We just received this letter from Benjamin Katz, founder of CompleteCampaigns.com, responding to our posting of a lengthy letter from Aristotle about our Consumer Guide to Software-as-a-Service. (We will reporting the results of our updated survey shortly.)

Dear Mr. Phillips,

We recently received an email from the general counsel of Aristotle, one of the software-as-a-service companies featured in our online guide, complaining about our efforts, that arrived just as we sent out an email to our subscribers asking them to help update the survey data in the guide. We are reprinting his letter below, followed by our response. Feel free to join in the conversation in the comments thread.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project is releasing another of its ongoing reports tracking Americans' use of the internet today (and someone leaked us an advance copy), and this report contains some really important news:

On the heels of Pew Internet & American Life Project’s announcement that blogs many not have had the impact we would have expected on the last election cycle, research compiled by eMarketer this week indicates that Pew’s numbers on “blog awareness” could be too conservative. According to four independent surveys, “blog awareness” could be as high as 63 percent. Pew pegs awareness at a mere 38 percent.

Here’s the data inverted:

At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice a recent Hewlett-Packard study that found that 10% of small businesses surveyed said they now include blogs as part of their overall marketing strategies. The survey was conducted last week and included responses from more than 400 small businesses. Small businesses, it seems, are way ahead of traditional advertisers when it comes to understanding the importance of blog marketing.

BlogKits, a service devoted to helping bloggers find ways to generate revenue, reports that 71 percent of bloggers surveyed said that advertisements are acceptable on blogs. [Full disclosure: I often purchase ads on blogs for clients of mine.]

It’s interesting to think back just a few months ago when many bloggers rejected the notion of selling ads on their websites. Now, Google contextual links and Henry Copeland’s Blogads are seen less as an annoyance and more as a right of passage. The presence of ads seems to indicate a steady stream of traffic capable of sustaining an advertising business. Are blogads the new legitimizer?

Another interesting point is that 52 percent of those surveyed said they could earn a living off of their online journals.

From The Long Tail: Microstructure in the Long Tail (a blog that calls itself "a public diary on the way to a book" that is itself based on a Wired article that popularized the "long tail" portion of the power law curve that appears to fit with weblog popularity and incoming links (although Dave Pollard disputes that), it appears that each long tail is itself made up of a microcosm of smaller long tails:

This is important because it explains why a very effective network-effect (viral word-of-mouth) recommendation system, which is essential in driving demand down the tail,  does not actually do the opposite: drive content up the tail to further amplify hit/niche inequality. The explanation, I argue, lies in the only semi-permeable membrane between niches and mass-markets. Popularity exists at multiple scales, and ruling a clique doesn't necessarily make you the homecoming queen.

Abstract from
The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 Election: Divided They Blog (an Adobe Acrobat document):

In this paper, we study the linking patterns and discussion topics of political bloggers. Our aim is to measure the degree of interaction between liberal and conservative blogs, and to uncover any differences in the structure of the two communities. Specifically, we analyze the posts of 40 "A-list" blogs over the period of two months preceding the U.S. Presidential Election of 2004, to study how often they referred to one another and to quantify the overlap in the topics they discussed, both within the liberal and conservative communities, and also across communities. We also study a single day snapshot of over 1,000 political blogs. This snapshot captures blogrolls (the list of links to other blogs frequently found in sidebars), and presents a more static picture of a broader blogosphere. Most significantly, we find differences in the behavior of liberal and conservative blogs, with conservative blogs linking to each other more frequently and in a denser pattern.

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Dave Pollard says the blogging popularity curve's long tail shows that it is "just" a logarithmic curve and not a "power law" curve after all. In Bloggers, Your Audience Awaits and its followup, The Long Tail: A-Listers Maybe Not So Powerful After All, Dave Pollard, the author of How to Save the World and one of the sharpest minds watching the blogosphere questions just how dominant and influential the supposed A list of popular / prominent webloggers actually is.

There is an inverse relationship among A-listers between number of page views and average time spent per page view....

What this suggests is that online advertisers looking for a bargain might be better off investing in a bundle of B-list bloggers, those 2,000 bloggers who each get 1/4 the reader attention of the average A-lister, an average of 60 hours/day of attentive eyeballs.

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A number of people have pointed out that the real Choicepoint scandal isn't that they were robbed in a way that allowed identity theft, but that their robbers obtained the information by posing as legitimate customers, raising questions about just what Choicepoint ordinarily does with all that information about us.

Hint: It's not just used for marketing.

Quoting from Mary Hodder's Napsterization (Choicepoint Scandal Unspun):

Tara Wheatland over at bIPlog has the definitive post on Choicepoint, their culpability over the cracking of their systems and people's data, and what's really going on. Many of the news stories were apparently inaccurate, and she dissects the spin Choicepoint put out to minimize their responsibility and some of the activities they engage in that are very unsettling. Check it out!

Also, check out EPIC's pages on Choicepoint. There's lots more background on this company that has been, for example, providing data to government agencies that those agencies would be barred by law from collecting on their own because of privacy laws that came out of Watergate. Well worth knowing what is happening with the company that stores all the information it can aggregate on you.

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A lot has been written about the effectives of the Bush and Kerry Internet strategies, including details of money raised, volunteers recruited, and votes won using the Web. However, information about specific online advertising strategies has yet to be released by either side.

Addressing this concern, MSHC Partners has published details about the online ad campaigns conducted by John Kerry and the Democratic National Committee. [Full disclosure, I work at MSHC and helped direct the Kerry and DNC online ad strategies. From this point forward, I’m just going to write in the first person.]

The purpose of releasing this information is simple: to educate the political community about the effectiveness of online marketing. Continuity of key learnings has always been a challenge to all those who have worked in and around political campaigns. Campaigns shut down after elections and little is done to preserve information about the strategies that worked (and didn't work) best.