Gee - TechCrunch had a post today on When Everyone Is A Blogger, Nothing You Say Is Off The Record.

In a way, isn’t that what we’re moving to?  With Google Search Wiki - I could pretty much comment on any url from any search result, and anyone else who wants to see my comments can.

Look, this story about a Belgian Diplomat and a New York Based blogger is pretty interesting in the level of “over reaction” that happened - here’s the story, according to TechCrunch:

Current Belgian Minister of Defense Pieter De Crem apparently stumbled into a Belgian bar in New York City on Monday evening with his entourage.

Ha, ha, guess he was drunk, or something … anyway - here’s the rest of it….

Following his visit, bartender Nathalie Lubbe Bakker blogged about their visit (in Dutch), talking about how disgusted she was of how drunk De Crem was and how embarrassed she was about his behavior. Worst part, she wrote, was the fact that one of the politician’s advisers admitted to her that the meetings they were there for on taxpayer’s money were in fact canceled because the UN was meeting in Geneva (which is about 330 miles from Brussels).

Clearly, one of the Diplomat’s advisers was out of line - and talked about a sensitive issue in a bar - which unfamiliar people.

He reportedly told her they had decided to come to NY anyway despite being aware of the cancellation because the policital situation here was ‘calm’ and that he’d ‘never visited the city anyway’.

A couple of days later, someone from De Crem’s office had a telephone call with Nathalie’s boss, after which she was promptly fired. This was initially denied by the politician, and it remains unclear if her termination was a direct result of the call or the blog post in question.

Somehow, the story was picked up and got a lot of attention from local bloggers and the mainstream media, which ultimately lead to the Minister having to defend himself about the NY trip in Parliament.

That’s how it is with Social Media happens - it’s the democratization of information - everyone can share - there is total transparency - and it can’t be controlled easily, if at all - but if people relax about it - it’s much easier to influence.

Yesterday, he made a statement to the Parliament admitting that a call was made but that there was never any insinuation about the girl getting fired from her job (which makes me wonder why the call was made at all then).

But then, the story unfolds some more and it ends us being blamed on the Blogger -according to what I just read in TechCrunch:

He also stated:

I want to take this opportunity and use this non-event to signal a dangerous phenomenon in our society. We live in a time where everybody is free to publish whatever he or she wants on blogs at will without taking any responsibility. This exceeds mud-slinging. Together with you, other Parliament members and the government I find that it’s nearly impossible to defend yourself against this. Everyone of you is a potential victim. I would like to ask you to take a moment and think about this.

De Crem added that he’s asked his legal counsel to see which measures could be taken to ‘defend his integrity’.

Needless to say, his statements indicating that ‘blogging is a dangerous phenomenon’ spurred a lot of angry (and funny) reactions in the local blogosphere, making the situation for him much worse than it already was (much like that German politician who blocked the local wikipedia.de website).

Let me just say this - is a blogger now sopposed to go out and get training on what he or she can or can’t say?

The TechCrunch Blogger Robin Wauters takes the point of view that it’s not Blogging that is a problem for the Belgian Diplomat, but that he comes from a culture and time that doesn’t know what to do with this kind of media - and treats it like a news story or news leak, when it’s sharing a personal experience in a blog.

People, and especially politicians representing them, need to wake up and smell the coffee. The world is changing, and blogging is now a big part of it, with all of its good sides as well as its bad ones. Live and learn. The sooner you get the hang of social media, the more you’ll see the opportunities in there rather than the threats.

To be totally honest, I would not be offended if there was some sort of Guidelines no so much what we can say, and what we can’t, but what information needs to be included.  For example, would it have helped if Nathalie Lubbe Bakker pulled at a Flip Digital Camera and filmed the statements?  Or would that be more damaging.

And if the Dimplomat’s party really felt pissed - maybe they should have been more open about it at home, instead of a Belgian bar in NYC - but that’s another story.

Probably nothing - it’s not about the money - but some people do get paid according to a post on Read/Write Web - How Much Do Top Tier Bloggers and Social Media Consultants Get Paid? We Asked Them!

A friend sent me the RWW link today and I was thinking … so all that great stuff I read in TechCrunch and Gizmodo, etc .. the top Blogger is lucky to make what, say, a Teacher makes after a year or two - with a lot of uncertainty thrown in.

I mean, didn’t Gawker just close down a few more blogs recently and lay off some “Top Bloggers” - Yep… The Gawker Layoff Tipline.

If your into security - blogging is not for you.   But I find Blogging is great if your inclination is to blog, anyway.

It’s opened up a lot of doors for me, a lot.

TechCrunch has a post on State of The Blogosphere: The More You Post, The Higher You Rank that stubles upon a truth I found out, by accident, a few years ago.  What I started posting to Webmetricsguru.com, I usually did 4 or 5 posts a day - and it’s really hard to do that many posts on Web Analytics.

I don’t think anyone posted as much as I did, but my subject matter often strayed into adjancent areas, along with some posts that didn’t relate at all - but I felt, belonged anyway.

And now, according to 2008 State of the Blogosphere along with Erick Schonfeld’s analysis - it’s revealed that bloggers who post more, rank higher.

“…Blogging is a volume game. The more you post, the more chances there are that someone else will link to one of your posts. (Technorati rank is based on the number of recent links to your blog). The majority of the Top 100 blogs tracked by Technorati post five or more times per day, and a full 43 percent post more than 10 times per day. Meanwhile, 64 percent of the 5,000 blogs ranked lower than 600 post two to four times a day, which is still a serious commitment.”

Recently, Sebastian who authors WebAnalyticsBook.com, and I started Blogspeedway.com, a new blog network, with a twist, we’d not only build community, but work on research, as well.

It’s all fine to talk about what Blogging is, or is not, but it’s interesating that an article on Blogging as a way into a new business published by The New York Times.

I wrote about it at BlogSpeedway.com. And while your visiting, if you wanted to blog, but haven’t yet figured out why or what, but still, wanted to, and kinda knew your should, try filling out our form.

Also, read a post I wrote recently at Blogspeedway.com,

Blogspeedway speeding along down the Internet Highway

while I was on my way to an exclusive retreat, a retreat that would never have happened, had I not been a blogger - it’s all true.

I’ve been using Radian6 quite a lot thanks to meeting with Marcel LeBurn and working with the great people at Radian6 to funnel web analytics ideas of how to make it more of a tool that can be used for Data Analysis beyond what PR or Marketing departments might employ it for (ie: reputation monitoring is fine, but identifying influentials and then setting up the analytics to segment on that traffic can yield very deep insights - but no one thought of Radian6 as something to use that way - till I bought it up).

Another capability of Radian6, and packages like it, is to come up with keyword phrases that are connected to conversations around major topics - this is a capability totally absent from the current set of Keyword Research tools, that were never built for that purpose - never really built with Social Media in mind, and don’t have a concept of a “conversation” - while in Social Media, Conversations are the “brick and mortar” of communication - you can’t have Social Media without a Conversation - 2 way or peer to peer.

With that in mind, Radian6 is making improvements to their core product this weekend - here’s the notice that went out today to current users of Radian6:

Advanced Data Drill-Down Capabilities
Now from within your widgets when you want to drill-down into the data in addition to being able to open the data in a River of News widget, you can also launch it into a Times Series widget or a Topic Cloud widget.  For example, if you are clicking on a spike in activity in a Time Series graph, you now have the option of opening the content in a River of News widget or in a Topic Cloud widget so you can see the top words being mentioned during that spike.  To access this feature, when you click on a widget (i.e. A word in a topic cloud, a bar in a chart or a line on a time series graph) simply click and hold your left mouse button down and a new menu will open providing the advanced drill-down capabilities.

All of the widgets now have this capability and you can keep drilling down multiple times to get more and more specific in your research.  As an example, you could open a time series graph from a topic cloud, then drill into the time series graph and open another topic cloud then click on a word in that cloud and open the content in River of News.

New Social CIM (customer interaction management) Module
This optional add-on to the core R6 dashboard enables you to effectively management and track your team’s online engagement efforts.  Seamlessly integrated into your River of News widget and into your browser through an integrated toolbar, you can now easily assign/manage engagement tasks, categorize posts, set priorities on posts, track notes and your online responses, and run reports including detailed audit trails of your team’s engagement activities.

This new module also introduces the flexibility to have users accessing Radian6 directly through their browser, without needing to configure the entire dashboard.  The browser plug-in gives you quick and easy access to the information you need, with the Social CIM capabilities you need to get engaged in your brand’s conversation with a quick and easy workflow.

New Training Videos and New Feature Overview Videos
In the Help section of the dashboard you can now access training videos if you need a refresher on building Topic Profiles or configuring widgets.  You can now also access short demonstration videos of new features that have recently been added to the system.

Check out the video section to see quick demo’s of all of the new features in this release!

Enhanced Vote Count Dynamic – Digg.com support
In addition to tracking de.licio.us bookmarks, our Vote Count dynamics (listed in River of News widget and in Influencer model) now includes support for Digg.com.

Enhanced API Feed
The programmatic interface into the Radian6 content now include three new data elements for each post: language of post, country of post, and author of post.
In order to deploy these new changes, the Radian6 dashboard will be offline Friday August 29th from 9pm EDT to 10pm EDT.

Which reminds me - Radian6 will be attending BlogWorld.com and so will Buzzlogic.com - and that sorta suggests that BlogSpeedway.com, aka, me and Sebastian Wenzel, or just me, should attend as well.

I’m still making my mind up about this as if I do attend, it’ll be a last minute thing - but many of my friends will be there and we’re looking for a lot of new bloggers to join our Blog Network - BlogSpeedway.com

OK, so blogs are now going to get the Social Networking tools Social Networks  have - according to Read/WriteWeb in a post titled .. The Next Social Networks Will Be Powered By WordPress and Movable Type

“…BuddyPress is a set of WordPress MU specific plugins, each adding a new feature. When complete, BuddyPress will offer extended user profiles, private messaging, groups, friends, status updates, albums, as well as something called “the wire,” which sounds a lot like Twitter.”

Sounds like Movable Type already has Social Networking, as of V4.2

“..With Six Apart’s recent release of Movable Type 4.2, that revolution has begun. The new release provides DIY tools for building your own social networking platform which includes member profiles, forums, friending capabilities, rating of content, and more.”

That reminds me, about a year ago, I thought about how great it would be if you could build a Social Network around a blog.  But then, I thought - well, how many Social Networks can one belong to?  Certainly, not a different Social Network for each blog.  According to the RWW post, that is a problem here as well…

“…the only problem with MT and WordPress going the social networking route is that they are adding yet two more social networks where you will have to establish a profile, find and add friends, etc. Where’s Facebook Friend Connect? Where’s Google Friend Connect? Where’s your portable social graph in all this?

But now, I’m seeing, we don’t really need to have different Social Networks for blogs, all we really need to do or want to to is enable Social Networking features on blogs - and let the Social Graph to the rest.

And, I feel, that’s what we’re going to come to - that point, in the next year.

It's happening - finally, Webmetricsguru.com is moving off of Know More Media - and it's possible - in the next couple of days, depending on how the moving of this domain and content is going - you might see Webmetricsguru.com offline for a day or two.

I'll try to do my best to keep the blog up and available - but it's quite possible and perhaps normal, that it could be offline for a short time.

1. The domain ownership is being transferred to new owners (us)

- DNS changes might make the blog appear unavailable - and can take some time to propagate, so even if everything went smoothly, I can see forsee a short period of interruption of between 1-2 days - though I'm sure if I did this every week, maybe I'd have it down pat and be a pro at this - but I don't do this regularly.

2.  We have to move all the content of Webmetricsguru.com out of Movable Type and into Wordpress

3. Move the RSS Subscriber ownership from Know More Media to me, that might be complicated

4. Get rid of all the Paid stuff - anything that could have brought down the Google Penalty on all of Know More Media.

5. Get the Web Analytics tracking in place, hopefully retain the Sitemeter settings.

And there's a bunch of stuff I have not even thought of yet.

So,  it's quite possible that this blog will be down for a few days late this weekend or part of next week. 

If so, I'll be back after a short interruption - stay tuned by going to www.theanalyticsguru.com - that is always updated and I hope you subscribe to The AnalyticsGuru.com as well as Wembetricsguru.com, esp after it's moved to it's new location and look.

I guess when people want to sell more candy, they think "…blogs" and then tie it with being cool ….. at least, according to this commercial that I saw over at Bloggers Blog - Guy Gets Girl With Blogging in Twix Commercial

"…Blog has become a mainstream word and it's a hot enough topic that advertisers are now using it in commercials. Here's a Twix commercial where a guy convinces a girl to come back to his apartment so they can do some blogging. "Oh Blogging," she says, "I love Blogging!"

Who knew blogging was that cool?

I guess if we're going to have a Meet the Bloggers Cable show for Political Blogs/Bloggers then we also must have equal representation - with Playboy Asking Which Female Blogger we'd Like To See Sans Clothing

Interesting… I didn't think Blogging was THAT Sexy … then again …

"…Playboy has published profiles of nine women bloggers (loosely defined) - Xeni Jardin, Violet Blue, Julie Alexandria, Veronica Belmont, Amanda Congdon, Brigitte Dale, Sarah Lacy, Sarah Austin and Natali Del Conte - and asked readers to vote on which one is “sexiest.” The winner will be asked to pose for Playboy."

Hmm .. now who'd would I like to see (one can always dream of ) ….. Violet Blue (kinda already there, if you ask me) or …. Veronica Belmont  or …..

I was able to meet with Todd Parsons this morning of www.Buzzlogic.com for over 2 hours, discuss life and see a demo of Buzzlogic in action.  I was impressed and, of course, want access to it - who wouldn't?

Rather than write alot about Buzzlogic - I'd rather just show you what I saw by … showing you what I saw - and here goes: