Amy Campbell’s Web Log

Two-month status report

see one-month status report here

In month two, I tried to tame myself from blogging’s addictions. Following links until my eyes pop out… Checking my referrers list… tracking hits to my website from my blog and elsewhere. I’ve instituted a no-blogging rule on myself during a typical workday. Knowing that such rules are meant to be broken, I have still managed to blog, although my post rate is down from last month, but my billable hours and social life are up!

Content vs. Frequency

I’ll keep this short, as I’ve come to appreciate that in a fellow blogger. While the human element is a great aspect of blogging, I don’t have patience for blogging that turns into yadda, yadda, yadda. As basically a business blogger (yes, I admit it), I believe blogs should add value, not suck time out of a person’s busy life (yours and mine). My philosophy that I will offer to others to subscribe to is: Only blog when you have something to say! A daily blog for the sake of being daily isn’t necessary as I see it. We all experience information overload. My hope for weblogs is that they act as useful filters of the information heap, rather than adding to it. These are high hopes, I realize, but what I believe will differentiate valuable bloggers from the yadda yadda crowd. (Feel free to disagree. I’d like to hear your thoughts).

Speaking of filters… I find tools like technorati, daypop, google and organica, and bloggdex to name a few to be the key to the future for their ability to search and filter web log entries. And while I haven’t spent the time to learn to use any of the news aggregators, I believe the RSS feed will change the world. I’m just an average user… a communicator… Here’s to the tool makers!

Net Effects

In month 2 my “networth” inched up in link strength. In addition to Denise Howell of Bag and Baggage adding me to her blog roll, My Shingle and Netlawblog.com linked to me. Both Bespacific
and a german weblogger linked to my Intro to Weblogs for Law Marketing article and the german blogger even added my New Hampshire Law Firm client’s web site to it resources list! (kinda kooky!) Others have found my blog via Google and Daypop on searches on for “FCC” and “Amy Cambell” and “web logs” and such. As a result, I’ve been contacted by a few folks inquiring about my services. So far it’s translated into some nice conversations.

In summary for month 2, nothing startling. More of the same. Traffic increased slightly over last month. Leaving me at position 39 in the Harvard Web Logs Rankings list with 3,505 visits

Thanks to Sabrina Spacifici’s BeSpacific mention of Intro to Weblogs for Law Firm Marketing, I’ve heard from many folks including Jerry Lawson, whose article Web Logs for Lawyers is most interesting for its discussion of web logs effect on search engine ranking. Says Jerry,

“…it is easier for search engines to understand blog content than conventional web site content. Therefore, they tend to rank blogs higher than they would a conventional web site that has identical substantive content…”

Having other sites that link to you is an important part of building your search engine presence. Blogs are an easy way to accomplish that. The added feature of RSS feeds — which automatically syndicate your blog entries to other web sites that aggregate these feeds — helps further spread your news throughout cybersace. We have yet to see the full impact of RSS on how we filter and receive our news.

However, using web logs in your marketing mix is not a gimmick. As with other internet publishing tools such as web sites and e-newsletters, creating good relevant content is the key. (See my article Providing Information of Value Builds Relationships and Trust for more on this point, as well as Markets Are Conversations.)

In fact, I’m beginning to recognize some strategic content/usability issues arising regarding spreading your gospel via web logs. A well-written web log entry headline is as important to your entry being properly indexed by search engines and news aggregators as is a properly written meta tag title for a given web page. More on this later…

From the Jupiter ClickZ Web Log Conference, John Palfrey had this afterthought regarding law firm Reed Smith allowing Denise Howell the freedom to publish Bag & Baggage…

“…It’s great to see a big, global law firm supporting this sort of effort by one of its lawyers, not trying to squelch it.� It was�confirmed for me that the firm is serious about it, because the marketing chief, Rebecca, from Reed Smith was also at the conference…”

Click here to read the above paragraph link-enabled on John’s site.

Denise Howell of Bag & Baggage provided terrific play-by-play reporting of day one of the ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies conference. For those of us who could not attend, it’s almost like being there. For more reports see Corante on Blogging for links.

Heath Row carries the torch for day 2.

Don’t miss his report of The Law of the Blog panel. Bring lawyers, blogs and money. Here’s Donna Wentworth’s notes on same.

Thanks everyone.

george w. bush : jason blair

wmd’s : quotes

united nations : new york times

a just war : a good story

(see Worse Than Watergate?
by John Dean )

john dean : watergate

__________ : iraq

(will the new woodward and bernstein please stand up?)

Funny how things work. Now that the FCC media ownership vote is past, it’s getting lots of press. Is it a case of “it ain’t over till it’s over?” (FCC Rule Fight Continues in Congress) or a case of “closing the barn door after the cows have left?” (FCC media ownership vote dealt blow to democracy
). Choose your cliche.

Today, Clay Shirkey’s The FCC, Weblogs, and Inequalilty makes some interesting points about inequality and media. Says Shirkey,

“In the aftermath of the FCC ruling, and given what we have learned from the development of weblogs, the debate on media concentration can now be sharpened to a single question: if inequality is a fact of life, even in diverse and free systems, what should our reaction be?”

He argues the tradeoffs are: Diverse. Free. Equal. Pick two.