I’m here covering Robert Scolbe, Jeremy Zawodny and Matt Cutts talking about their blogs for this sessions at Webmasterworld Pubcon.

Jeremy thinks most of the blogs out there are meant to be read by less than 10 people-people are popping up all over the place and people who you know or who are interested in you can get a chance to know about you.

Matt thinks that alot more people are going to be blogging and for those involved with SEO and blogging is one the good ways to get traffic - esp in letting people know there’s traffic out there.

In a way , this session is interesting because we have official representatives of the three major search engines present and talking about their blogs.

In the corporate environment there are other requirements - when Robert Scoble took a look at this logs the other night he realized he had 40,000 readers!  When bloggers start out they usually just have a small audience and blogging has been a real evolution of the last few years.  At first, people would say to Jeremy Zawodny that he’d get fired at Yahoo for bloging…but it did not happen.

One of the issues Matt Cutts has is knowing Google and knowing the various people that he can go to get problems taken care of - but  when he blogs about an issue he thinks he might tick off the people at Google who he knows he can directly go to (when the issue is about Google - ie: something about Google Maps, etc).

Anyone can say anything about you in the Blogosphere and every day people would say something about you and you have to be there to give your side of the story.   Jeremy pointed out that all this is possible because of modern search technology.  Say you want to do a search on "Yahoo Sucks" or "Microsoft Sucks" you can get all the different opinions about that …all because of search.

Anytime someone writes something (like Danny Sullivan writing about the 25 things i hate about Google) better stuff can come out of it (ie: Google Sitemaps).

Questions:

For Jermey:  Tell us about your post about Google Finance?

Jeremy said that Google Finance reminded him of what could have and should have happened with Yahoo Finance.  But Jermey had talked to alot of people at Yahoo Finance (he worked on it for 3 years) and had been talking to that team all along - and when he posted on his blog a couple of weeks ago - he had exhausted the possibilities).     That was a case when writing about something in the company was better because it got him a higher level of contact than he would have had without posting.  His point was that as Yahoo is growing they need to keep this stuff from happening again (when he started there was 2000 people, now there are 10000 - and it’s hard to know who is the right person to go to).

A discussion ensured on the time element - in order to participate in the "discussion" you need to be part of it as it’s going on - and blogs allow you to do this. 

Matt Cutts: There is an official policy about what you can post about - the first Google blogger had disclosed some financial projections and that put us back about 6 months (now we have blogs about all sorts of things).

Robert Scoble  - if your going to blog about your company know the risks and if your going to say something about the company that you think is going to raise eyebrows - know why your doing it.

Jeremy Zawodny - if your going to be writing about work at Yahoo there’s a clause that says you should let your managers know about it (I hope I got that right)!

Matt Cutts: My mom actually had a blog before i did (she used blogspot…?) (everyone laughs…).   Matt only started his recently.

Question 2:  How does blogging work with your personal life?

Matt Cutts: Matt handles web spam at Google and he started the blog last July - what keeps him going - he says it’s a ton of fun and he’s happy at Google.  It’s hard to keep up.

Robert Scoble: it’s hard to keep up.

Jeremy: it helps to be unmarried and not having kids

Question 3: What’s your motivation for blogging (to Jeremy):

Jeremy started over 3 years ago when a scientist he knew about invited him to look at his blog and then he started himself to have fun.  He enjoys reading the comments he gets and the more often he posts the more comments.  It’s more important to get the right audience than to get the largest possible audience.  I’m always amazed at what people react to (he admits he’s a poor judge of that).  It’s fun, there’s always something unexpected.

Matt Cutts:  SEO is still hard and there’s a lot of misinformation out there and by starting the blog was a way to get good information to people.  Also, Webmasterworld is a great place for that - a blog can be a persistent place to point people to. 

Robert Scoble - I’ve traveled around the world for my blog and I’ve really enjoyed blogging (he did not say those exact words but that is the jist of it).  His last three interviews are the same way, they had printouts of his blog and they went right to the chase.  You join a company because of personal relationship.

Jeremy: having the blog accelerates the process of them getting to know you in an interview or in a conversation - people can know you before you know them).

Matt: I don’t think I’ve ever had someone join Google because my blog but I can tell you about a case of someone who applied to Google recently and mentioned my blog - I heard about it and looked at this comments over several months - they were good so I recommended him for the job).

Question 4: what is the best way to get started with Bloging?

It might be nice to have your own domain if your planning to do it for a while - Robert thinks you should read 50 blogs for two weeks becore you start.  Try out the different free services first.

Jeremy: be clear on why your blogging in the first place.  Robert says that if your not writing about something at 2 AM that really turns you on you probably won’t be doing it three years from now.

END of SESSION