SmartCompany has released a nice list of Australia’s 25 top business blogs, created by Brad Howarth.
With the list is a useful article running through the highlights of the blogs on the list, including why these leading businesses blog, the value they get from it, how they go about it, and far more. There is also a number of good points on the keys to running a success blog.
From the article it sounds like I was the first of the 25 bloggers featured to start blogging, kicking off in 2002. Next month I’ll be celebrating 8 years of blogging. Many more have joined in since then.
Below I have put the list of the 25 business blogs together with their authors, ranked by their web traffic from Alexa as of today. A couple of cautions to sound here: This list is about the top business blogs, which is more about business impact than traffic. Also Alexa figures are pretty unreliable, though at the moment there unfortunately aren’t many better tools to rank blogs, with Technorati rankings changed and Wikio not comprehensive.
My blog comes up at rank 7, though most of the ones ahead of me are professional blogs while I get to this when I can (unfortunately this is my second post in over two weeks now :-( ).
See the article in SmartCompany for the full review and to see descriptions of each blog. Brad has added some other blogs that just missed the cut this year on his blog.
1. Problogger (Darren Rouse): 2,069
2. Telstra Exchange: 8,771
3. Just Creative Design (Jacob Cass): 21,866
Read more →
Australia’s top 25 business blogs ranked by traffic
By Ross DawsonSmartCompany has released a nice list of Australia’s 25 top business blogs, created by Brad Howarth.
With the list is a useful article running through the highlights of the blogs on the list, including why these leading businesses blog, the value they get from it, how they go about it, and far more. There is also a number of good points on the keys to running a success blog.
From the article it sounds like I was the first of the 25 bloggers featured to start blogging, kicking off in 2002. Next month I’ll be celebrating 8 years of blogging. Many more have joined in since then.
Below I have put the list of the 25 business blogs together with their authors, ranked by their web traffic from Alexa as of today. A couple of cautions to sound here: This list is about the top business blogs, which is more about business impact than traffic. Also Alexa figures are pretty unreliable, though at the moment there unfortunately aren’t many better tools to rank blogs, with Technorati rankings changed and Wikio not comprehensive.
My blog comes up at rank 7, though most of the ones ahead of me are professional blogs while I get to this when I can (unfortunately this is my second post in over two weeks now :-( ).
See the article in SmartCompany for the full review and to see descriptions of each blog. Brad has added some other blogs that just missed the cut this year on his blog.
1. Problogger (Darren Rouse): 2,069
2. Telstra Exchange: 8,771
3. Just Creative Design (Jacob Cass): 21,866
Read more →
ABC24: Can newspapers successfully charge for online content?
By Ross DawsonMy thoughts on newspaper content paywalls were recently featured in an interview on ABC24.
The segment begins with an overview of newspapers’ plans to charge for online content, including quotes from Rupert Murdoch and industry commentators, and is followed by an interview with me.
My comments in the interview include:
* There are better chances of charging for online news working for Australia, given the unusual concentration of media ownership.
* Of the various models of charging for online content, Australian newspapers are most likely to provide some content for free and a subscription for full access.
* While we cannot know whether the ‘grand experiment’ of charging for online news in 2010 will work given changing consumer attitudes, the chances are slim it will succeed.
* Some newspaper proprietors seem to hope that bundling online and iPad news with newspaper subscriptions will increase print subscriptions, though that is likely to be negligible.
Holidays in Fiji – yay!
By Ross DawsonWe are about to leave for Fiji! We planned our holiday a couple of months ago, when we realized this was one of the only times I could carve out before the end of the year. Since then I’ve been too busy to appreciate the fact that it’s coming up, though knowing I’m about to go on holiday has made my intense schedule a bit easier to cope with. I will realize that it’s real when I arrive there.
We went to Fiji just over a year ago, a few weeks after Phoebe was born, and Leda hasn’t stopped talking about it since then, so it will be great to get her back there. It’s an easy destination to get to and spend time in.
I have long thought that a great holiday is one in which you start thinking things you couldn’t even imagine before you left. One week is a bit short to allow submerged ideas and perspectives to emerge, though I think they might, as I play with the kids in the pool.
Back soon!
The Daily Me is finally arriving with the convergence of social news and tablets
By Ross DawsonLast week I wrote about Flipboard and Paper.li: Social news curation hits the tipping point. The news today is that Betaworks, which developed or supported the highly successful Tweetdeck, bit.ly, Tumblr and far more, is working on News.Me, a ‘personalized news service’, in collaboration with New York Times.
While neither organization would say much about it, this will clearly be a social news service that will tap, among other resources, the vast data bit.ly has (presumably) collected on what links are shared on Twitter and other social networks. New York Times invested in Betaworks in its March $20 million Series B, and then shifted one of its early stage products into Betaworks, where it is soon to emerge as News.Me.
In his 1995 book Being Digital Nicholas Negroponte wrote about the idea of a ‘Daily Me’ newspaper, that would provide news tailored to the individual. This spawned a multi-year debate about the supposed evils of the Daily Me, which would mean people wouldn’t be exposed to the diversity of the world and would live within their own navels.
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Seven trends driving the future of financial advice
By Ross DawsonThe main reason I haven’t been able to blog or Twitter much over the last week is that I am currently on a national speaking roadshow for a major financial services firm, hitting five cities in six business days, ending today. The firm is building relationships with its key financial advisors, hosting dinners in the best restaurants in each city, preceded by presentations from a prominent industry figure on the role of regulation and from myself on the big-picture future.
While I work across many industries, my background in financial services means I am often drawn back into the space. Some of my reflections on financial services trends are captured in posts I’ve written after keynotes I’ve delivered on the role of the reputation economy for professionals and financial advisors and the future of global financial services.
The future of financial advice is a massively important issue, not just due to the size of the sector, but also because quality advice is critical for many people in supporting their financial well-being. I will spend some more time delving into this issue, but for now here are seven key trends and issues that I see are driving the future of financial advice.
1. Transparency is making commissions more visible.
Transparency is an inexorable trend across industries, not least in financial services. Visibility of what are sometimes massive advisor commissions on financial product is shaping attitudes to what is fair and appropriate.
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7 Shifts: The Future of Social Media and Internal Communications
By Ross DawsonMelcrum recently released a report on How to use social media to solve critical communication issues, with as usual some great case studies and many practical insights. Go to the report website for a full overview and executive summary.
I was asked to write the closing section in the report, on The Future of Social Media and Internal Communications. Below is my article in full. If you’re interested in the topic also see my recent Thoughts on the future of workplace communications.
The Future of Social Media and Internal Communications
Organisations achieve their objectives by bringing together the talent and energy of many people. As such, the raft of emerging communications platforms today have the potential to literally transform how organizations work. From the 1990s, email fundamentally changed how most jobs were done. Now a wealth of new communication tools are being used to create sometimes dramatically different ways of working.
Based on the rapid emergence of social media and other new communication platforms, there are seven key aspects to how organisational communication will change.
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Flipboard and Paper.li: Social news curation hits the tipping point
By Ross DawsonFlipboard and Paper.li are two of the hottest properties in media today. Over the last six weeks they have taken social news curation to a new level. This will undoubtedly soon spawn hordes of competitors, while these leaders in the field continue to evolve their offerings. The result will be that we all have far better access to the news that we want from world of infinite information.
Flipboard was launched on July 21, at the time announcing that they had received $10.5 million in funding. For several weeks it was ranked one of the top few free iPad apps in the News category in US, UK, and Australia, attracting massive interest for what it calls a “social magazine”.
Paper.li has been around a bit longer, but has just taken off properly in the last few weeks, as the chart below illustrates.
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Visualization of top iPad News apps in Australia
By Ross DawsonAs part of our ongoing research into iPad and media, and also to provide some insights for the audience of the iPad Strategy Workshop we ran at Newspaper Publishers Association, we created a visualization of the top 30 paid and free iPad apps in Australia, as of 24 August 2010.
Click on the image for full-size pdf
The chart shows in the left hand column free apps, and on the right hand side paid apps, each ranked from #1 to #30 in order of popularity on iTunes. The following bar shows the price (for paid), the user rating on iTunes, and the size of the download in MB. The horizontal axis for paid apps indicates price.
The color code shows the type of app, bringing to attention a number of interesting features, for example that aggregators are very popular in paid apps, and that broadcast and newspapers dominate in free apps.
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Presentation from iPad Strategy Workshop at Newspaper Publishers Association
By Ross DawsonThe iPad Strategy Workshop at Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum was a big success. In a large room laid out for 120 there was just standing room by the time it started, with great content and a highly engaged audience.
The Twitter stream for #iPadStrat gives a pretty fair overview of proceedings, though there were just a small minority of people on Twitter in a room full of newspaper publishers.
Here are the slides from opening presentation, as promised:
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Launch of iPad Media Strategy framework
By Ross DawsonThis morning I ran the iPad Strategy Workshop at Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum in Sydney. To provide a framework for discussion at the workshop (and also as part of our ongoing research into effective approaches to the iPad for media and news organizations) I created a visual framework of key strategic issues, as below.
Click on image for full-size pdf
I will delve into these strategic issues in later posts.
This is a Beta v1 version, so as always, please give feedback on how to make it more useful, including anything that’s missing or things that could be put better.
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