The rise of curation

Social recommendation isn’t new; marketers have long known the value of vocal advocacy. The difference is that now, a brand’s audience (or its followers) can register direct and extremely visible benefits from their advocacy.

Thus, curation is a valid, and valued, technique for gaining currency with audiences. We benefit from our own curatorial advocacy (which builds our credibility), and we rely on our favorite brands or businesses to sift through the web and point us to good resources, insights and opinions.

Little wonder, then, that many business brands have built large audiences using the curation approach. These brands are seen as leaders because they have the ability to tell the good from the bad, and they have market-leading contacts who keep them abreast of the latest developments.

In the curatorial approach, the network is critical, along with the brand’s ability to sort the dross from the diamonds.

The role of creation

While curatorial communication dominates some social media right now, it’s important not to forget the valuable potential of creation in audience engagement.

After all, curators curate creations. So when you make, do or say something new and valuable, your online presence will be more likely to be included in the curations of others. It’s the basis of viral marketing, but thanks to the nuances of social media, your creation doesn’t need to go viral to deliver value to your brand, or your team.

If everyone else is funneling or channeling information, those brands that create have a point of difference. When you make ideas, products, or thoughts, the information you deliver to your audience is unique.

Your creative work gives you the scope to engage customers, stakeholders, and other parts of your organization, by inviting them to join the process of creation and development. But more importantly for collaboration, creation allows you to share stories of experimentation, learning and application through social media, the company blog, industry events and so on.

That experiential information can form the glue for engagements with third parties, which, over time, can prove mutually and deeply beneficial. Such benefits could be something as simple as landing a spot in an invite-only beta test, or something as valuable as hearing about a bug that may affect you — in time to preempt disaster.

If you create, you have a lot to gain by sharing your experiences online, and connecting with others doing similar work. If yours is known as a creative brand, you likely already have followers and connections who are craving your creative insights. The question is: are you using that opportunity?

Striking a balance

How can you make the most of the opportunities for curation and creation in your social media activity?

Your team’s online presence may address multiple audiences. But whether you are concerned with engaging with customers, suppliers, or peer organizations, your team has a lot to gain by creating, as well as curating, information. This is particularly the case if your team is an isolated unit of specialists, or has a specific technical focus. It should be imperative for such organizations and teams to be directly engaged in the business of creation.

Connect with the creative leaders in your field. Share product development stories and updates on your blog. Invite creative third parties and peers to contribute their ideas for overcoming challenges, or addressing issues you face in your own creative process — and publish your own thoughts to get the ball rolling.

Traditional businesses may be concerned that asking questions or seeking advice from others, even peers,  online has the potential to damage the brand. Adopting a strategy that encourages individuals in the creative team to seek peer input through their own online activity (as employees of the brand) may be a solution to this impasse.

Do you leverage creation in your online engagements, or do you stick largely to the territory of curation?

Image courtesy stock.xchng user rolve.

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The research focused on the ways influence is established through Twitter, hinting at which user categories are the most popular, as well as which provide value, and how.

While businesses can apply this information to tweak their interactions with clients, customers and the public via Twitter, the research points to much more than that: It implies that greater benefits are available to companies that use Twitter to actively engage with their own team members: companies that stop seeing Twitter as an outward-focused medium, and customers as a separate audience from staff.

A Culture of Public Collaboration

How many of your staff members actively follow — that is, engage with — your company’s Twitter feed? How many staff members’ Twitter accounts are actively followed (or engaged with) by your company’s Twitter feed?

According to the Yahoo study, “Organizations … devote a surprisingly small fraction of their attention to business-related news.” Other user categories didn’t behave like this, though. It reported that, for example, bloggers:

• retweet valuable URLs from a range of relevant categories, noting that “[In-Tweet URLs] originated by bloggers tend to be overrepresented among long-lived URLs.”
• act “as recyclers and filters of information.”
• consume large amounts of information, acting as intermediaries between the media and other users.

Do those who run your company’s Twitter account see staff as peer sources of valuable information that can be recycled for the company’s broader following?

This approach has the potential to benefit the company among internal audiences, as well as those in the public space. At its most basic, actively engaging with staff members within the public space provided by Twitter reflects the value of the staff to the company.

It reinforces to team members themselves — as well as customers and clients — that the company regards its staff as thought leaders, and while this approach can’t create a culture on its own, it can support a culture in which team members are actively recognized.

The “intermediary layer” alluded to above comprises about 500,000 Twitter users, according to Yahoo’s research, and only 4 percent of them are among the “elite” 0.05 percent of users who attract half the attention of the Twittersphere. Your company doesn’t need to be Lady Gaga to lead opinions on Twitter. But to take advantage of the intermediary layer, it does need to actively engage with peers (including staff members), filter information and retweet the good stuff.

It also needs to do that consistently. More than 270 URLs were initiated by bloggers per capita, according to the research. (By comparison, the average organization generated an average of 104 URLs per capita.)  To approach a significant level of value, your corporate Twitter team needs to consume a lot of relevant media; either direct from the source, or from other opinion leaders, including your staff.

Twitter and the Corporate Blog

If your organization has a blog, you’ll likely be tying your Twitter strategy into that, so if you’re planning to improve the value of your Twitter interactions, using them to engage with staff as well as clients, you might need to apply that same approach to the corporate blog, too. Do your staff members actively engage with the corporate blog, not just as contributors, but as audience members?

While many company blogs like to take the company line, apply the company style guide, and adopt a semi-corporate tone, some of the tried-and-tested blogging advice — writing “on the level,” telling stories, using anecdotes, and revealing a human side — may help companies to build credibility among all their audiences.

It’s one thing to have a team member draft a blog post; it’s another to see your staff daily accessing the company blog—perhaps via their Twitter feeds—then making comments, retweeting links to posts, and so on.

The company blog can be a particularly appropriate way to keep staff informed of the work of other parts of the business, and aware of the relationships the company has with its followers—provided the blog, like the company Twitter feed, is authentic, and successfully treats all its followers as collaborators, rather than “staff” and “customers”.

Does your company treat staff and clients as separate audiences? How well does it engage and collaborate with both groups through the company Twitter feed and blog?

Photo courtesy stock.xchng user a_kartha.

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The approach I’ll outline below relies on using hosted blogging software, such as Blogger, Typepad or WordPress.com (please see disclosure at the bottom of the post – Ed.), so it may not be a perfect solution if you need to guarantee security. Not that hosted blogging tools aren’t secure, but the best way to keep information under your own control is to keep it on your own servers.

Using Blogs for Collaboration

Once you’ve set up an account with your blogging platform of choice, you can create a new blog. The sites of all of the hosted blogging platforms walk you through the process, making it very manageable. During the new blog creation process, you may be asked whether you want to make your blog private. If not, you’ll need to change the blog’s settings to “private” after you’ve finished creating it. The privacy settings can usually be found in the “Settings” menu on your blogging platform (check with the documentation if you can’t find it).

If you use WordPress.com, you’ll find that there’s a theme called P2 that’s especially suited for turning your new blog into a collaboration tool. It can be applied to your blog by selecting the “Appearances” menu and then the “Theme” menu. From there, you’ll be able to search for the P2 themes to apply to your blog. On Blogger and Typepad, you’ll likely find that you’ll need to use less customized themes.

Bringing in Your Team Members

Once your collaboration site is set up and marked as private, the next step is making it accessible specifically to those team members who will be working on your project. On Blogger, you’ll find your access settings on the “Permissions” menu, underneath the “Settings” menu. You can add blog authors as well as blog readers there. On TypePad, you can invite people to contribute to your blog over email in the “Authors” page under the “Edit Configuration” menu. Similarly, on a WordPress.com blog, you have the ability to add more people to the site. You’ll be asked for their name and email address, as well as to choose a role. Because of the way that different user roles work within WordPress, you’ll likely want to make most of your team members either Editors or Authors; Administrators can change anything about your collaboration site, Editors can add, edit or remove any content and Authors can only add, change or remove their own content.

Once the blog is set up, it’s just a matter of sharing updates and attaching any files you need the rest of your team to see.

The Benefits of Using Blogging Software

One of the key benefits of this approach is that you can literally establish a new collaboration site that’s very easy-to-use in a matter of minutes. You can choose your team members and be communicating on a private site without waiting on anyone else.

If you want a more private (not hosted) solution and have easy access to a server, you can set up something similar by installing WordPress from WordPress.org, using Moveable Type. You can add security measures and other controls that way, like keeping the site behind a firewall, although the entire process will take a little longer to set up. There are also a variety of third party themes out there, along with plugins, that allow you to customize a blog-based collaboration site if you’re running it on your own server.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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It’s free and easy to get started with Analytics, but there are also a lot of advanced features that can make it even more useful. I’m sometimes surprised by how many people only look at their dashboard page and never really drill down into some of the more interesting details and features. I thought it might be time to do post with a few quick tips for getting more out of Google Analytics.

1. Alerts. If you want to keep on top of your sites and know when something out of the ordinary is happening, you should visit the “Intelligence” section and set up a few alerts. You can configure the service to email or text you when something specific happens. For example, on one of my websites, I have it set to alert me when the number of visitors goes over a certain threshold on any one day. Alerts can be set using most of the many different metrics available in the various reports. You can also apply your alerts to multiple profiles and use them on several different websites.
2. Custom Reports. Don’t just use the built-in reports; create your own custom reports (available in the “My Customizations” menu). Spend a few minutes thinking about what you really want to know, and create a custom report that you can view every time you log in. For example, I have a custom report that shows the unique visitors, new visits, time on page and pageviews for each blog post, and when I drill down into a single blog post, I can see which keywords people used to arrive at the page from search engines. The best thing about these custom reports is that you can share them across your Analytics accounts and use them on multiple blogs.
3. Export. Most of us would probably think about exporting our data as a CSV or XML file that we could use to crunch the numbers in some other application, and Google Analytics can certainly do that. However, it can also be used to create some nicely formatted PDFs of your data that you can send to your manager or your clients. This is a great way to quickly give someone who isn’t familiar with Google Analytics an overview of some specific event or a monthly analytics report with little extra work on your part. My favorite is to create a report by exporting from the dashboard, which gives you a multiple page file with overview numbers and graphs for visitors, traffic sources, maps, content and anything else you’ve added to your dashboard. You can get PDF exports by using the “Export” drop-down menu of any report; you can even export your custom reports.
4. Customize Your Dashboard. You should also take the time to customize your dashboard. First, add any frequently-used reports to your dashboard using the “Add to Dashboard’ button at the top of any report. You can even add your custom reports to the dashboard. Each box on your dashboard also has a very faint and tiny “x” in the upper-right corner that you can use to remove any unwanted information. Now that you have the right information on your dashboard, you can use the upper-left corner of each box to drag the components around to put the ones you want to see first near the top of the page. and less frequently-used items further down the page.
5. In-Page Analytics. I saved the best for last. In-page Analytics is one of my favorite features, since it lets you see where people actually click on your pages. You can find In-Page Analytics under the “Content” section in the left-hand navigation. You can navigate to various pages on your website to get a different view of where people are clicking on your subpages. You can also use the drop-down filter at the top to hide any clicks below a certain percentage to focus on where most people are clicking, or you can create your own filters to only see clicks from new or returning visitors, certain geographies, or based on almost any other available metric.

What are your favorite tips and tricks for squeezing more out of Google Analytics?

As we approach the end of the year, it’s a good time to take a step back and look at some data to see which of your blog posts have been getting attention and which ones have been mostly ignored. You can do so much more than taking a quick look at your standard analytics package. Here are a few tools and tips to give you a deeper look at whether people are paying attention to your blog posts.

Web Analytics

A standard analytics package, like Google Analytics, is a great start, but make sure that you delve deeper than just checking out the simple graph showing how many people visited your blog. Here are a few of the things that I like to look at:

• Traffic sources that show how many people found my blog from various other blogs, web pages or search engines.
• Keywords to see what people were looking for when they landed on my blog.
• Which blog posts got the most visits.
• “In-Page Analytics,” which provides a graphical view of where people are clicking on the page.

Feed Analytics

Most web analytics track hits by using a snippet of code on your page in order. Feed readers don’t execute those little chunks of code, so you’ll also want to use a feed analytics tool, like Feedburner, for example. This gives you a better idea about how many people read your blog through a feed reader, and you can get access to information like how many people viewed a post in your feed, whether they clicked on any links, etc.

I get a very different picture from the people who read my feed than from those who visit my blog. For example, every couple of weeks, I do a short post on my personal blog with links to blogs posts that I have written elsewhere. These blog posts get almost no web traffic and are rarely posted to Twitter, but they get a lot of views in my feed, and people often click the links to my other blog posts. You might be surprised by how your feed data differs from your other analytics.

PostRank

PostRank is a nifty little tool that looks at which of your blog posts got the most attention on a wide variety of social networks. You can see how many people posted your content, or commented on it, on Twitter, Google Buzz and dozens of other social media websites.  It also gives each of your posts a score between 1 and 10 , which is a great way to see at a glance which of your blog posts were interesting enough for people to want to share them.

Twitter

There are a few tools that make it easy to see which of your blog posts are getting attention on Twitter. If you shorten your links with a tool like bit.ly that has built-in analytics, you can see how many people clicked on the link and who retweeted it. BackTweets is another great service that searches Twitter for a URL and finds any shortened links to that URL, regardless of who shortened the link and which service they used. This is a great way to see when other people are posting links to your blog posts.

Blog Search

Google Blog Search also has a nifty little feature that lets you see any blogs that link to your blog simply by entering something like this into the search box:

• link:gigaom.com/collaboration

You can look for posts linking to a website, blog post or section within your blog – basically, anything you can define by a URL. You can then sort the results by relevance or date and even filter by certain dates or timeframes, like most Google searches.

What are your favorite tools or tips for taking a deeper look at whether people are paying attention to your blog posts?

Photo by Tilemahos Efthimiadis used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

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The solution? Develop a system around your blogging efforts. Here are the steps I took to create a system for producing and managing content for my own site.

About a month ago, I was approaching yet another week of blank canvases, so I set out to find a way to be more intentional and focused with my content. The first thing that came to mind was an editorial calendar. Big magazines and newspapers have used them since the dawn of the publishing industry, so I was fairly confident the solution would work for me, but I didn’t want to just throw together a calendar in spreadsheet form and think that all my problems would go away. I really wanted to approach this as a big magazine would, so I started by thinking in terms of a single magazine issue and how an editor might produce and manage its content.

Step 1: Choose a Theme

If you think about a single magazine issue, there’s generally a theme to it, a common thread that ties together the articles within it, so that was my first step — develop a theme. I decided to have “focus months” on my site to guide the content for a given month. This would help me accomplish a couple of things.  First, it would make my content more intentional. It would center my efforts around keywords and information that was relevant to my target audience. Second, it would help me better anticipate the content I was going to create, which would allow me to line up guest experts and interviews that were relevant to the content. I was immediately able to come up with themes for the next six months.

Step 2: Choose Your Sub-Topics

Once I had a theme in mind, I was able to think about sub-topics within that theme that would deepen my coverage of the content that month. At first, I just listed out the possibilities for sub-topics without thinking too much about them, and created a list of ten or twelve ideas. As I created the list, I noted possible guest experts who might provide greater insight into the sub-topics than I could provide on my own.

Step 3: Establish Your Schedule and Content Needs

With my topic and sub-topics ready, I had to decide on the frequency I would publish. I settled on publishing one content piece per day (could be an article, an audio piece, etc.). I decided to interview guest experts within the sub-topics and then spread out the content over the course of the month. My plan would be to line up and interview guests the month before I intended to publish the content. That way, I would avoid last-minute scrambling to produce content and could instead focus on quality well in advance of publishing. This would also help when I got sick or took time off, since I would already have content on tap for the given week or month and could simply schedule it to be published (or, even better, hire someone else to do it for me).

I decided that the number of weeks there were in a given month would be the number of guest experts I would line up for that month (five weeks, five guest experts). And to make things simple, each guest expert would produce one week’s worth of content (five content pieces per guest).

My site has a mix of articles and audio, so I decided to do one-hour interviews with each guest (and then each interview would be divided into four shorter content pieces) and then have each guest contribute one article in addition to their interview. That made it really easy on my guests, since they only had to show up for a one-hour interview and create one article. Plus, that little bit of effort on their part would equate to weekly promotion for their businesses, since I would be spreading their content out over the course of the month.

The great thing for me was, instead of having twenty to twenty-five separate content pieces to create on my own in a given month, I would simply do four to five interviews (depending on the number of weeks that month) and knock out four content pieces in one hour. Of course, that meant a lot more planning on the front end, but then the actual content creation part would become very easy.

Step 4: Produce the Content

So, I knew how many guest experts I would have (the same as the number of weeks that month), and I knew how many content pieces I needed from each of guest (always five), so that let me know how many titles I had to create for the month. Say, for instance, the month’s theme was “balance.” I knew I needed five content pieces, so I created five generic titles.

• Stress-Reduction Tips
• Personal Renewal
• Food and Mood
• Balancing Home and Work Life
• Disconnecting from Technology

Then I could create more interesting titles from the generic ones:

• 60-Second Stress-Busting Techniques
• The Importance of Personal Renewal
• Is Food Affecting Your Mood?
• Creative Ways to Balance Work and Home Life
• Cut the Cord: How to Disconnect from the World

This part was surprisingly simple. While I normally could sit and ponder blog post titles for what seemed like hours, I was immediately able to think of several ideas when thinking about picking the brains of experts on a given topic.

Step 5: Create an Editorial Calendar

I had my theme, my sub-topics, and even the specific post titles for the content I wanted to create. All that was left to do was actually create the content, edit it, and publish it. That meant that I actually had to conduct the interviews and then lay out exactly when I was going to edit and publish the audio and articles contributed by the guests.

Tom’s Planner is actually a great tool for organizing an editorial calendar (as mentioned by Simon just the other day, you have until SUnday to sign up if you’d like to get a free premium account for a year).

The first step was getting the content and editing it. Within Tom’s Planner (see image below), I created a place for each contributor and all of the content he or she would be creating. Next to each content piece, I put when we would be recording it and when I would be editing the content.

The second step was then organizing and publishing all the edited content, so at the very top of Tom’s Planner, I created an “ALL” group and listed out the types of content I had available for publishing and then evenly distributed it across the month (see image). I knew I would have one article per person, four audio pieces per person, plus a few other pieces of content. The thing I didn’t know, at least until everything was edited, was where I would use the content, so for instance, lesser quality audio pieces (say, if the sound wasn’t as good as with other pieces) might be used on the “Conversations” section of my site instead of within my premium audio program.

As I would edit and publish, I would be able to move content up from the individual contributor sections.

This has been a really great system so far. I have all of my audio content recorded for September, and with the exception of a few articles, I’m all set on content for the month. Now, all that’s left is editing and publishing, which makes my job a lot easier.

Why a System? Why Not Just Blog?

If you’re running a business blog, there’s generally an underlying purpose behind it. Maybe you want more clients or to create a fan base for an upcoming book. Whatever the case, there’s a reason that you blog, and the content you create should help you reach your end goal. By being more intentional and focused with your content, you’ll achieve greater success in a much shorter period of time and make sure that your content is, in fact, serving the audience it’s intended to serve.

My favorite things about having a system?

• Content has become so much easier to create
• My efforts are more focused and are helping me reach my goals
• I’m more intentional when it comes to guests, which means greater cross-promotion, back links, and visibility with new audiences.
• I’m no longer staring at a blank screen wondering what I’m going to write.

So, what’s your system? How are you staying on track and organized when it comes to your blogging efforts?

Photo by Flickr user Gustty, licensed under CC 2.0.

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However, despite Apple’s restrictions on third-party development kits — notoriously codified in clause 3.3.1 of iPhone’s developer terms — there are toolkits available for layman app developers.

One of the most popular is the web-based Appmakr; though designed for simplicity, large brands including Newsweek, the US Army and AllTop have all utilised the service to create and publish their official iPhone apps.

AppMakr is really designed for packaging RSS-driven sites into standard iPhone interfaces, breaking the development process down into seven steps:

1. Art – name your app, upload a splash screen and a home screen icon.
2. Tabs – import RSS feeds into individual tabs of content – feeds can formatted as video, text and photos and includes hooks into podcasts, Twitter, Youtube, Blogger and iTunes.
3. Customise – add header images to the app’s interface as well as the enabling users to share content via email, Facebook or Twitter.
4. Notifications – creators can manually send ‘push notifications’ from AppMakr to all downloaded instances of the app.
5. App Info – describe how the app will appear in the iTunes App Store.
6. Monetize – advertising from several third-party networks can be incorporated into your app.
7. Publish – the final step, complies and builds your app ready for testing or distribution via the App Store.

AppMakr includes an integrated iPhone simulator, so you can effectively test the app as you move through the seven steps.

With no prior knowledge of AppMakr, I managed to build a basic app that aggregated mainstream news, local and social media in around an hour. Indeed, half of this time was spent creating icons, headers and other screen furniture for the app.

If you’re already a member of Apple’s iPhone developer programme, you can link your Apple account credentials with AppMakr and publish your app with no charge to AppMakr using your own brand. If you’re not a member, you’ll need to publish under AppMakr’s brand with a charge of $999. That may sound expensive, but it’s likely less than the cost of hiring a competent iPhone developer for a day’s development work.

AppMakr’s not suited to anything that needs specific hardware functions such as the iPhone’s camera, GPS, accelerometer or microphone, so you won’t be creating games or productivity apps!

However, it’s a great tool for packaging a website as an iPhone app; whether that’s for a client or your own content.

After iPad announcement day, I provoked a lot of controversy by writing that I felt that the iPad could serve as a travel computer for me. After handling it and trying out its features, I’m now even more convinced that is true.

I’m a writer, more specifically a professional blogger. I’m not doing heavyweight computer tasks when I travel. In fact, I’m usually not even writing when I’m on the road except for brief updates to my web sites. I’m answering email, conducting text-based research on the web, taking notes, and doing other lightweight tasks.

I’m not the only writer or blogger who thinks the iPad can help in their work. After a week with an iPad in hand, the Chicago Sun-Times’ Andy Ihnatko raved about how useful the gadget is for his workflow on TWIT last week. Mashable’s Ben Parr wrote one of his recent posts completely on the iPad, although he admitted that a few things were a pain, like working with images.

The only real processor- or software-heavy task that I did during my last extended business trip was edit photos in Adobe Lightroom on my return flight, which could easily have waited till I got home. It certainly wasn’t worth hauling around a computer that weighs three times as much as an iPad for almost a week just to get a two-hour head start on my photo processing.

The first thing I noticed when getting my hands on an iPad was how big it was. The size was surprising. I had expected the screen to feel smaller than it does. This was good news for its usability for many of the tasks that I do. Many of these tasks, such as web browsing, can also be done on my iPhone but the small screen makes them awkward. The iPad provides the screen real estate to take notes, browse and read without getting a headache from it.

Besides being large, the screen is also gorgeous. The resolution is wonderful and it is just a joy to look at. As spoiled as I am by using my iPhone screen on a daily basis, the iPad screen is even more beautiful, although it obviously gets streaky easily.

Another thing I noticed almost immediately was the speed of the device. It responds to commands lightning-fast compared to my iPhone. This kind of processor power raises interesting possibilities for what the iPad may be able to do in apps that the iPhone can’t, such as in the area of photo editing. There is already at least one photo editor out for the iPad, PhotoGene, that looks to be very robust.

A lot of commenters on my previous iPad article suggested that instead of an iPad I get a netbook for my travel needs. While there is a price penalty for buying the iPad over a netbook, I see the iPad as a better option for me for several reasons:

• Weight: The iPad is half the weight of most netbooks — an important carrying consideration for someone with arthritis in their back.
• Compatibility: Since I’m already heavily embedded in the Mac OS ecosystem (I use an iPhone and MacBook with iCal, Contacts and Mobile Me, for instance), all my data will sync natively very easily with another Apple device. I use the iWork suite, so having a device that can use those files is definitely a plus. I can design presentations at home in Keynote and then take them on the road using the iPad. I can take transfer text notes back and forth in Pages.
• Speed: The tablet format and quick-boot OS will make it much easier to do quickie tasks (such as making a short note in an application like Evernote) than a netbook. Juggling a netbook for such tasks while standing would be awkward at best, and I could be done and have the iPad put away again before the netbook would probably even be booted up.
• Connectivity: For me, the 3G iPad, with its no contract pay-as-you-go connectivity, is the one to have. To have cellular system access with a netbook, I’d have to pay for a connection device like a MiFi or wireless card, which means paying every month for an expensive service whether I really need it that month or not. With the iPad 3G plan, I can have (and pay for) connectivity only when I need it.
• Battery Life: Both the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and Andy Ihnatko are on record as saying the iPad can get 11 hours or more of battery life using power saving settings. This far exceeds the average netbook and is just one more reason the iPad is a superior travel device.

So, how do I imagine utilizing the iPad on my next business trip?

First, I have to gear up. I’ll have an iPad with 3G. I’ll install the following apps: Evernote, iWork (Pages, Numbers and Keynote), Things and WordPress (please see disclosure at the bottom). I’ll take the camera connectivity kit and an external keyboard with me, but the keyboard can stay at the hotel during the day which means I save the weight of hauling it.

Some preparation at home will make my life easier on the road. I’ll add to the iPad’s onboard photo library any photos I think I may want to use from my archives while at the event. I can export my Notebooks from Circus Ponies’ Notebook program to view as web sites in Safari if I think I’ll need them. I’ll also prepare in advance blank draft blog posts that are pre-completed with thumbnail photos (for instance, the event logo) and any advertising banners I intend to use. This will save cutting & pasting and photo editing on the road, and will make posting faster in general. All I’ll have to do is write content and use the camera connection kit or my iPhone camera to add pictures to my posts.

Once on the road, I’ll use Evernote and Pages for taking notes, WordPress or Safari for doing my web posting, Things for editorial planning and Keynote for any presentations. Any contact or calendar changes that I make will be synced to Mobile Me for backup. I can store and pull files that I need from Mobile Me or Dropbox.

I am really looking forward to the day that I can leave my laptop at home when I pack my suitcase.

Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Penzu: Just Like a Paper Journal

Penzu seems to have been devised around the idea of a paper-based journal — the kind you write your most personal thoughts in. As we know, the web is hardly a place to publish all of our most personal thoughts, yet there are times when we might want to share a particular idea or story with others.

The public nature of traditional blogs has seen them evolve to the point where most bloggers take care to vet closely the content we publish on them. Penzu saw an opportunity to provide a completely secure journal tool that would allow users to create content in total privacy online, and share pieces of that information with a selection of contacts only as and when they saw fit.

Penzu has really stuck closely to the paper journal model. The page display is ruled, as a journal might be, and users type directly onto the lines. The free version of the service allows you to add images to your entries, lock them, share them, print them and receive comments on them, so there’s plenty of flexibility.

The paid version — Penzu Pro — allows “military-grade encryption” (the same 256-bit AES encryption algorithm used by the U.S. government), rich text formatting, content export and import in a range of formats, tagging, page and profile customizations, and more. It costs just $19 per year, so it’s certainly affordable.

Paper vs. Electronic Journals

Yes, you could keep a paper journal to record your personal thoughts, but as Penzu points out, it can so easily be lost or stolen. Also, since Penzu’s an online service, your journal will be accessible any time, anywhere, so long as you have web access. You don’t need to carry the journal with you, and your Penzu journal will contain your on-the-spot thoughts, rather than a summary of key points at the end of the day.

The other benefit of an online journal is, of course, that it facilitates sharing. Write an entry in a paper journal and it’ll be difficult to share it with contacts down the street, let alone those on the other side of the world. Travel and work journals contain information you may not want to publish to a blog, but which you’d conceivably want to share with a specific group of people. This is where Penzu comes into its own.

Penzu: The New You?

The ethos of Penzu seems to be that keeping a journal is primarily a personal experience. Its security features, and the fact that there’s not a stable URL that users can visit to access your content (they’re simply mailed URLs to each journal entry you want to share) ensure that your journal is private, unless you send entries to your contacts.

In this way, Penzu will appeal to those who prefer not to publicize every aspect of their lives. In a professional sense, I can see Penzu being handy in a range of situations, from mentoring and collaborative exchanges, to restricted-access blogging. Users may well choose to share every post, but with a selected few contacts, and that’s the real benefit here: no one sees the content you don’t want them to see.

A staff member might keep a Penzu journal about a trade show they’re attending on behalf of their employer, and share it as a resource with team members. A small business owner might keep a daily activities diary so they can track productivity, ideas and reminders, and perhaps share the relevant pieces of that content with associates or mentors. A creative might keep a journal of their process to share with like-minded peers, so they can obtain input and feedback on their approach, execution, and work. An entrepreneur could use Penzu to record and develop business ideas, and to share the formulated concepts with others when the time comes. The scope really is endless.

Can you see a place for restricted-access online journals in your work or life?

Photo by stock.xchng user typofi.

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

What’s the Problem?

I think part of the problem with blogs is that they are too static and dull. We need to infuse new life into blogs and make them more dynamic. Just as Flash added a freshness to web sites when it first appeared on the scene, we need to do something that will change the game for blogging.

The other part of the problem involves the incredible shrinking attention span of readers/viewers. Hollywood learned long ago that motion pictures need to reach out and grab the audience right away within the first 10 minutes or else its opening weekend will be its last. That’s why most movies look and feel like music videos these days. Quick cut editing and special effects reign supreme. Even the publishing industry has taken its queue from the movie industry and insist that its authors write tighter and more exciting stories.

What’s the Answer?

I believe the answer could be the same one that’s being touted as the potential savior of newspapers and magazines: The Apple iPad and similar devices, plus the new digital newsstand that it will usher in. Yes, I am suggesting that we look at blogs the same way we look at newspapers and magazines. It’s not a coincidence that many blogs have experienced increased subscriptions after changing to a more magazine-styled theme. Imagine providing your content in a more dynamic and exciting manner, like Wired’s demo iPad app:

Kiss Your RSS Goodbye?

Some pundits predict that subscribing to RSS feeds will become obsolete, thanks to technology such as PuSH (PubSubhubbub) and the proliferation of mobile applications. This could be why many blogging professionals have already started making their blogs available as iPhone apps. Their reasoning is that they want their work to be accessible and available to as many people as possible, and if it means porting it to a new platform, then so be it. The good news is that these same iPhone apps will also work on the iPad. Another factor in the increase of “blogs as apps” is the continuing decline in the cost of having an application developed. Pretty soon, releasing your own app will become as common as launching a blog.

Content is Still King

I’m not suggesting that glitz and glamor are better than substance and message. On the contrary, I firmly believe content will always remain the most important aspect of any blog, newspaper or magazine. I’m just saying that we cannot ignore the obvious truth of today’s readers and viewers. We cannot stick our heads in the sand and hope that the quality of our content alone will win the day. We need to deliver our best work (be it blog post, article, movie, book, etc.) in the best packaging available if we want to give it a chance to be consumed/digested and, ultimately, appreciated.

The new generation of mobile devices such as the iPad and other tablet computers will become ubiquitous and will help us deliver our message in exciting new ways. We should not lament this changing of the guard; instead we should embrace it and adapt to it, and take our blogging to new heights.

What do you think? Could iPads and similar devices usher in a new age of blogging?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.):

Web Tablet Survey: Apple’s iPad Hits Right Notes