The International Herald Tribune is running a fascinating piece about brand blogs today . In the US, there are a whole series of blogs devoted to companies such as Disney and Stabucks. The point is that they are not necessarily aggressive. They are just being set up by people who use the products, and want to swap information with other customers. The way these blogs are emerging is as marketplace conversations - and pretty big ones. One devoted to the viideo rental firm Netflix now has 100,000 visitors a month. The companies that learn to co-operate with these blogs are, I suspect, going to be the businesses that do best in the next decade.

More years ago than I care to recall, Matthew and I (the two founders of Blog Relations) worked on a trade paper. We both fondly remember a gloomy but likable ad salesman called “Bondy”. After doing his daily round of “smile and dial” calls he would come over and report, “It’s the Goby Desert out there boys”.

Skip forward more than a decade to the dotcom boom. I was working on a .co.uk with a very able and more cheerful ad salesman who could have sold sand to a Mongolian tribesman in the Gobi Desert. He used to take his clients (well I suppose his male clients) to the Venus Lap Dancing Club across the road. They would buy online banner ads by the bucket load at very fancy prices. If the .co.uk hadn’t been burning even more money in its own multi-million advertising campaign, it might have broken even.

Now those who ply the ad sales trade are starting to look a bit redundant. They are being replaced by an enormous automated production line known as “Google” which places advertisements infront of relevant eyes almost by magic, or, as Google would prefer to say, “by science.” Advertisers are getting more careful how they spend their money. They are at last beginning to realise that the sales patter and the lap dancing are not really the point.

“This year, Google will sell $6.1 billion in ads, nearly double what it sold last year, according to Anthony Noto, an analyst at Goldman Sachs. That is more advertising than is sold by any newspaper chain, magazine publisher or television network,” reports the New York Times “Google wants to dominate Madison Avenue, too”

One of the key employees at Google is a former ad salesman himself. When he was at Netscape, Omid Kordestani used to sell multi-million sponsorship deals. He came to Google as its twelfth employee and called up the same clients offering them $1000 deals to buy “key words” to produce little text ads when people searched the internet.

In this inteview with John Battelle on his Search Blog, Kordestani denies that Google wants to do down the ad agencies of Madison Avenue. They need to work with them - but anyone who is interested in how the media business has been so severely disrupted in such a very short space of time should read both the Kordestani interview and the New York Times article.

If you want an example of how a blog can create media coverage, take a look at this post on English Cut by Thomas Mahon, A bespoke Savile Row tailor in london. The New York Times, Business Week, and The Guradian are among those who have written about the top taylor and his made-to-measure blog - and he doesn’t even mention BBC Radio 4 which featured him on the Shop Talk programme.

“Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.” Forbes Magazine.

“blogging represents the revolt of the voiceless against the heedless — and for the first time in the entire history of American business, corporate America can no longer ignore what its customers are thinking and saying.” - David Kline, Blog Revolt

I know that this isn’t entirely on subject, a but a blog is a good place to let off steam about customer service nightmares, particularly online ones.

We’ve discovered something pretty extraordinary about our business bank, an institution in the UK known as Abbey. Before you panic, this only applies to the business banking side, not, as far as I know, to the personal banking, but it’s quite extraordinary.

When you do payments online with Abbey National Business Banking you can think you are sending money to one person, when in fact you are sending it to an entirely different one. I still have to pinch myself to believe I wasn’t dreaming when the Abbey representative told me this, as if it was an ordinary everyday sort of thing about a bank. I was saying, “but this is outrageous, it’s basic banking, you’re creating chaos”, but nice though the Scottish lady on the end of the phone was, she didn’t really seem to “feel my pain”.

I was mystified why my payments were going astray. Fortunately, they were just going to another account owned by me - but they could have been going to somebody else entirely.

Apparently it’s like this. If you have two logins on your account - which most businesses do - and if you and your business partner both set up payment schedules 1, 2, 3, with nicknames, John, Jane, Jill, then Abbey’s online payment system gets completely confused. John might be 1 on your first login, and Jill might occupy that spot on your second login.. You send money to Jill, but really it goes to John. There’s no way to review the account details before you press “send”. You just see the nickname which you’ve set up. It’s scary.

As far as I know, this only applies to their online Business Banking facility. It’s been pulling in lots of customers because of its attractive interest rates, but Abbey’s been cutting staff and moving the location of their payment centre. Abbey has been bought by a Spanish Bank, Banco Santander, and it doesn’t want to spend any more money on IT until the New Year when it will be merging its system with Santander’s.

Anyway, I forgot to mention, all this applies to another small business which I own with my wife. Matthew and I at Blog Relations have been trying for months to open an account with Abbey. It’s been a long trail of delays and lost papers. We’ve both been far too British and patient about it. It’s no use having a good interest rate if your cheques are sitting in a drawer. Now we are taking our business eleswhere.

We in the UK expect banks to be bad, but there has to be a limit…..

Sir Martin Sorrell, who as the boss of WPP is probably the most poweful ad man in the world, has given a powerful description of how the world’s media owners are getting nervous over the speed at which their business is shifting onto the internet. Sir Martin said at an internet advertising conference today there was a “considerable degree of panic” among traditional media owners over the speed of the onset of the digital age.
“I think they see circulation figures, TV viewing figures and revenue figures that give them deep cause for concern,” he said.”Over the last couple of years I cannot recall seeing a very happy media owner, certainly not of the traditional type. They are all worried about what is going on.”

It’s a good point. News Corp has been the most obvious example, but plenty of other traditional media owners appear to be in the same boat. In the UK, for example, they have been moaning about the advertising recession even as the rest of the economy was booming. I suspect as the economy turns down they will really start hurting. The same is true in the US. The economy has been growing at 4%, a year, and still the old media are laying off workers. When the downturn in the UK and US really arrives, as it surely will, then panic will be too mild a word for what the old media owners will be feeling.

I’m aware that we’ve been a bit scimpy with the number of categories we’ve created to file our posts under. I didn’t want them to get out of control, so that we had a forest of categories in which they eye can’t find the tree it’s looking for.

There is another possibility - to create tags so that search engines like Technorati can latch on to key words. These don’t effect the organisation of your site.

For those interested in tags, there’s a good discussion on asymptomatic.

I’m going to file this under How? What? which might have been better named -”tips”. But then, when we began this blog, we didn’t know that posts with the word “tip” in the title were going to be among our most popular. That’s the problem - you don’t know these things at the outset when you set up the organisation of your site.

A crafty blogger has discovered that Google is experimenting with a service to rival eBay. It’s called Google Base and Seweso has even got screenshots.

FT.com has expanded its RSS service so that it now offers 67 feeds. It’s good to see the traditional media helping to popularise the convenience of RSS. I might prefer to read the FT through Bloglines rather than their slow loading website.

I know that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for the blog-from-your-browser-tool Flock . I still think it repays half an hour of your time getting to understand all its useful features.  But for those who think it’s a bucketful of  half “baqed” ideas,  try flocq.

You can always trust an advertising guy to coin a phrase. Neil French, the creative director of the advertising giant WPP, resigned last week, after some unflattering remarks about why women weren’t suited to senior jobs. It was he complained “death by blog’. It was an accurate enough description. Some bloggers picked up on his remarks, and within days French had little choice but to step down. There are two interesting points about this saga. Thge first is that executives are going to have to think a lot more like politicians. They will have to wach what they say all the time, since any careless remark may be picked up and turned into a ‘gaffe’. The second is that blogging may be used to enforce a kind of grey, political correctness, in which nobody is allowed to say anthing. That won’t necessarily be healthy.