It’s day three and we are close to the finals. Today we are taking care of a healthy living, and you know: sometimes, this is the hardest part. Right at the start we found ourselves in the kitchen not sipping oily hot coffee with fat milk as usual, but green tea without sugar and some strange greek mountain herbs.

Back to the office - and in a lucky moment, Tobi caught Eike right before she wanted to shut the windows - today these windows stay open, freezing in fresh air is preferred to choking in the computer heated office.

Over to lunch: Instead of a 5 class menu or some quick rolls at the corner bakery we chose to go for the Gandine, a nice little location not far away - but far enough for a little running tour. Here we picked some salads and even the dessert can be described as “semi-healthy”: icecream made of olive oil, parmesan cheese or carrots.

To pick up some energy in the early afternoon, we tried the organic gummy bears stars with real costa rica cola. Afterwards, Michel decided to do a little “smoker’s yoga” on the terrace. And yes, we have to admit that some of our team couldn’t resist to join the cake session, but what’s good for the mood can’t be bad for the body?

Let’s see with what the laFraisians come up with - and who will win the gold medal in the end. Actually this reminds me: we haven’t decided on the prizes or even how we pick the winner, but the last three days were really fun and insightful anyway, so stay tuned for the big winner’s ceremony next week.

In it’s article “The Web Trail“, the Guardian announces today “From tomorrow, the Guardian will publish stories first to the web”. This is, they say “ending the primacy of the printed newspaper”. Lofty words.

The Guardian is not, of course, the only paper to be putting a lot of focus into its online offer. And this seems much more like the normal development of news transmission. And it will be interesting to see how the medium changes how news is accessed. On the one level, how news publishers decide to make a profit.

It could go the way of Salon.com which shows non-members a few seconds of advertising. Or a “premium” membership with three different plans: one year premium ($35.00), one year premium with ads ($22.50), monthly premium ($6.00).

Or the way of The New York Times, which has free registration which gives basic access to news and archives, and paid subscriptions ($49.95/year) for “exclusive access to Op-Ed and news columnists on NYTimes.com, easy and in-depth access to The Times’s online archives, early access to select articles on the site, as well as other exciting features such as News Tracker and Times File.”

And despite the dire concern that online newspaper versions “have cannibalised sales”, this fear just ignores that going online gives newspapers the chance to have fast, trackable revenue options. Relevant online marketing can increase a newspaper’s value to readers (do you mind links to where you can buy the book after a book review?). And unlike offline advertising (which newspapers haven’t opposed) it’s easy to tell which advertising is valuable and effective.

The other level of course is technology. Like the NYT’s offer, it will be interesting to see what services (specialised news, exclusive access, etc.) news services create. And the tools they will add. Already, blogs are integrated to news websites. The Washington Post (which has required, but free, registration), for example, uses technorati to link all blogs that site articles (with the blog-integration company BlogBurst). And offers del.icio.us tagging as well.

The Guardian’s call that it will break news first online seems like an inevitable. But the claim that “we will take the internet seriously, but we must not let it get in the way of our primary business which is publishing a paper each night” seems unnecessarily fearful (not to mention their “revolutionary” claim). I don’t think it’s reckless to say that catching up with the way readers consume media (and pay for media) is the only way to remain journalistically and financially viable.
As Ten Red Roses writes:

Thinking about it, I used to buy newspapers regularly, definitely every week, and I went through phases of buying a daily paper. Now I tend to buy a daily paper only if I am going on a train journey, or if there is something I am particularly interested in; I rarely buy a Sunday paper. I get all the news and comment I can handle through [the] internet these days.

There are elephants in (chat)rooms. These are exciting times.

Over at Seth’s Blog there’s a list of over fifty insights into “how to get traffic for your blog“. To list a few:

• Use lists.
• Be topical… write posts that need to be read right now.
• Learn enough to become the expert in your field.
• Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you.
• Write short, pithy posts.
• Write long, definitive posts.
• Encourage your readers to subscribe by RSS.
• Start at the beginning and take your readers through a months-long education.
• Assume that every day is the beginning, because you always have new readers.
• Highlight your best posts on your Squidoo lens.
• Write about blogging.
• Edit yourself. Ruthlessly.
• Don’t be boring.
• Write stuff that people want to read and share.

And many many more. I really like “assume that every day is the beginning”, as new-agey as it sounds. But whew, I guess I have my work cut out for me.

It’s a phenomenon of web 2.0/user-generated content and all those other keywords tags going around these days. Spreadshirt just implemented a del.icio.us icon so that visitors could add products to their lists. And there’s debating going on about whether Spreadshirt users want more of the same.

There’s a survey going on at Spreadshirt now asking just that question: is social bookmarking valuable to you?
It’s up for debate. There’s enthusiasm (but, honestly a lot of it seems industry-generated), like Contactivity, who write:

At first glance this may not sound terribly revolutionary, and you may not even like the idea of having everyone see your bookmarks, but this very simple technology is potentially as transformative in the way that we all use the web as Google was…the more bookmarks we save, the more unwieldy our collection becomes. Very often we need to save one particular webpage, not an entire site and for this, bookmarks are inefficient.

This enables you to save and ‘file’ any individual webpage without having to clutter up your bookmarks with hundreds or thousands of links. Think of social bookmarking as an online filing cabinet, and the keywords, or ‘tags’, you apply to each saved URL as the folders within your bookmarks, but much more dynamic.

But there are the more critical, an old blog posting (old as in October 2005) from 99 little bugs… that says:

I’m a long time del.icio.us and digg user. Since a while my online bookmarks collection has a few hundreds entries classified in many tags. Nothing to complain about the system, it’s great, but I find myself accessing my bookmarks again very rare, even if I want a thing from the bookmarks, I’d rather hit Ctrl+K in Firefox and google it, 99% of the cases, the answer will popup in the first result if you remember the right keyword(s) and…surprise in allmost all the cases I remember the keywords.

So, why not trusting your brain’s memory to remember stuff ? I mean, it’s one of its main functions and we are trying more and more to forget it. I’m not asking anybody to start remembering complicated URLS, but using del.icio.us or any other social bookmarking service for remembering stuff it’s pretty useless in my case.

And there are the more balanced, like WeBreakStuff, saying:

You could say tagging is really cool. And it is. But there is one aspect to tagging that some people usually don’t think about: the lack of motivation to tag for public consumption. Allow me to explain: when you tag something in del.icio.us, you’re doing it for yourself and not others. In fact, the number of cases on which you would tag for others is extremely limited, because *who cares* about how you tag if they won’t use that information?

A great summary of blog findings from Sifry: on multinationality of blogging, tagging and more.

The meta-discourse round-up. With lists!

From the Guardian, by Sarah Lelic (www.mad.co.uk): a report on the state of blogging. According to a report in December, “Consumer Created Content” “around a quarter of European internet users are now active bloggers and contributors to online forums”. And, to the great joy of marketers, that about that number were taking part in organised activities, e.g. “polls and competitions”.

But then a new study came out claiming that actually only around 2% of UK’s internet users “publish or contribute to a blog”. And more damning, if one sees blogs as the voice of consumers and the voice of the marketers, “only 10% of the country’s online population looks at a blog more frequently than once a month”. And therefore the weight given to bloggers in public discourse, consumer value and media discussion has largely been overestimated.
It’s unclear where the numbers stand. But nonetheless, blogging is growing. And the Guardian offers these critiques/words of advice to corporate bloggers:

• present things honestly (or, cynically, with at least the illusion of honesty)
• avoid blogging as an overt marketing tool
• be aware of crises and use the blog to communicate the problem and diffuse concerns (I’d add, plan for how to use blogs in case of crises)
• figure out how to deal with disgruntled employee or customer blogs
• decide how to take on/ignore complaints
• weigh the risks and benefits

Levin also adds that “While the influence of blogging on the average consumer has perhaps been overstated for the present, it is inconceivable that the power of blogs and bloggers will do anything other than increase as time goes on.” But that’s also up to debate. There’s a whole debate on whether blogging has peaked: see here or here (the comments are interesting) or here.

Over at the Washington Post, the debate is focused on political/news blogs and their implications. The black v. white article “Blogs: Good or Evil?” can be reduced to two lists:

Good:

• blogs aren’t inherently evil
• blogs are interesting because “bloggers have a voice and emotions and are speaking directly to you. Because they’re up front about their biases”.
• blogs are fast

Evil:

• “They elevate analysis over news-gathering; they value speed over judiciousness; and they encourage the practice of journalism to turn in on itself, to tend ever more toward navel-gazing” (says Jonathan Last)
• most blog writing is lousy (I didn’t say it)
• keeps you from getting other stuff done (for Sarah Hepola that means writing a book)

The article goes on to talk about the ideal news blog, that takes a critical, judicial perspective on political behaviour. Which could be easily translated into any blog, and which isn’t too relevant here.

But to go back to Levin, and to the meta-level: what are we (Spreadshirt) doing here (in the blogosphere?). Another list? The idea is…

• to communicate news & info - it’s much less intrusive than mass-mails, and gives us more space to explain what is going on than just the homepage format.
• to showcase shops that are topical - since the fast format of blogs lets us do that. This lets the blog be a source of ideas for partners, news for media sources and promotion for the shops themselves.
• discuss the things that make up Spreadshirt - blogs, web 2.0, shirts, (online) marketing
• to facilitate communication with shop partners, customers, fans, haters
• to have something readable, personable, enjoyable (hence: headline shirts, my ramblings, etc.)

PS: Note to spammers. You’re killing me. Really. Even if I do love the “this site is very cognitive” comment. Could you knock it off?

From Cybersoc:

10 things i wish i’d known when i started blogging
(it’s actually 11. scroll down a bit)

An edited list from TXP Magazine

1. Sort out your domain name
2. Sign up to a third party RSS service, such as feedburner
3. Join technorati and claim your blog
4. Host your images using another service, for example flickr
5. Consider signing up to sites like blogburst which syndicate your content to news and media websites
6. Make sure you add your URL to Google
7. Add some sites with similar content to yours to your typepad list
8. Sign up for, and start using, del.icio.us and publish the links you collect there
9. Post comments on other blogs and leave your URL there
10. When you first set up your blog, really put some thought into the categories you’re going to use
11. use Pingomatic

The guardian.co.uk has a new article titled “Ignore bloggers at your own peril, says researchers“. The article talks about the large impact, despite relatively low numbers of bloggers online. Says the article, “although “active” web users make up only a small proportion of Europe’s online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends”.
The article is talking about bloggers taking on businesses: but what does your blog do? Is it a love letter to your friends? An online journal? Or does it take on news, technology, business?

Oh, and if you were ever looking for something to read, the Webby Award nominees for top blogs are in.

A few of my favourites:
we make money not art
boing boing
story corps
freakonomics
5 blogs before lunch

Useful information for every blogger:
It turns out green really is our colour…

Your Blog Should Be Green

Your blog is smart and thoughtful - not a lot of fluff. You enjoy a good discussion, especially if it involves picking apart ideas. However, you tend to get easily annoyed by any thoughtless comments in your blog.

There’s a discussion on integrating spreadshops to wordpress blogs: here.
And there are also special plugins here.

By-the-by: I know enough html to (usually) make texts bold. My IT knowledge? Pretty limited. So if you have questions, please ask the original authors.