By: Adam McFarland | Source: site-reference.com

The recent trend of using the press release to promote an online business has emerged with good reason – good press costs very little and can do more for a business than thousands of dollars of marketing. Most businesses use press distribution services like PR Web or PRFree to get the word out about their news. While distribution services certainly can be effective, they tend to miss out on arguably the most influential group of the press – bloggers.

Research Bloggers in Your Industry

More is less when it comes to contacting bloggers. Buy a list of 1,000 bloggers and send out a generic email to all of them and you’ll likely get no response. But send a small amount of personalized emails to the appropriate bloggers and you’ll be shocked at how many positive responses you get.

The first step is to make a list of the bloggers that would be interested in your story. You can generally get a feel for whether or not a blogger would be interested in your story by reading a couple of posts and checking out their bio. If they’ve done a few similar stories in the past or they are heavily involved in your industry, there is a good chance they’ll want to hear your story. If not, leave them off your list and move on.

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By: David A. Utter | Source: webpronews.com

The Yodel Anecdotal site, debuting as "yet another self-serving corporate blog," will offer an inside look at life within Yahoo.

Yahoo’s newest member of its corporate blogging lineup, Yodel Anecdotal, launched yesterday with a greeting from editor Nikki Dugan. She described what they wish to accomplish with the blog:

We want to share insights into our company, our people, our culture, and the things that occupy our cluttered minds. We’ll cover emerging trends, provide some behind-the-scenes commentary, profile interesting Yahoos, spotlight our beloved users, reveal some of our quirks, tap into guest bloggers, sprinkle in some videos and photo essays, and generally think out loud (lucky you… you get to listen). You’ll hear from interns to executives. Some days we’ll be light and airy, others we’ll get serious.

It’s an approach Google has used for quite a while on the Official Google Blog. Google has ranged from discussing its involvement in litigation against it to announcing Pearl Jam videos hosted on Google Video.

Yahoo’s development of Yodel definitely sets it apart from Google’s official lighthouse on the craggy coastline of the blogosphere. Where Google has stuck with its minimalist design approach, Yahoo goes straight for the optic nerve.

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By: David A. Utter | Source: webpronews.com

The successor to Microsoft’s MSN Spaces blogging service launched this week with an assortment of new features for its users.

Yet another MSN property has had the MSN name removed and replaced with the Windows Live moniker. Windows Live Spaces launched with a heavy emphasis on social networking features aimed at a younger audience.

The new look and feel of Spaces can be customized to suit the user. Spaces allows users to upload up to 500 photos per month to the site. A Live Contacts box uses icons to show when friends have updated their Spaces recently.

That Friends module and others can be added through the Customize feature in Spaces. Users can plug in new modules, or change the theme and layout of their Spaces page, from the Customize menu. Modules can be dragged and dropped around the page as desired.

Niall Kennedy, who departed blog search engine Technorati for the challenge of working with Microsoft on Windows Live, posted his opinion of the new Friends feature:

The new friends integration is the real hotness, allowing users to define their relationships and see more information about the people who matter most. The friends module shows Messenger presence and status messages and adds a "gleam" next to any contact with a recently updated space. Friends lists are browsable within a Spaces web page as well as within that contact’s mini-profile (contact card) within Messenger.

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