Home | TrendTracker | PowerBlog Reviews | The Experts | Newsletter
ABOUT
SMALL BUSINESS TRENDS brings you daily updates on trends that influence the global small business market.
Anita Campbell, Editor
Past life: CEO, corporate executive, tech entrepreneur, retailer, general counsel, marketer, HR ... (more)
email me
free business magazines
FREE BUSINESS MAGAZINES
Trade publications FREE to qualified professionals. No hidden offers and no purchase necessary.
On Wall Street
The Deal
Computing Canada
CIO
Employee Benefit
Oracle Magazine
100+ additional titles. Click to browse.
ARCHIVES & SEARCH
Previous Small Business Trends articles can be found at the links below:
October 2003
November 2003
December 2003
January 2004
February 2004
March 2004
April 2004
May 2004
June 2004
July 2004
August 2004
September 2004
October 2004
November 2004
December 2004
January 2005
February 2005
March 2005
April 2005
May 2005
June 2005
July 2005
August 2005
September 2005
October 2005
November 2005
Or, use the search box below to find a
specific post:


NEWSLETTER
Sign up for our FREE Small Business Trends newsletter. (View Current)

We publish regularly and promise we won't share your email address with anyone. (Privacy Policy)
SMALL BIZ INFO & RESOURCES
BLOGS TO READ DAILY*
* Don’t have time to read several dozen blogs a day? Pick two or three. Your brain will thank you for it.
ONLINE COMMUNITIES
BLOG DIRECTORIES
THE BUZZ

SPECIAL RESOURCES
Small Business Trends Radio
Tuesdays, 1:00 PM Eastern U.S. time
on Voice America network
Click to listen

November 1st: Torsten Jacobi, CEO of Creative Weblogging, joins host Anita Campbell. Sponsored by Six Disciplines. Show details.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
PowerBlog Review: Emerging Technology Trends
Read all the PowerBlog ReviewsEditor's note: Welcome to the eighty-sixth and final in our regular weekly series of PowerBlog Reviews.

Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends blog has been one of my favorite blogs ever since I started blogging two years ago.

Roland Piquepaille is a computer consultant from Paris, France. Roland is one of those unique people you have to admire because of his dedication, his incredible range of interests, and the fact that he does it all writing in a second language (English).

For much of this PowerBlog Review I have to credit another outstanding site, Master New Media, run by Robin Good. Robin, who hails from Rome Italy, recently did an in-depth interview of Roland Piquepaille. Robin is in a class by himself when it comes to finding interesting subjects and conducting incisive interviews with surgical precision. There are few even in the mainstream media who can equal Robin's interviewing skills. Many thanks, Robin!

Roland's blog style is quite a thing of beauty, even though it goes against the advice of some blogging "experts" who suggest only short posts. All of Roland's posts are long by typical weblog standpoints (often around 500 words), and cover their subject in depth. Of course, this style of blogging takes considerable commitment. Roland says in the Master New Media interview that he spends the better part of a day per blog entry:
"Between reading the RSS aggregator news and the time I choose a story, it's probably three to four hours, and after that, let's say it's an additional one hour and a half to two hours or more to finally publish it. So overall, it's probably about six hours, yeah."
Recent topics show the range of interests, including such examples as "Self-repairing spacecrafts", "Why leaves change color", and "Algae to fuel our cars?" And because he tends to write about unusual topics, and not repeat what everyone else is blogging about, his blog is regularly linked to, including by the famous Slashdot site:
"Even for me, if a story is already covered by, I don't know, twenty magazines in the world, to me it is not a good enough subject. I want to have a subject which is not completely original but at least which is not covered broadly by the press. So, it is probably for this reason that in the last two years I have been Slashdotted between two and eight times per month (!!!), and yes, I do acknowledge that this is a good thing... though there are also lots of Slashdot haters which come after you after they discover you that way."
Roland is not content to just write a post and leave it at that. At the end of each post he lists links to related articles, which actually go to Del.icio.us bookmarks he has set up by individual topic. This is yet another way that Roland gives a very thorough treatment of his subject matter.

Recently Roland's blog became part of the ZDNet network of blogs, where it is now called "Emerging Technology Trends." This move in and of itself is part of a broader trend unfolding right now, where traditional media companies are now building channels of blogs. In some cases the blogs are new, and in other cases the blogs are existing sites -- like Roland's -- that are being "moved" over to the media site. In Roland's case, he posts a brief extract of the post on his original site, with a link to the full post on his ZDNet blog. In this way he avoids the problem of duplicate content (bad for search engines), but still serves his existing readers. Right now his blog gets 200,000 to 250,000 page views per month, so moving traffic over to ZDNet is significant.

Roland has demonstrated his leadership by stretching the boundaries of blogging for some time now, taking the medium to new levels. For more about Roland's blogging approach, please also read the Master New Media interview.
More news... more trends... more insight...

Home | Privacy | Terms | SmallBizTrends
(c) Copyright 2003 - 2005, Small Business Trends LLC. All rights reserved.