One in Ten Small Businesses Will Be Blogging

A joint survey by Hewlett-Packard and Harris Interactive has found that 10% of small businesses plan to include blogs in their marketing plans, and 16% plan to invest in blogs over the next two to three years.

Although one can interpret this as saying that 90% of small businesses are not considering blogs, the 10% who are are early adopters, not unlike the first wave of businesses who got on the Web in the mid-'90s. Most likely these businesses are either technology- or media-related, and with a blog-savvy customer base.

However, Anita Campbell of the Small Business Trends blog notes that most conventional blog formats are ill-suited for business use. She suggests that instead of the usual diary metaphor for blogs, small businesses view them as press rooms, categorizing posts by topic rather than date, including search features, and integrating shopping-cart tools. It seems like there's an emerging business opportunity for business-oriented blog hosting services and blogging consultants...

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In Case of Emergency, Don't Rely on E-Mail

E-mail is a wonderful thing. But one thing it was never intended to be is a method of rapid emergency notification. While generally fast, e-mail messages can take their sweet time getting from sender to recipient, depending on how they're routed. They also can fall prey to firewalls and overzealous spam traps.

For some reason, America Online has been treating e-mails issued by the emergency coordinator in Indian River County, Florida, as spam. As a result, AOL customers who subscribe to e-mail notifications about hurricanes, tornadoes and other emergencies have not been getting their alerts. The county says it is working with AOL to resolve the issue; in the meantime, it advises AOL customers to whitelist the county's e-mail address.

I've noticed similar problems with the local Amber Alert e-mail I subscribe to (though not having anything to do with AOL). I have the messages, along with other notifications (weather, breaking news, sports scores), sent to a text-capable cell phone, so I can get them "anytime, anywhere." However, during the last Amber Alert issued for my area, I didn't receive a message until 24 hours after the alert was cancelled!

Again, I must stress that this is not totally the fault of the technology, which is being used for a purpose for which it was never intended. Perhaps the time has come for a new e-mail protocol to be considered, one that would be used only by appropriate authorities to issue high-priority emergency notifications. These would be expedited through Internet routing tables and granted exceptions through all firewalls and spam traps. Strict governance would control precisely who could issue messages, and under what circumstances. Devices and software that recognized the protocol could flag an incoming message, assuring that the recipient reacts to it promptly.

With more people depending on the Internet and text-capable mobile devices for emergency communications, it's an idea that deserves some exploration.

UPDATE: AOL has reportedly resolved the blockage issue with the Indian River County authorities, though AOL defends its actions by claiming that the method in which the emergency e-mails were sent made them indistinguishable from commercial spam. "You just simply cannot in this day and age put up an e-mail server and crank out thousands or tens of thousands of e-mails without doing some legwork ahead of time," said an AOL spokesman.

Source: Techdirt

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