "There are too many people looking at blogs as being some magic bullet for every company's marketing problem, and they're not. It's Internet media." Right ho! http://secondlawmarketing.blogspot.com/. Also, read the informative article, 'New York Times On Gawker Blogs'.http://www.webpronews.com/news/ebusinessnews/wpn-45-20050508NewYorkTimesonGawkerBlogs.html. 

BBM, anyone? Read this list.

What's the best business model for blogs? The Tom Sawyer Business Model - Get people to do your work for free (e.g., MSN Spaces, Blogger.com). The Flo Ziegfeld Business Model - The free blog gives you a taste of the paid goodies inside (e.g., Podcasting). The Karl Rove Business Model - The blog makes the pig sponsoring it look worth kissing (e.g., Organizational blogs). The Zack Exley Business Model - The blog acts as a recommendation engine that pushes people toward giving to the sponsors' favored causes (e.g., Moveon). Moveon. The Chuck Barris Business Model - The bloggers are selling themselves, looking for work. The Wyatt Earp Business Model - The independent blogger is attached to a larger organization and gives it his credibility in exchange for money (e.g., Romanesco at Poynter). The Charles Foster Kane Business Model - Advertising. http://www.a-clue.com/newsletter.htm. (Please look for the 16 May issue of the newsletter.) 

JAVA, TEA OR SURF. Is 'addictive' the word?

The sixth annual Web@Work study (354 U.S. IT decision-makers with at least 100 employees and 500 U.S. employees with Net access at work interviewed online) by Websense, Inc., a staff internet management solutions provider, had a surprising finding. It suggested that "surfing the web may be more addictive than coffee. Fifty-two percent of employees surveyed who use the internet at work for personal reasons stated that they would rather give up their morning java than internet access at work, while only 44% would give up their internet access for coffee. … internet usage at work is increasing - 93% of all respondents said they spend at least some time accessing the internet at work … up from 86% in 2004…".
http://ww2.websense.com/global/en/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressReleaseDetail/?Release=050509928.

NOT EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND. Some folks despise him.

The title of the CBS long running hit sit-com, "Everybody Loves Raymond", now drawing to a close in the US, bamboozles us into believing like the gospel what it says. It took the gutsy Borowitz Report to track down relentlessly and quote fearlessly a little known research project by the University of Minnesota's Opinion Research Institute in its post on Friday the 13th. This research shatters the mirage. Not everybody loves Raymond, it says. Some hate his guts, it looks like.  http://www.borowitzreport.com/.