The nice lads over Elastic Path (from right here in Vancouver) have put together a great white paper called “Blogging for Retailers.” (Follow link to download your copy)

If you blog for business’ sake - at all, then you should read it. They talk about retailers, specifically of the ‘large scale’ variety, but literally every word applies to any blogger who uses their content and conversation as a marketing tool; be it a service business, or any-sized online retailer. Toward the end is a glossary of terms for the uninitiated.

Also, Dave O had fellow ‘Elastic Pather’ Jason Billingsley and Bryght’s Boris Mann join him for a podcast on the same subject. A great listen to go with a great read.

Many thanks, Gents.

We are growing in numbers. We are are extremely polite, almost to a fault. We say “eh” a lot, even if we try not to. We work in Marketing and Communications and we are…

Canada’s 1% Blogging Army.

We spread the word about new media marketing and PR tactics, and we evangelize the things we love. We get to know one another through generous linking to one another, and then of course, we say thank you. A lot.

Big thanks to Sean Moffitt for creating the list of 150 ‘MARCOM’ bloggers in Canada. It’s a great list, and one that I sure am proud to be part of. Click the image above the read the list over at Buzz Canuck.

John of Obviousness.net tells us of his favourites, and I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, so here’s mine:

Like John, I couldn’t get on without:

• Gmail- Email me for an invite: jordanbehan[at]gmail.com

• Bloglines- Although I hype Netvibes for its simplicity, I’ve been monitoring my favourite feeds in Bloglines since the beginning.

• Wordpress- She drives this site, and many client sites as well. And we love her. Code is Poetry, after all.

• YouTube- for the same reasons John gives. (Except the part about the kids) It’s the most widely used, and it has everything.

• Flickr- If you don’t love Flickr, then I’m not sure you and I can get along. Just kidding. Or not.

Also, I’m rather dependent upon:

• Basecamp- For project management, to do lists, etc.

• Pandora- So I can rock out while I work!

What are your favorites? The ones you just can’t live without…

Well, wouldn’t you know it? According to Read/WriteWeb, Yahoo spent a cool $10-12 million to acquire MyBlogLog, the latest social media web 2-point-whatever tool that all the cool kids are using.

I first mentioned MyBlogLog a few months back, and since then I’ve started to make use of the widgets, stats counters and even messaging that it offers. Fellow blogloggers, hello! For fun, why not click through to the site to have a look at your own smiling avatar in the sidebar? I love that feature, it reminds me of some of the cool people that come by to have a read, and it makes me feel happy. No, really. And if it sounds like I’m gushing over MBL, it’s because I am. I like it, almost as much as my brother likes MySpace. But not quite .

Update: Duh! Here’s me on MyBlogLog.

The surprising thing to me is how good Yahoo is at acquisitions. Such a big company, with such an epic history on the net (relatively, of course), and yet they still have the wisdom to secure great web services like Flickr and the former example; ones that actually have a certain amount of genuine cachet among the early-adopting-power-user set. And they’re not afraid of spending some dough to get them either. (Update: Later, in the shower, I realized how funny that line must sound, considering what Google paid for YouTube) So, although I was starting to think that Google would always provide me with all of the tools I needed for absolutely free, I find myself migrating away from the big G, and oddly content with a handful of Yahoo products. Have you used Upcoming.org lately? It’s wicked good (Italics represent poor impression of a Boston accent) for events and networking, in case you didn’t already know.

I don’t mean to sound as if I don’t still use about a half-dozen Google products that I am just “chuffed” with, (Google, I am heartily sorry if I have offended you…) I just can’t help but notice that Yahoo is always upping the coolness factor too.

On a related note, I just finished re-reading Michael Gerber’s E-Myth Revisited, and I’m starting to build operations manuals as to “How we do it here” at Tell Ten Friends. You know, just in case someone were to one day make me an offer of 10 mill or so to buy this here small but thriving firm.

I would want to keep the chair, of course.

I’ve added some new gems to my blogroll (”Stuff I Read,” in the right column). As always I only add things that I read on a regular basis, and that I’m keen to share with readers.

You might find yours in the list, but don’t be heartbroken if it’s not there…I have several others short-listed that may be added soon.

Enjoy!

Update: How could I forget Converstations, and Obviousness.net?

Roland is in the middle of an interesting SEO/content management debate, and I have to say I agree with him:

Yes, a static website is much better than no website. But with modern blogging software like WordPress and content management systems like Drupal, Joomla, Plone it’s easy to setup static pages as well as blogs and you then get all the advantages of blogs (ease of editing, RSS which leads to higher search engine rank) and traditional static websites. This means you have a system where anybody can update the content without needing a webmaster or FTP which means the site is more likely to be up to date unlike most static websites.

(self portrait by Roland)

He continues..

Technical people and web designers who recommend to clients to use static pages with FTP, Front Page, Dreamweaver, etc. are doing their clients a disservice! It’s 2006 not 1999!

Better to use WordPress (even though I work for a Drupal company I’ll continue to plug WordPress for blogs and simple static sites; use Drupal if you want a comprehensive web presence including a true community site) and just use its static web pages features and make the blog part invisible) than to use some custom or hand coded static site.

I couldn’t agree more. Perhaps it would be too blatantly self-promotional to remind everyone that if you need a site built with Wordpress…

First, the existing Z-list, as reported by Mack Collier:
BrandSizzle
bizsolutionsplus
Customers Rock!
Being Peter Kim
Pow! Right Between The Eyes! Andy Nulman’s Blog About Surprise
Billions With Zero Knowledge
Working at Home on the Internet
MapleLeaf 2.0
darrenbarefoot.com
Two Hat Marketing
The Emerging Brand
The Branding Blog
CrapHammer
Drew’s Marketing Minute
Golden Practices
Viaspire
Tell Ten Friends
Flooring the Consumer
Kinetic Ideas
Unconventional Thinking
Buzzoodle
NewsPaperGrl
The Copywriting Maven
Hee-Haw Marketing
Scott Burkett’s Pothole on the Infobahn
Multi-Cult Classics
Logic + Emotion
Branding & Marketing
Popcorn n Roses
On Influence & Automation
Bullshitobserver
Servant of Chaos
converstations
eSoup
Presentation Zen
Dmitry Linkov
aialone
John Wagner
Nick Rice
CKs Blog
Design Sojourn
Frozen Puck
The Sartorialist
Small Surfaces
Africa Unchained
Perspective
gDiapers
Marketing Nirvana
Bob Sutton
¡Hola! Oi! Hi!
Shut Up and Drink the Kool-Aid!
Women, Art, Life: Weaving It All Together
Community Guy
Social Media on the fly

And now, my additions:

Jeremy Latham’s Blog
SMogger Social Media Blog
Masey.com

For starters, I haven’t been posting much. This is most disappointing to me, because I vowed I would be consistent. Much worse though is the fact that I haven’t added the rest of my podcasting series, and now we’re close enough to the holidays that it seems I might break that promise too.

My sincerest of apologies to those of you who were waiting for more episodes before Christmas, especially those who made a point of saying so in the comments. In the New Year, I will atone for all of my sins, I assure you. Still, Time magazine has voted me Person of the Year.

Lastly, I owe a big thanks to Mack Collier, his “Z-list” has brought me a huge burst in traffic and links, and I haven’t had the time to reciprocate to all of the linkers. This one I will rectify much sooner. Thanks to all of you who are reposting my link over and over again, I am entirely grateful. I haven’t checked yet, but you might have moved me up the Technorati ladder quite a few notches. In blog land, that’s like hard currency.

And, did anyone else notice that the entire Wordpress dashboard UI changed overnight? I’m still getting used to it.

Update: ‘Twas Rob who changed my dashboard; adding a plugin as a surprise, as he mentions in the comments.

This is my 100th post since the switch to Wordpress. Add the 81 from Blogger, and we’re not far off from 200. Also, stay tuned for the celebration of the most important milestone of them all, Tell Ten Friends’ first birthday. (hint: it happens before we ring in 2007)

Thanks very much for reading. I’m having a blast, and your comments, links, feedback and encouragement are just icing on the cake.

Tag! I’m it.

Ben Yoskovitz shared his five things that the blogging community doesn’t know about him, and has chosen me as one of five people to continue to spread the meme. So here goes:

1. I can read Korean (phonetically, at least), even though I have no idea what I’m saying out loud most of the time. Try it for yourself; it only takes about three hours or so to learn.

2. I have a healthy dose of Acadian (Merci, Grandpa Arsenault) mixed in with my Irish and English heritage, mais mon francais n’est pas bon.

3. After college, I spent an entire calendar year as a bike courier in Victoria. Having my bike stolen from outside my friend Erik’s pizza shop was the beginning of the end of that memorable time for me, and was the wake up call I needed to start growing up.

4. My first name is actually Patrick, inherited from my father and his father before him and his father before him. And all of us first born sons, all with middle names starting with “J.” If you’re keeping track, that would make me Patrick Jordan Behan, and Patrick J. Behan IV.

5. Although I did play rep hockey up until Bantam, due to a late-blooming ability to skate well enough and a complete lack of “hands,” I had a much more successful career as a referee (even appearing in the stripes as a linesman for a game of Junior “A”) than I ever did as a player. Ask anyone who ever played hockey with me, and you won’t get much of a dispute on this point.

So there you are, five things that you didn’t know about me before that I am comfortable sharing with the ‘internets.’

Now, I want to find out five things about:

Jeremy Latham
Nathaniel Steven Henry Brown
James Sherrett
Linda Bustos (a hip noob)
Kris Krug