Christopher Knight of Ezine-Tips and EzineArticles writes an article titled Why Ezines Still Beat Blogs, in which he gives four reasons why blog and its distribution channel RSS is not a replacement for ezine and email marketing in general.

Suzanne Falter-Barnes offers 7 reasons why blogs are beating out ezines, and matter so much to your platform.

I don’t think that Chris and Suzanne are debating the values and benefits of each publishing platform because:

• Chris points out that ezine is still more effective, which is true as of now. Ezine publishers who have been collecting readers for years will reach more people than their new blogs. But their shares will change in the future.
• Blogs are powerful medium to tap into, but they have different readerships than e-newsletters. I don’t see a reason why marketers and publishers in general don’t leverage both for delivering messages.
• RSS is a pull technology while e-mail is a push technology. Neither of them will go away, but those who can adapt them strategically win.

Of course, blogging is faster and easier than publishing HTML newsletter. While ezine publishers can automate the assembly of ezine with simple PHP scripts or copy and paste, like Chris said, writing a blog entry involves only writing, previewing and another click on the Publish button.

Via Blogwrite for CEO, link to Chris’ article, Suzanne’s article.

When General Motors Corp. wanted to stop speculation this spring that it might eliminate its Pontiac and Buick brands, Vice Chairman Bob Lutz took his case directly to dealers and customers who were up in arms about the possibility.

“When we feel that we need to get a direct response out there, we’ve certainly got this bully pulpit to some extent,” said Michael Wiley, GM’s director of new media. “It’s a place where we can talk directly to people unfiltered.”

It’s hard to quantify how many companies, executives and employees are blogging, but there are probably more than 100 official corporate blogs, with hundreds more in the works, said Pete Blackshaw, the chief marketing officer for Intelliseek Inc., a company that analyzes and tracks blogs.

“Don’t go toward fake blogs. Don’t launch character blogs. Use a blog for what it’s for, transparency,” said Steve Rubel, the vice president of client services at CooperKatz & Co., a New York PR company.

While the article is about big corporation, blog is as well affordable and effective for small business owners to start a conversation with customer

Read the full article at Journal Now.

Tristan Louis has posted his latest findings and analysis of indexed data for blogs in Yahoo Search, Google and Technorati. There are some tables and graphics to digest, but basically to my surprise Google has indexed only about 3% of the links Yahoo! has.

Here are the conclusions, quoted from his post:

• Yahoo! generally does a better job at indexing the blogosphere than Google does. We know they have been working hard to improve their index and here’s proof that they are getting results
• Even if Google is the one with the motto about not doing evil, Yahoo! seems to be the one interested in giving equal opportunity to the little guy: smaller blogs seem to have a better chance of being recognized by Yahoo! than they do of being recognized by Google
• While the front page of Google advertises they are currently indexing over 8 billion pages, it is very difficult to find ways to support that claim via the link feature they are offering: this can be seen as confirmation that Google does not tell you about all the links it has in its index.
• Sure volume counts but in the case of search indexes, they may count against sites: if one is less likely to appear in Google than it is to appear in Yahoo! and the Google index is much larger than the Yahoo! one, then, if Yahoo! and Google had the same amount of traffic, a single blog could find itself receiving more traffic from Yahoo! than it does from Google. This would be due to the fact that each individual page in Yahoo! has more weight than it does in Google.
• The top 100 blogs have other 56 million links in the Yahoo!. That’s a lot of links and clearly shows that links are the currency of the blogging world. It would be interested to get data that would help analyze how much interlinking exists across those sites.

Read the whole analysis at TNL.net.

The Wall Street Journal Online has an article about introduction to blogging and comparison of three popular free blog creation services: Google’s Blogger, Microsoft’s MSN Space and Yahoo’s Yahoo 360 service.

While using these three sites, we paid careful attention to how each blog-creating service handled four basic tasks: publishing text entries, or “posting” as it is called in blog land; adding photos; publishing links to other Web pages on our blogs; and providing privacy (if desired) online. We also took note of the overall style and formatting options provided on each site.

After reading the article, seems like the authors Katie Boehret and Walter S. Mossberg indeed are newbies to the whole blogging thing, so it might pose a relatively fair reviews of them.

In a quick summary, MSN Spaces do a pretty good job to convert blogging into a fun process, except the slideshow feature which works on Internet Explorer only. On the other hand, Blogger while powerful, needs some technical learning curve to get use to it. Yahoo 360 is still in beta, needs to pull in other Yahoo services to operate, and lack of standard blogging features like commenting.

One thing they probably forget to mention is that Google’s Blogger allows people to host the blog on their own web server, the important feature that is not available on both MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360, I believe. Another thing is multiple authors support.

Read the full review article at The Wall Street Journal Online.

Yahoo! has acquired blo.gs service, and is running it now. How can it impact current users, especially related to privacy issue?

Yahoo! obviously has the resources to run and improve blo.gs in pace with the incredible growth of blogs (and syndication in general), and in talking with them it was also clear that we had some of the same vision for the future of the service and the ping/notification infrastructure.

Before the acquisition, blo.gs has warned its users last month that the service is going to be sold and user data is to be transferred in the process. Concerned users should delete their account. Blo.gs has kept its promise by keeping the privacy policy intact even after being sold.

Via Trained Monkey.
Link: blo.gs.