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[2002-10-24] Blogging for Dollars: Giving Rise to the Professional Blogger
Towards the end of June, I was invited to a conference at the Banff New Media Institute, located in the midst of the Canadian Rockies in the province of Alberta. The title of the conference was "Producing New Media: Money and Law," and we explored and discussed funding models and legal issues for various new media projects, including Weblogs. During that weekend, I came to a realization that I've been mulling over ever since: a lack of money is hindering the growth and potential of blogging. Free--or personal--blogging can only take us so far.
[2002-10-22] Cutting Costs Without Losing Your Shirt
Are you feeling the crunch? After years of heavy investment and expansion, businesses across the economy are feeling enormous pressures to reduce their costs. Such a tactical reversal is a difficult change in approach for managers mired by the "grow at all costs" mentality of the 1990's. But hold on a minute; despite the sense of urgency at achieving cost savings, it is vital that business managers apply strategic thinking to the reduction of their costs. A well-conceived cost reduction strategy enables managers to capture maximum value in the form of direct savings and the installment of a culture of efficiency while minimizing the destruction of company value resulting from cutting too much from core business activities. This article will outline some of the reasons that companies are feeling the pressure to reduce costs and then offer a five-step methodology for building a foundation of strategic cost reduction (SCR) in your organization.
[2002-10-04] Lifting the Lid on LookSmart
LookSmart is a global leader in Internet search and categorisation, operating a database of three million URLs organised into 300,000 categories. Its influence is far reaching, yet a succession of recent changes to its paid inclusion program has left the directory misunderstood and widely criticised. In order to understand these changes, LookSmart's future direction and the impact of these changes to website marketing, we must first understand a bit about the structure of LookSmart itself, and it's relationships with a string of strategic partners.
LookSmart was the first major player to introduce paid inclusion, and as a result developed an early skew towards the corporate sector of the web. Measures were taken during 2001 to counteract this through the integration of Zeal's community based website directory , which doubled the number of non-commercial sites within the LookSmart database overnight - and continues to feed non-commercial content into the directory. This gave website marketers the opportunity to submit content to LookSmart for free. Becoming a Zealot involves a few online tests, but means that you can edit your own non-commercial listings that will be distributed throughout the LookSmart Network.
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