How blogs can link brands and customers, plus tips for better business (higher ed?) blogging

This Palm Beach Post article summarizes how business blogs, when done well, can connect companies to their customers.

What constitutes a well-executed blog? The article lists seven tips for better business blogging and adds, “The biggest demand is that the blog be honest and transparent.”

David Berger of IBM (which has around 4,000 blogs), notes: “If you overtly try to use blogs to advance some sort of corporate end, you’ve already lost the battle. There’s a smart way to capitalize on the medium. It’s in the authenticity of the bloggers themselves.”

Good advice for higher ed bloggers, too.

Via Peter Kim, who is quoted in the story.

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Blogs really are viral, sorta

Some Carnegie Mellon comp sci students have come up with a way to determine how information spreads among blogs. The algorithm also shows which blogs you should read to be as informed as possible in the as “cost-effective” a manner as possible. (Alas, this blog doesn’t make the cut. Hope you don’t feel you’re wasting your precious time here.)

But what fascinates me about this study is that the same algorithm the researchers used to figure out how information spreads in the blogosphere can also be used to determine how disease outbreaks occur in water distribution networks.

Consider a city water distribution network, delivering water to households via pipes and junctions. Intrusions can cause contaminants to spread over the network, and we want to select a few locations (pipe junctions) to install sensors, in order to detect these contaminations as quickly as possible.

The sensor placements obtained by our algorithm are provably near optimal, providing a constant fraction of the optimal solution. Our approach scales, achieving speedups and savings in storage of several orders of magnitude.

And you thought blogs had no redeeming social value. That may be true for most of them, but at least the study of blogs has yielded something of value to society.

Link via Steve Rubel’s Twitter page.

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