Are you a blogger who wants to learn how to research like a journalist? Sign up for the Heritage Foundation’s Computer-Assisted Research and Reporting (CARR) sessions. Mark Tapscott writes:

The Media Bloggers Association is hosting its second-ever Database 101/201 CARR Boot Camp Sept. 23-24 at the National Press Club….

Attendance at the CARR boot camps is free and there are a limited number of fellowships available to assist with travel and hotel expenses. You can view the agenda here. Enrollment info here. Hurry because enrollment is limited to the first dozen enrollees.

More at Tapscott’s Copy Desk and Outside the Beltway.

Blogger Aaron Wall of SEOBook is being sued by company called Traffic Power for defamation and disclosing trade secrets. From The Blog Herald:

If successful the case has the potential to cause major upheaval in the blogosphere as comments would need to be filtered in cases where there was even the slightest chance someone might sue or find the comment offensive or disagree with it.

Might be time to update the disclosure and editorial statement.

Related: As blogging grows, companies eye legal pitfalls

Is it riskier to moderate blog comments?

Harsh, but funny.

In other news, Newsweek has implemented a blog-roundup feature on its front page (scroll down).

(Via Search Engine Journal)

An online retailer called Bluefly created a blog called Flypaper (with comments!). Hmm…sticky name. From USA Today:

The blog “encourages them to visit often to check postings on styles, designers and fashion faux pas,” says Melissa Payner-Gregor, CEO of Bluefly.com. The company’s fashion spotters around the country post items on Flypaper, which launched in April.

Flypaper’s customers typically have relied for fashion news on magazines such as Vogue. Now, they also have the blog as an information source, and the company has an opportunity for an interactive relationship.

It is potentially a lucrative one. A recent study by online market research firm ComScore Networks found that shoppers who visit blogs spend about 6% more than the average online shopper. (Emphasis added)(Source)

The rest of the article is informative, but the highlighted portion is the money quote. If people keep coming back (Does the reason matter?), you’re doing something right.

…but I predict his time in the blogosphere will be brief. I don’t think he’s ready to handle the onslaught of real-time complaints from disgruntled residents about government services.

According to the Washington Post:

In the mayor’s second message, Williams admonished posters that there was no censorship of postings “as part of some conspiracy.”

He asked people to call the city’s complaint line with service requests. And hey, lay off the “expressive but not very helpful comment on ignorant public officials or employees.”

Williams launched the blog just last week, and he already sees how hungry the public “beast” is for government reform, and DC residents commenting on the blog probably won’t follow his “call the complaint line” advice. The point is that people want to communicate with real people, ones they believe care about them and their problems. A disembodied, automated, wait-forever complaint line won’t cut it.

Any blogging politician with commenting enabled (although moderated) is a brave soul. But if I were a betting woman, I’d wager that in a month or two, comments will be closed.

(Photo from the Washington Post)

When I first heard that BusinessWeek was going to create a blog, I was skeptical. Plenty of media types have jumped on the blogging bandwagon, but not many get it right. Not only does BusinessWeek get it right, the magazine chose a memorable and clever title for their blog (background).

Blogspotting is authored by writers Heather Green and Stephen Baker, and they have become true bloggers. They allow comments and trackbacks (although moderated) and do the one thing that endears them to other bloggers: link to other bloggers.

Blogspotting is a good place to stop for news and commentary on the convergence of journalism and blogging. Heather and Stephen also link generously to business bloggers. The blog is worth a weekly, if not daily visit.

I don’t know how I missed this, but Forbes wrote about “blog power” last month:

Blogs (short for Weblogs) started out mostly as personal Web journals. However, thanks to sites like Google’s Blogger, which allows people to easily create blogs in a matter of minutes, these homespun Internet outposts are rapidly expanding and evolving. At this writing, there are some 14 million blogs, growing at a rate of 12,000 a day. Cumulatively, bloggers post content about 275,000 times per day on nearly every topic or niche imaginable. One study claims that more than 50 million people regularly read blogs.

It’s an excellent read.

Related post: Forbes on Blogs

I’ll mark this down as one of those when-I-find-the-time projects, but I want to write a feature story about the failure of iFulfill.com, an order fulfillment company that was undercapitalized and, some say, mismanaged.

Former owner Paul Purdue caught a lot of heat for blogging about the abrupt closure instead of spending time helping clients retrieve their inventory from his soon-to-be-closed warehouses. I was engrossed with the story itself, the comments on Purdue’s blog, and posts on a Yahoo! community forum.

Other fulfillment companies swooped down like Superman, rescuing Purdue’s desperate clients by offering to pick up and deliver inventory languishing in his warehouses. Angry and heartbroken clients, some close to financial ruin, had to break the bad news to their customers. It seems that most items were recovered and returned to worried clients, but the ensuing financial loss is still mounting, I’m sure. At least one company or person has filed suit against Purdue.

This BusinessWeek article (also see the magazine’s blog for more information) angered Purdue’s clients even more. A seemingly nonchalant Purdue is photographed smiling. A subplot in the drama is the role of Purdue’s blog consultant. Clients and others place some of the blame for their predicament on the consultant. They say Purdue’s blogging (a waste of time?) contributed to his business’s failure, although the consultant was not aware that his company was failing.

Implications and questions abound, particularly for blog consultants: Should we bear some of the blame for advice that may not be in the best interest of the client? Is it prudent to blog the failure of a business? As blog consultants evangelizing about “transparency” and “honesty,” how transparent and honest are we when it comes to our businesses? Are we exempt? If so, why?

Blogger.com is the reason blogging exploded in the past few years. A tech novice with little more than a desire to rant can sign up for an account, create a blog and start blogging in five minutes or less, literally.

The quickness and ease of use makes the platform a target for anonymous types up to no good or others trying to game the system by setting up automated blogs that are nothing more than spam sites. It’s only a matter of time, I predict, that search engines will begin excluding Blogger blogs.

This may not seem serious to non-bloggers, but it’s very important to legitimate businesses shelling out money to optimize their blogs for search engines. Unscrupulous blog-spam practices are becoming so widespread that Google, Yahoo!, and the other search engines will have little choice but to exclude certain domains ripe for exploitation, and “blogspot.com” will likely be the first to go. The good must suffer with the bad, as my mother used to say.

(Hat tip: Blogspotting)

Says the Sun-Sentinel:

[B]usiness is going to the blogs. Major corporations like General Motors and small businesses like Zenful Creations, a Web design firm in Coral Springs, have jumped on the blog bandwagon.

Blogs aren’t going away. The question is, is it something you want for you or your business?

[…]

By putting some effort and time into a blog, you can raise your business’ profile on the Internet and bolster sales. For instance, Leach estimates that about 40 percent of her business has come from people who first visited her blog.

So little to lose and so much to gain.