Martin De Saulles

The best business blogs are those that have a personal feel to them where you get to know the person or people behind the posts.  Some good examples that I regularly read are A VC, The Obvious? andBuzzMachine.  I trust the authors of those blogs and feel they believe in what they write.

I'm sure ghost writing services for blogs have been around as long as blogs have existed and no doubt do a lot to help with the SEO of corporate web sites.  However, in the long term I think it will become a zero-sum game as content is created purely to get more Google juice and not to express the thoughts and reflections of the people really running the business.  Emotional connections with an author and, by extension, their company will ultimately have more value than another cynical top ten list of this or that.

Making money by selling digital information is becoming increasingly difficult as end users increasingly rely on free sources for their personal or business needs.  2 recent posts from the Alacra blog (links at bottom of this post) are fascinating and offer an insight into how the company has developed a commercial (based on a "freemium" model) information service that combines the knowledge of selected financial bloggers with their own proprietary databases of companies and M&A activity.  I was particularly interested in the comment by Steven Goldstein of Alacra regarding the need to use both automated systems to create a scalable system and human editors to compensate for inaccuracies in their semantic tagging system:

" Finally, we rely upon human review of the results. While technology is critical, in that it allows the product to scale, technology alone will only reach accuracy levels of 80-85%. That may be sufficient for some products, but when we’re pushing out alerts to users, we believe the bar is higher. So, we have a 24-hour team of editors who review the tagged events to ensure they are accurate."

http://www.alacrablog.com/alacrablog/2009/11/the-alacra-knowledge-base-a-rose-by-any-other-name.html

 

http://www.alacrablog.com/alacrablog/2009/11/tagging-the-heartbeat-of-alacra-pulse.html