I've gotten the copy-edited [does copy-edited have a hyphen?? that's the kind of thing the copyeditor knows... and I don't] manuscript back from Portfolio and am going through it page by page.

I feel like I'm back in sixth grade. It's covered with red marks and scribbles in red pencil. I've been  instructed to respond to the copyeditor's suggested edits in a different color pencil. Not pen, mind you.

Oh, and to harken back to pre-Internet days, the manuscript arrived as 250+ loose pages with a giant rubber band around them. Lots of details and stuff to pay attention to.…

David Kline, co-author of one of the handful of books published thus far on blogging (Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business and Culture) just emailed to say he's working on an article about what's holding the F500 back from blogging and what it will take for blogging to go mainstream. He asked for my thoughts and I responded:

Fear & blogging on the blogosphere Long Tail
(with apologies to Hunter S. Thompson)

Fear is the single most important thing holding corporate America back from embracing blogging. Fear of being open,…

Just out today is MarketingSherpa's 2006 Marketing Wisdom report. It's a great example of using your customers to create content for you. The Sherpa folks sent out a survey link in December asking the 100,000-plus readers of their email newsletters to submit a lesson learned or useful anecdote from 2005. The results - from 110 readers - are compiled in a nifty looking PDF report.

Also clever, the report has an upscale sponsor, search marketing firm Omniture.…

In case you missed it, "podcast" was declared 2005 word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary. The concept is simple and yet profound. Podcasts are audio files - talk radio with music thrown in - that you can download, "unhook" from the Internet and carry away with you in an iPod or other MP3 player to listen to at your convenience.

And who's creating them? Everybody, it seems, from Fortune 500s like Whirlpool and IBM to, no surprise, NPR. They're a marketer's dream, really. Whether you're sponsoring a podcast or creating one of…

Nice tidbit in Big Blue bit by the blogging bug on how IBM speechwriter Christopher Barger started blogging on his own, was discovered by his bosses, "panicked" - and then got promoted. Reporter Julie Alterio interviewed (and quoted) me for this nicely-written article in the Westchester Journal News (Jan. 9, 2006). Also see her companion piece: Podcasts a hit inside and outside IBM. Interesting how podcasts are being used as an educational as well as communications tool on corporate intranets.