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Yahoo launches shopping blog

Consumer spending may have been off last month, but Yahoo is doing its best to pump up purchasing intentions. 

The Yahoo Shopping blog is intended to "interesting products, great deals, new site features, and user generated content," the company's p.r. people said in an e-mail.  Think of it as something like a commercial Engadget, with a broader focus.  While the posts are written in first person, it doesn’t appear the blog is open.  Comments are open for registered users, but suggestions for featured products need to be e-mailed.

Yahoo's effort is a transparent promotion, of course, for merchants and advertisers who sell things on the site.  Because of Yahoo's huge audience, and folksy, conversational style, the blog could help move a lot of product for Shopping.Yahoo.com clients.  To some extent, it's in competition with other shopping sites like Glam.com, Daily Candy, and Omiru.

Yesterday's Startup Journal had a great story about a network of 14 consumer-product oriented blogs.   Blogpire Productions publishes Web logs about single-serve coffee, shaving products, and poker accessories.  Inspiring story for an entrepreneur.

Disclaimer: I own shares of Yahoo.

Who's the next Scoble?

Make You Go Hmm  and Valleywag are fueling the speculation. Early chatter makes Niall Kennedy a 3-1 pick.  Formerly of "an RSS feed geek" with Technorati, he currently works for Microsoft, so he'd be an insider, like Scoble was.  Kennedy also does a weekly podcast with the Net's latest pro-blogger, Om Malik. 

Scoble's last appearance as a Microsoftie, by the way, was on the This Week in Tech podcast produced at Vloggercon.  At one point, you can hear Scoble laugh and say, "I am the propaganda."

People who should be pro-bloggers

    If Om Malik and Bob Scoble can blog for a living, so can others.  Here are 5 I'd like to see quit their day jobs and blog full time.  I'd pay.

Tom Friedman, The New York Times
    Smart, clear, analytical, wired and connected.  I will vote for anybody, Democrat or Republican, who promises to make him Secretary of Commerce.

Joe Brancatelli, JoeSentMe.com
    This consultant to airlines and travel Web sites knows how to get a good deal; knows great places to go, and deserves to be listened to by management at hotels and airlines.
   
Ken Auletta, The New Yorker
    It's not just that he knows all the big, old media names. He could pay attention to new media and insure we don't repeat history.

Scott Simon, NPR
    His curiosity and intelligence propel him to find fascinating facets of a story.  I always learn something listening to him.

Anthony Bourdain
    So, I used to cook.  Bourdain combines his culinary talent with a lust for travel.  I'd enjoy his perspective outside the kitchen.

Who would you like to see blog fulltime? Make a suggestion.

How did Scoble get away?

Marc Canter suggested that the reason Robert Scoble ankled to a 19-person Silicon Valley startup was, in part, because he was "treated like s***."  That's hard to believe.

On his blog, Scoble says Microsoft offered to move him to Silicon Valley, near his son, and he could still work for the company. "I just knew that if I stayed at Microsoft all the action would be up in Redmond and that would be tough to manage," he explained. Scoble also praised the company, telling readers the things Microsoft does "matter."  He also said he worked for some excellent people in Redmond.

Don't believe Scoble was treated badly.

DO believe that Scoble's become a star in his own right (and write).  His value to Podtech.net is huge.  When Scoble sits across a table with a company and tells them they should blog and podcast, he speaks with great authority.  He's done it, for the richest man in the world.  And in so doing helped humanize Microsoft.  One blogger speculated Scoble's already bigger than PodTech.net, and that the company should change its name to take advantage of that. He'll be a big asset to Podtech's bottom line.

We have to hope Scoble will be more than a salesman.

Calacanis' dream: Malik moves

AOL's blog entrepreneur-turned-exec/mascot should be smiling this morning.   When Jason Calacanis founded Weblogs Inc. about two years ago, he predicted that one day mainstream journalists would leave their day jobs and start to blog, giving up W-2 income and make a run for it on their own.

Om Malik, a senior writer for Time Warner-owned Business 2.0 is making the move. Let's hope it goes better for Malik than it did Dan Gillmor's "Bayosphere."

"I have written about start-ups for so long, and have always wanted to see if I had the chops to build something from scratch. I hope I can," he explained on his blog.

Malik is going to do a startup.  He's going to hire "smart engineers and code jocks" to "develop Web services that enhance the experience of my reader community."  He's already gotten some Silicon Valley VC money to seed the venture, GigaOM.

Malik will also write a monthly column for Business 2.0.  Not a bad way to self-promote while you're scrambling to get a business off the ground.

Scoble leaves Microsoft

Microsoft's most visible blogger, and all-around great guy, is moving south. Robert Scoble's signed on to take what he learned about blogging and podcasting and vlogging with Microsoft in Redmond to work with John Furrier's PodTech.net. Podtech concentrates on producing content for businesses and has more than a dozen clients including Intel Corp. and Yahoo. (Listen to Scoble's podcast about his move.)

On his Web log, Scoble mentioned some reasons for him to make the move south to Silicon Valley. One is to be closer to his son. The other is it'll be flat-out more exciting to work in a startup company where he'll be the 19th employee than one of 61,000 at Microsoft.

Scoble expects that podcasts and mobile video are going to get a lot bigger. "When Microsoft comes into that market it'll create new opportunities," he blogged. "New media distribution channels. And it's not the only one coming. I've seen and heard about some really awesome stuff coming soon from other companies as well. That all spells OPPORTUNITY for all of us."

Speaking of opportunity ... Scoble says that he spoke with Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom over the weekend - who told him her videoblog is now seeing about 300,000 viewers a day. "Did you know that advertisers are now paying her $85,000 per week?," he added. "That's almost as much money as I made in an entire year of working at Microsoft."

Meanwhile, back in Redmond, there are still hundreds of in-house bloggers. And it’s always possible Scoble’s exit will re-invigorate company-critical, analytical and thoughtful postings from Mini-Microsoft, like Bob did.

Blogfade: Apprentice blog for sale

Turn out the lights, the party's over.  TheApprenticeBlog.com is for sale on EBay, and after five bids, the price was just $100 Wednesday morning. 

The publisher, Lex, writes she's just gotten bored by it all.  Just like viewers did during the show's fifth season.  Monday night's finale was the highest rated show for the season, but also the series' lowest-rated windup show.

How much didn’t people care?  I watched the show last night, via mighty Tivo.  As the show began I remarked to my wife, "You know, I read the Journal, the Post, and USAT cover to cover today; was online looking at news all day, and nowhere did I see any mention of the Apprentice winner." 

Anyway, the blog’s for sale.  Lex claims about 5,000 page views daily. “TheApprenticeBlog.com has a solid readership base and participation making it a breeze to maintain and monetize," she says. The deal includes the domain name, six seasons of archived content (one of the Martha Stewart Apprentice effort), plus Typepad hosting until the end of the year. 

"When I started this blog, I was really excited about the show, the technology and learning," Lex wrote.  Now, "I am uninspired."

Here's the EBay listing.

Speaking of Donald Trump, Variety reports plans for a reality TV show based on the "Monopoly" game which would have contestants renovate real estate properties. The story.

Arianna opts for e-mail promo

Arianna Huffington writes to say she's launching an e-mail digest next Monday. 

"My latest blog post and a selection of the most popular and newsworthy takes from our roster of news and opinion makers." Huffingtonpost.com.

AP gets blog friendly

For the second time this week, the Associated Press has a new media partnership that puts the 160-year-old news distribution company in the spotlight. 

Yesterday it was a deal with Topix.net, pointing news searchers to AP stories.  Today's deal is with Technorati, the blog search service. It includes the 440 AP members which subscribe to the Hosted Custom News Web product. 

AP stories on those sites will show a module featuring "Top Five Most Blogged About" articles.  If you click on a story, you'll be taken to a Technorati.com search page listing blogs which are writing about the story.  "Blogger voices will now be heard in several hundred local online news organizations across the USA. I believe that this is a deep validation of the power of citizen media," said Technorati's chairman, Peter Hirshberg.

Get past that 'citizen media' cliche and sense the new energy in this old geezer.  In the past three years, AP killed its all news radio network, birthed a Web-friendly online video news service, and created a youth-oriented news feed called ASAP.

This is the handiwork of Tom Curley, the former president and publisher of USA TODAY. He championed this new Internet thing, and nurtured the start up of USATODAY.com (where I also worked).  In 2003, he shifted from Roslyn, Va. to New York to become CEO of the AP. 

In retrospect, you might say it took him a lot of time to make new media splashes with this old media agency.  But tethered to the newspaper industry, the AP couldn't slash and burn and dart into new opportunities.  You might say Curley had to wait for things to get worse before they could get better: for member newspapers to realize they (1) needed to change, (2) didn't have enough bright young minds and money to do it themselves, and (3) Curley wasn't some nut.

Acronyms rule at Syndicate Conference

Almost 300 registrants at this week's Syndicate conference in New York probably sound like they're speaking in the tongues of geeks. 

"What the show has turned out to be is a whole bunch of publishers and PR people trying to figure out what's going on with syndication," said Eric Norlin, speaking on behalf of the show's organizers.  "They're talking about the tools and technologies around things like blogging, podcasting, RSS, OPML, Wikis and all the way out to Internet TV and mobile platforms."

Listen to my interview with Norlin from Syndicate conference

The producers of podcasts were attending, many looking for backers.  The audience for the producers of Mommycast's seemed most interested in how and when they know to insert a sponsor's billboard. (Like death and taxes, a sure thing at tech conferences is the question, "How do we make money at this?")

The founders of  Newsvine said that while they gather news from hundreds of sources, it's not enough to trust in the news sources.  "They even have human people who are watching people who post stories, and if they see one that is not true they will not take it down and they will 'ding' that person's reputation," Norlin said.  "The role of the editor becomes more and more important in this new world."

News and photos from Syndicate:

• Attensa Launches Outlook 1.5, the First RSS Reader to Use Predictive Prioritization to Intelligently Display RSS Feeds in the Order the Reader Will Want Them
• The Premier Event For Content Syndication Trends Kicks Off Today in NYC
• Flickr photos