Blog Nominations Called For

The Ndarala Group in conjunction with Regional Living Australa and Brian Brown's Pajama Market: small business blog of the day would like to invite you to nominate business blogs run by smaller Australian professional services firms or individual professionals for consideration for inclusion as one of the featured blogs on Brian's site. The key requirement is that the blog be a business blog.

I have spoken of Brian's blog before. It has developed into a leading source of information about and examples of small business blogging.

Just to set a context for our invitation.

On 23 July Dave Lee reported in his e e learning blog on the opportunity he had had to join some of top media and content names in San Francisco for a conference on the future of media that was held concurrently with a similar gathering in Sydney, Australia. I wrote about it at the time in a post on my personal blog, Informal Learning - the end of courseware?.

In his post, Dave included a chart comparing US and Australian involvement in content creation on the web. There were some important inter-country differences.

Eight per cent of Americans had a blog as compared to 4 per cent of Australians, 14 per cent of Americans had added material to their own web site as compared to 10 per cent of Australians.

These statistics threw light on something that had puzzled us, the huge apparent gap between the US and Australia when it came to the use of blogs for business purposes within professional services. Yes, the US economy is twenty or so times the size of the Australian economy, but the gap was far bigger than that. Now the stats suggest that US blog intensity is twice that of Australia, thus doubling the gap.

We believe that business blogging is a valuable tool, especially for smaller firms. The trawls I have done across US sites show great use of blogging by independent consultants in particular as a way of keeping in touch with a broader marketplace.

Our hope is that we can use this call for nominations to identify and promote individual business blogs within Australian professional services, thus providing demonstration models to encourage broader usage.

Nominations can be submitted by inserting the blog name in the comments section or by emailing me on ndarala(at)optusnet(dot)com(dot)au.