Leftovers

After a ten-day hiatus I came back to more than 1500 items in my feed-reader. I deleted many, but I can’t miss out on predictions and other stuff, so some 450 remained which I am still chewing my way through.

Apperently, an FTD study turned out that blog was the most used word in German business publications in the last 8 weeks, ahead of items like risk management or corporate governance. Fine, groovy. But will my non-blogging friends see me jump around? No, they will not. We are just at stage one, maybe the end of it in Germany. Stage one being awareness, accepting the idea of "yes, there is something new called weblogs".

Next in line is of course understanding the power of the web and of weblogs in particular. It seems that over the holidays at least one company has managed to show how not to do it. The team of the German blog Werbeblogger wrote a piece about supermodel Heidi Klum more than a year ago and now received an email, supposedly from her father, urging the blog to remove the name from an URL etc. (the name Heidi Klum of course)
Patrick at Werbeblogger blogged this and… you can find the timeline here. Even Steve Rubel had it. (very early, as to be expected). At the same time, a judge in Bremen is feeling the heat because she wrote a letter to the well-known Shop-Blogger to take one of his pages down for name-infringement.
My guess is we will actually see a lot of these cases in the upcoming year, offline companies taking it to the bloggers. Come to think of it, my other blog, Pöbler.de, could be a likely target because I complain a lot on it and googleranks ok.
So, "understanding the blogosphere" it is for Germany in 2006. Boy, am I looking forward to 2007. Maybe, the major surge (aka wising up on the corporate side) will happen earlier, Nicole would like the business.