PrideFest issue of Out Front Colorado (including the Official PrideFest Pullout Guide) is on stands now!

Be sure to pick up the latest issue of Out Front Colorado. The first of two official PrideFest issues for this year, the May 38 edition of OFC features articles on the new Sex in the City movie, Trans 101, an interview with Aubrey Sarvis, El Futuro Community Center, Naughty Pierre, fabulous Las Vegas, and all of the rest of the regular OFC features and columns you've come to know and love over the years.

Yours truly has a piece on Bisexual Pride in the paper proper and one on Blogging for Pride in the PrideFest pullout. Read them after the jump.

Social Media for Business (that includes blogs!)

In times of economic downturn, it's more important than ever for businesses to explore alternative modes of advertising and brand-building. Like blogs.

Study: U.S. Blog Advertising To Hit $746M By 2012

From ProBlogger: Advertisers seem to be embracing the niche-ready blogosphere with $746 million expected to be spent in 2012 on getting messages in front of Internet users. Unlike social networks, such as MySpace and Facebook, which present a hard-to-define audience, blogs seem ready-made for online advertisers. “Like podcasts, blogs tend to appeal to specific audiences. Accordingly, much of the demographic targeting that marketers work so hard to achieve in the mainstream media is already done for them,” writes eMarketer. The... [Read the full story]

BlogPro Blog Denver PrideFest 2008 marks 100th post

Yesterday the Denver PrideFest Blog marked the occasion of its 100th post. Since its inception on March 28 of this year, Denver PrideFest Blog has provided daily news, entertainment, interviews, rare photos and videos by, for, and about one of the country's top ten biggest and best GLBT events.

BlogPro is proud to be the official blogger for Denver PrideFest 2008 and on a personal note, I've had a wonderful time working on it. It's great to be able to be a part of an event that is so important to Colorado's GLBT community. Anyway, we've still got a month to go before Denver PrideFest is upon us and I've got some really cool things planned for the blog so be sure to check it out.

Number 1 on Google! Business Week Takes a New Look at Blogs

Three years ago, Business Week published a story about blogs.

"...you cannot afford to close your eyes to them [blogs], because they're simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they're going to shake up just about every business - including yours...Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They're a prerequisite.

-- Business Week Magazine, May 2, 2005

According to Business Week that cover story, Blogs Will Change Your Business, archived on the Web, received hundreds of thousands of page views and still comes up #1 on Google search results for "blogs business."

Now they've updated and revisited the blogging issue and you can read the rest of the story by Denise Wakeman for allbusiness.com here.

Business Blog Writing with The Blog Squad

Business Blog Consulting

Business Blog Consulting is a site devoted to demonstrating how effective weblogs can be for communicating with customers and marketing to new customer prospects. You will find here lots of examples of business and corporate blogs, as well as resources to help you learn more about the topic.

Blog survey: Why do people read blogs?

In a nutshell, people read blogs because they want better, faster information that they can't get anywhere else.

Should I wait this blogging fad out?

John Bell says, 'no way':

"I guest-lectured at a colleague's graduate class at Johns Hopkins where I also teach a class. One of her students - a young man in his twenties studying to enter marketing and/or communications - asked seriously, "Can I just wait out the whole blog-thing, wait till it fades away or do I have to pay attention to what's happening?"

Didn't expect that question from him, a digital native. But I do hear it a lot from business "gray-hairs" - the digital immigrants. The short answer is that blogging will not fade away like a fad. I certainly believe there will be a "leveling off" of the explosive growth we have seen. But too many people have found a voice and a reward for publishing their POV to expect that to recede It is part of a movement that will continue to grow and change affecting how we market from this moment forward. ... "

Read the rest at the Digital Influence Mapping Project

Blog of the Week: WeatherBug

WeatherBug, the leading provider of weather information services, manages and operates a proprietary network of 8,000 WeatherBug Tracking Stations and more than 1,000 cameras that are strategically placed at schools, public safety facilities and television stations throughout the U.S. These professional grade weather stations generate live neighborhood level reports every second (unlike other weather providers; their data is up to an hour or more old). Check out more information at their blog, www.blog.weatherbug.com.

Market your business online

Brazil: A chat about blogs and journalism

From Global Voices:

"Mario Amaya [pt] talks about how the mainstream media has adapted itself to the Internet, transition from paper to digital, advantages of blogging, and the Brazilian blogosphere in preparation for his piece for Palavra na Tela 2008 (Word on the Screen) [pt], a special chat about Blogs and Journalism hosted by the Digestivo Cultural site."

Read the rest here.

Blog Quotes

"The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom." - Jon Stewart

Blogs and the GLBT community

From Harris Interactive and Witeck-Combs:

" ... Regarding web logs or blog use, the survey found about one in four GLB individuals (24%) report visiting personal blogs, which are websites that serve as an individual’s personal online journal, compared to 12 percent of heterosexuals. In fact, over one in three GLB adults (36%) visit their favorite blogs everyday, while only 19 percent of heterosexuals say they visit their favorite blogs daily. GLB respondents also reported having a more positive reaction towards advertising found on blogs, by two to one when compared to heterosexuals (22% vs. 9%). ..."


Read the rest of the article here.

Blog of the Week: The Hype Machine

The Hype Machine blog follows music blog discussions. Every day, thousands of people around the world write about music they love — and it all ends up on The Hype Machine.







Offering up a number of ways to explore the music that flows through the site including; Front Page: What's going on right now in the blogosphere; Radio + Chat: A mix of popular & newly posted music & a place to talk about it; Popular: The most popular artists, searches and blogs on the internet right now; and Hype Spy: Snoop on what other people are listening to on the site, The Hype Machine is here to make music discovery fun and get artists paid.

An interview with a 14-year-old professional blogger

Forbes' best small business blogs

"It stands to reason that budding businesspeople would be attracted to Weblogs, those do-it-yourself publishing sites that embody the very spirit of entrepreneurism. What do blogs add to the small-business dialogue that a whole host of magazines, cable channels and Web sites don't? In addition to transmitting news, industry gossip and occasional rants, the best small business blogs offer interactivity, allowing readers to chime into the dialogue with their own bright ideas. ..."

Read the rest here .

Quote of the Day: Sergey Brin

"Google actually relies on our users to help with our marketing. We have a very high percentage of our users who often tell others about our search engine." - Sergey Brin

*blogspot is owned by Google

Sarah Boxer, author of Ultimate Blogs

"... Today there are, by one count, more than 100 million blogs in the world, with about 15 million of them active. (In Japan neglected or abandoned blogs are called ishikoro, pebbles.) There are political blogs, confessional blogs, gossip blogs, sex blogs, mommy blogs, science blogs, soldier blogs, gadget blogs, fiction blogs, video blogs, photo blogs, and cartoon blogs, to name a few. Some people blog alone and some in groups. Every self-respecting newspaper and magazine has some reporters and critics blogging, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. ..."

Read the rest here.

Blog of the Week: Monster

"The world of work can be sometimes terrific and sometimes terrible, sometimes crystal clear and sometimes completely confounding, sometimes rewarding and sometimes repugnant (are you sensing a penchant for alliteration?). Searching for your next job and/or career just magnifies all these paradoxes.

As members of the team that creates Monster Career Advice, we spend a lot of time thinking and writing about careers and the pursuit of them. The Monster Blog gives us a chance to write about an array of issues in a free-form style. Sometimes we'll talk about the day's big news stories and sometimes we'll muse about workplace microwave etiquette -- just depends on the day."

Find out more at Monster Blog.

What should your business blog do for you?

It's RSS Awareness Day

Bloggers and people in the Internet industry are aware of RSS but its reach seems to halt there. To inform more people about the benefits of RSS the RSS Awareness Day campaign was launched by Daily Blog Tips. You can find the RSS Awareness Day website at www.rssday.org . The website has a page with buttons and banners for bloggers who want to spread the word about the RSS holiday. This page also contains information that shows how few Internet users know about RSS.