A communications strategy firm:

CRA is a consulting firm devoted to bringing leading research in organizational and interpersonal communication to bear on real-world problems. We are not a PR, media relations, or media production firm–we are a team of consultants educated in Communication Science and devoted to advice that works, responsive service, and lasting client relationships. Our team of fifty–over forty of whom hold their Doctorates–provides applied solutions across three practices:

• Internal Communication Strategy
• Leadership Development
• Organizational Research

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Chris King, touring the US
in a Jones RV

Very cool series of blogs by a very cool company. Jones Soda is a quirky softdrink brand playing David to Goliath like Coke and Pepsi. The web site has a lot going on, but blogs are one more way they keep it fun, having Gen Y skateboarders, BMXers and other hip cats writing the blogs.

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Weblog supporting nationally syndicated public radio program. Why all public radio shows don’t have blogs is a mystery to me.

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Weblog supporing security services firm that has long distinguished itself on the Net by providing statistics about web traffic.

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Avis Valentine
spokes mannequin

Artist Brandy Agerbeck uses Movable Type Blogger.com to present the merchandise in her store, where she does the fulfillment through Cafe Press. Very clever use of a business blog, where the blog is the business.

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Janeane Garofalo

Actress and left-wing poltical activist Janeane Garofalo is one of the hosts of the new liberal talk radio station Air America and she and host Sam Seder have also set up this companion weblog. That’s a no-brainer. Talk radio and weblogs are a match made in cyber-heaven.

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Chris Lydon

National Public Radio personality Chris Lydon is one of the only NPR folks blogging, as far as I can tell. His is a political blog, born of a two-hour NPR show on the subject of how blogging would affect the 2004 presidential race.

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Dave Barry

The Miami Herald’s favorite columnist, humorist Dave Barry, has his own weblog. Interestingly, it took more than a year for the Herald to decide this was worth putting on their own servers, instead of on the free Blogspot service, where it lived previously.

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Mena Trott

Publishers of the popular Movable Type and TypePad blog publishing tools, Six Apart maintains several customer service blogs, including:

• SixApart’s homepage for general company news.
• Mena’s Corner, from Six Apart’s president and co-founder Mena Trott, “is our outlet for updates about Six Apart and the weblogging space through our perspective. It is, an attempt, to show the inner workings of a start-up and let the outside world understand the challenges we face and achievements we accomplish.”
• Everything TypePad, for product and customer service announcements about the company’s hosted solution, TypePad (which is what we use to produce BusinessBlogConsulting.com).
• Movable Type’s homepage is also a weblog with product annoucments and customer service news for that product.
• Mena.Typepad.com, company president Mena Trott’s personal blog
• Ben.Stupidfool.org, Six Apart’s CTO, co-founder and Mena’s husband and high school sweetheart (awwww) Ben Trott’s blog, which it looks like he doesn’t update lately.

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It’s disappointing that Blogger.com, the guys who basically invented blogs (now owned by Google), don’t showcase the potential of business blogs more prominently with their own service, but they do update Status.Blogger.com sporadically, pertaining to system status issues, and Blogger.com’s homepage is itself a blog, though it likewise appears to be updated only once or twice a month. On the other hand, several folks on Blogger’s management maintain their own blogs, including Evan Williams, Jason Shellon and Biz Stone.

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A new national magazine and website (it’s not clear, actually, whether this is a print publication at all) dedicated injecting social responsibility and personal fulfillment into the business world: “think Fortune meets Oprah with a dash of Vanity Fair,” says co-founder Anita Sharpe on her bio page. Contributors to the site include a couple of A-List Left Coast bloggers (Halley Suitt and David Weinberger), as well as towering management consulting guru Tom Peters, among others.

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Garland Coulson

“About Us” copy begins: “Garland Coulson, ‘The E-Business Tutor,’ teaches small business and home based business people how to successfully promote their web sites and businesses on the Internet.” The site’s homepage functions as a blog, though I can’t recognize by looking at it what tool Coulson uses (Builder Spot perhaps?).

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Business 2.0 also has a blog, not surprisingly.

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My first column today on research topics at iMedia Connection. Not surprisingly, I kick things off with a blog theme. Includes original research about the characteristics of blog readers from Quris.

iMedia: Blogging Is Booming