Left Bay’s Musings on the Media

Searching for answers in sales and marketing

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Goodbye 2007!

December 31, 2007 at 1:55 pm · Filed under Advertising, Apple, Blog, Google, Left Bay Media, Newsletter, SEO

It’s that time of year again, when we all buckle down and face our shortcomings to eagerly make promises to ourselves that we’ll fix them in the coming year. We ponder the year past and wonder how our regrets could have been avoided and vow to not make those mistakes again. We delight in our fond memories and hope that the future has room for more. Fittingly, this is Left Bay’s 2007 recap, and hopes for 2008.

What We’ve Learned

Traditional brand advertising is dumb.

What Web 2.0 really is. Just in time too, since we’re at the dawn of 3.0, and all…

We have to turn the space heater on at least an hour before we settle in the office to brave the wintertime.

College professors of interactive advertising react to SEO jargon with nothing short of puzzled looks. (“No professor, not like banners…”)

What a blogopotamus is. Surprisingly, not a plump desk-chair potato who reads and writes blog posts all day.

We wasted far too much time perusing Google StreetView. And I didn’t find anyone I knew in the pictures.

Ask.com is going off the deep end. (Still waiting for that algorithm, btw).

Apple and Google are going to continue growing and will one day have a knock-down, drag-out battle-of-the-superbrands where the victor will take over the world (my loyalties lie with Apple, but I have a feeling Google will take the spoils).

Acquisitions will forever be news until the day that battle takes place.

This will always be funny.

Our Resolutions

We should try to read our SearchCaps more often instead of having 15 messages in our inbox daily from accrued newsletters. (which when we read, realize we missed a lot).

Update the blog more.

Make resolutions again in June when they start to go stale.

Happy New Year from Left Bay Media!

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The Blog Age

April 3, 2007 at 4:16 pm · Filed under Blog

I blog, you blog, we all blog. Here’s a blog about blogging.

Who doesn’t have a blog? Technorati, blog search engine, currently has 71 million blogs indexed. I am surrounded by feed fiends, blog bookmarkers, and (recently) Diggers of social content. I call it The Blog Age.

The Blog Age is marked with the saturation of user-generated content. People have always been creating the media we consume, but that once elite group has now transpired to become…anyone with a computer and internet access. Welcome to the blogosphere.

Before they are anything else, blogs are diaries. With the introduction of the world wide web in the 80s, diaries moved from paper to cyberspace, and have grown (and grown) ever since. In the early blogging days, they existed as open forums or personal homepages and usually were manually updated parts of a website. They were called online diaries before blogs came to be. The word blog was officially adopted when Peter Merholz broke the word “weblog” into “we blog” on his blog, Peterme.com, in 1999. The Blog Age begins.

Several online diary sites began to launch in the late 90s, most notably Xanga, still a leader in the industry. It was quickly followed by Open Diary, LiveJournal, Diaryland, and Blogger (later to be bought by Google). It was shortly after this time that current blogebrities like Andrew Sullivan started to gain popularity. The blogosphere has since kept snowballing, and the hill seems endless.

The concerns vary with the huge presence of blogging on the web. How do you gain blog visibility? How will companies incorporate blogs into their marketing mix? Where do you draw the line between personal blogs and business blogs? When does time spent writing/reading/searching blogs become too much time? They’re slowly consuming the web, and with what benefit? Sure, communication, amusement, selective news…but at the cost of hours upon hours of time? Worth it? I guess that’s your call.

For now, we can’t escape it. There is a blog for everything, even a blog about nothing, or a blog about blogging! We’ve even developed a blogging language to further niche-ify the community. It seems a forever-growing trend (a là iPods and Hybrids); so pervasive we choose to keep feeding the fire.

So go write another blog.

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