stefan

Anton, has upgraded our editor and added a few functions.

It is much easier to insert a link now. You just mark a word, click on add link and insert a URL.

Also you can position a photo. And now the text floats around the image either on the right hand side or on the left hand side of the photo. Right now it only works per drag and drop, but that will follow short term.

Also, I cannot wait to see our new templates and template structure online. I know that we have announced this already a while ago but now we are close to launch and it should be online within the next 10 days.

 

I have been to London last week to meet a couple of people like Fraser and Joe who run this very exiting e-government project readmyday.

On Tuesday I gave a presentation about blogging in non-profit organizations to some of the international webmasters of amnesty international. I very much enjoyed the discussion that followed the presentation. Organizations like amnesty certainly need to go through a process of setting their goals first.  I believe that knowing the technology inside out already helps in this stage of the process.  Every feature has been created for a certain reason. So knowing the features means knowing all the different goals that these features were built for. 

Niall has published a very interesting article that also inspired parts of the presentation ( Blogging_ai_Nov05.pdf).  If you download the presentation or use it in any way please do not change anything.

hlx a leading German low cost airline - comparable to Jet Blue - has launched a blogging community using the 21Publish solution. With every booking of a flight customers of hlx now get the chance to start blogging by either posting to group blogs or by posting private photos.

The group blog concept is a perfect fit for brands like hlx. Users can post to blogs on e.g. Spain or other destinations to share travel experiences. Only when an entry has been published it is re-published on the profile page of the author. This way the brand is able to set the agenda and develop topics closely related to their brand. The user has by default writing access to all of these blogs. Also each post can be moderated by the administrator to keep inappropriate content out.

As far as I know hlx is the not only the first Airline to launch an open blogging community but also the first brand apart from media companies to have launched such a community. I refer to my last post on marketing and user generated content and I still believe that we will see much more of this coming up in the future.

Thank you hlx for choosing 21Publish!

Steve has written a new whitepaper on  Corporate Group Blogging. The whitepaper espcially highlights the advantages of Corporate Group Blogs over single author blogs or even just corporate news blogs that do not mention any author in particular.

Personally I think that Corporate Group Blogs such as the one from Mercury Interactive or PackNation (although this is more of an industry group blog) are the future of Corporate Blogs. I recently have read (unfortunately I forgot where that was) a post about research findings saying that people tend to believe employees more than they believe the boss. I think that sounds very credible. Corporate Group Blogs are intended to include employees  in corporate communication. So if the aforesaid is true Corporate Group Blogs should be a lot more credible than just single corporate blogs.  That is why I believe that Group Blogs are not only far more lively but also better to build tighter trust and ties with constituents.

Fredrik has written a post about it with some of the pros & cons he sees in Corporate Group Blogs. One of the cons is that a reader might dislike one of the bloggers. But even if that might be true in a Group Blog environment such a reader would have other blogs to read too. While if there was just one single corporate blogger a reader has no one else to turn to if for some reason he dislikes this persons. So in my view Corporate Group Blogs even reduce the risk of somebody disliking the personality that blogs for the company.