Boomerang

Over the last few weeks, people have confessed to me that they are overwhelmed by the blogosphere. They have trouble finding blogs to suit their interests. Not surprising, since there are a reported 71 million blogs already on the Web today, according to Technorati, a popular blog search engine. (see David Sifry’s full report on the State of the Blogosphere)

So how do you find relevant and interesting blogs? Using specialized blog search engines like Technorati, IceRocket, and Google blog search should be your first step. I think Technorati is the most user-friendly of the bunch. It also compiles the most popular blogs for its Technorati Top 100, which can be a timesaver when you’re looking for the most influential blogs. Then there’s IceRocket: It has great trending tools that I use to illustrate momentum on a particular topic in the blogosphere. Google Blog is my least favorite, but they have a valuable feature that allows searching within a specific time frame.  

Choose relevant keywords and make sure to use synonyms to expand your results. When you find a blog you like, scroll down to the blogroll. The blogroll includes related sites or blogs that a blogger finds interesting or valuable, which could be a goldmine of data and means your search is complete. For example, The Huffington Post has an exceptional blogroll that lists the most interesting and influential politicos around.  

I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve learned by searching blogs and the people connected to them. In particular, I recently stumbled upon Neuromarketing, a blog that leverages brain science for marketing and sales. (Yeah, yeah — I know I’m a nerd. I’ve come to terms with it.) Topics range from green neuromarketing to multisensory advertising. Blogger Roger Dooley provides the neurological basis behind consumer behavior, among other things, and it’s great to see how science can apply to the business world. 

If you’re a newcomer to the blogosphere, don’t get discouraged by the tens of millions of blogs. There are plenty of great blogs out there — you just need to learn how to use the tools at hand.   

These days the only thing that gets between me and the dozens of blogs I peruse each day is my thin framed glasses. I consider social media the main focus of my work life, and it wasn’t until my recent visit to Brazil with some friends that I realized blogs and social networks are an integral part of my personal life as well.

Before leaving for my dream trip, my “travel planner” and dear friend told me countless travel tips and personal stories she read on various travel blogs. In Rio de Janeiro, we met some wonderful people who appeared to be close buddies, but we learned that they met just a few days prior through social networking sites while looking for travel companions. What a great way to have some new friends to hang out with upon arrival.

As our trip came to a close, eight of us exchanged contact information and promised to “MySpace” each other once we returned home. In addition to email addresses, we shared personal web pages, IM screen names, and the URLs to shared photo sites where we agreed to upload the evidence from our crazy time at Carnival. Of course there will be a filtered set of photos for the family and coworkers - don’t want to have any of those online persona issues.

Now that we are all back in our respective countries, I’m interested to see how our in-person friendships translate to cyberspace relationships. We started the trip using social networks to find information and people, and now we return to those same networks in an effort to maintain our connections. We’ve come full circle using social media - just like a Boomerang to Brazil and back again!

Boy it’s good to be back. We’ve taken the last few months off to regroup, rethink, and realign our objectives behind this site. While we want to provide readers with insight into a variety of topics, we want to make sure we have fun in the process. That’s why our new blog, Boomerang, will not only focus on current issues affecting business and communications; we’ll explore how it’s impacting our personal lives as well. Just as a boomerang has similarities to social media in the way it travels quickly, goes far, and returns full circle; so will the Boomerang Blog.

BusinessWeek’s Steve Hamm has an excellent article up about how Dell and the blogosphere interacted with one another during the incendiary accidents of notebook batteries. Hamm writes that bloggers were most influential in keeping the news of this problem alive after the media furor had died down, and also credits Dell with promptly setting up a website to help customers and react to the situation via informative executive blogs.

An article by The Wall Street Journal’s Nick Wingfield highlights efforts by bloggers and reporters who are trying to raise money to turn their blogs into money making businesses. The article points to Rafat Ali as an example with recent backing to expand his indepent blog PaidContent.org. As his site indicates, “it’s about the economics of content.” Ali is biz-tech journalist and entrepreneur based in Los Angeles.

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Blog SolutionWatch reports the launch of new service Commentful, a tool that allows users to keep track of discussions on new media sites. Users create a watchlist of sites to track and are notified of updates when they log into their account. A FireFox extension is also available, which provides real-time updates. This is useful for anyone who needs to keep track of ongoing discussions that might affect their clients, but doesn’t have the resources to baby-sit the conversation. Oh, and Commentful isn’t the first in this space – competitors include coComment and co.mments.

According to Reuters (link courtesy of CNET) FeedBurner, which syndicates 346,000 feeds for 212,000 bloggers, has purchased blog analytics company BlogBeat. BlogBeat provides bloggers with real-time information about their blog such as which content is being read by whom, and what is most popular. FeedBurner will be offering the new functionality for free under the FeedBurner StandardStats service. Fee-based services aren’t planned until 2007. For corporate and commercial bloggers, this makes FeedBurner the top choice for blog and feed analytics, particularly now that it is free.

There’s a report that Blog Mogul Nick Denton, of Gawker Media (which controls 15 sites), plans to sell two blog propoerties; tabloid-centric Sploid and video clip aggregator Screenhead. In addition, editors at Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo and Gridskipper were moved or replaced within the network.

According to Denton, his motivations for the reorganization are based on the bubble he perceives that is growing in the market. He says, “The world does not need more blogs and if you count all the pages on MySpace, there’s approximately one reader for every blog out there.”