Hello Readers,

Good news: BusinessBlogConsulting.com is back!  Regular readers doubtless have noticed that this site has slackened in activity of late. I blame myself — life has gotten busy. That’s a lame excuse for a blogger, I know, but frankly I needed a break, and I guess the rest of our contributors followed suit.

But it’s time for a change. To that end, I’ve found a new steward for this site whom I’m sure will rise to the challenge to restore it to its earlier excellence and beyond: contributor Stephan Spencer and his partners at NetConcepts will hence force direct the content and business of this site.

Long-time readers will recognize Stephan’s name as one of our stand-out experts, whose many posts have been among the most popular with readers over the last few years. I have every confidence that he and his colleagues will take this site to a whole new level as a premier resource for marketers and bloggers looking to make the most of this unique medium for business promotion.

As for myself, I hereby pledge to resume my active contributions to this site. I’ve enjoyed my rest and am rejuvinated and inspired to return to the cause. Most of the rest of our regular experts have likewise agreed to rouse for our hiatus and rally to new deliver new insights on the topic of using blogs to maximize business performance.

Please join me in congratulating Stephen and NetConcepts on taking the reigns of the site and ushering in a new era for this blog.

Putting out money where our mouths are, we’re hoping to put money where our mouths are. That is, this site is all about using blogs for business. Yet, despite the name of the site, that would imply we are a consulting company, up until now, BBC (as we contributors hubristically call it) has been something of a labor of love. Granted, of the contributors are consultants themselves, who benefit from the exposure this blog affords their practices. (Myself, I took a day job two years ago.) But basically, this has been a not-for-profit exercise in information sharing.

Then I noticed something a few weeks ago: we get a decent amount of traffic. Enough that I figured, well, if blogs are supposed to be a good way to make money, let’s give it a try. So, you will notice as of today, this blog has ads on it.

Mostly we write here about how to use blogs as a marketing vehicle for companies with other, larger business models. But we also do comment from time to time about pure-play blog publishing businesses, a la Gawker, Weblogs Inc or Federated Media. One of the real secrets of blog publishing, however, is the B2B model. I have several friends who are making a full-time living off of business-oriented ad-supported blogs, such as Steve Hall at Adrants, Rafat Ali at PaidContent and Tig Tillinghast at MarketingVOX. So I figured we should give it a try, too. We’ll let you know how it goes. As the man falling from the 20-story building said as he passed the 10th-floor window, “So far, so good.”

I just realized this site recently passed its second anniversary (born sometime in March 2004). Hooray for us!

I must be the luckiest boy in the whole wide world! About six months ago, after briefly retiring from this blog, I relaunched this site as a group blog. With the help of Paul Chaney, I assembled a crack team of co-bloggers, and those of you who read this blog regularly know that the result has been one of the best resources on the topic of using blogs in a business and marketing capacity out there, if I do say so myself.

Well, this weekend marked a great new milestone. If you visit us regularly, you’ve probably already noticed, we got a significant face lift. Like the site itself, the relaunch was the effort of several folks, so here are some shout outs.

First, after months of bitching about TypePad’s flaky service of late, we’ve made the switch to WordPress. Much as I love the folks and products over at Six Apart, I felt it was as much as anything a good chance to get to know a new publishing platform. What I’ve seen of it so far, I like. Jeremy Wright led the WP installation effort.

Josh Hallett did the work on the new CSS template design, which I personally thinks kicks serious ass. Stephan Spencer then tweaked the hell out of the site with all sorts of Web 2.0 type features, inclucing the ability for readers to bookmark every post on del.icio.us, track links to posts in Technorati, the ability to email posts to a friend (using this plug-in), the ability to add Technorati tags on the fly to posts, displaying those tags in a tag cloud, Swicki search, and more (Stephan, please feel free to elaborate). Finally, Tris Hussey pitched in and made himself generally useful, helping import the old archive into WordPress, among other things.

Thanks to all these guys, all our fabulous contributors and, most of all, all of our loyal readers, for making this site something worth reading every day!

After a few days of snafus with this blog’s templates, I think I’ve got it sorted out and comments are working again. TypeKey is required now to thwart evil spammers (sorry, I know it’s a pain in the backside, but I don’t know of a better solution). Please feel free to test them out.

Sorry folks, but we realized we were getting slammed with comment spam, so I’ve turned on TypeKey for comment authentication. I hate TypeKey as much as the rest of you, but I hate comment spam even more and am not aware of any simple fix that’s better than TypeKey (and works with TyepPad). Unfortunately, TypeKey isn’t so simple that I’ve figured out how to make it work right yet. For the time being, it’s impossible to leave comments; you get some error message. I’ve left a question with TypePad’s customer support, so I hope to have it sorted out soon.

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When I first started blogging one of the first sites I latched on to was this one. On a daily basis it kept me up-to-date on trends in the blogosphere, written from the candid, often humorous perspective of its creator Rick Bruner.

When Rick announced his semi-retirement from the blog some months ago inwardly I groaned. To say that I had learned a great deal from him would be an understatement. That’s why it’s terrifically exciting to be part of this revival, or more precisely, this reinvention. Business blogging has come a long way since I first started reading this site back in early 2004. Much has changed. The medium has matured.

I believe this site will continue to provide great value to the business end of the blogosphere. Some of the greatest minds in the industry will be contributing to it regularly. As such, you will get a panoply of opinion and commentary. Yet, we will adhere to Rick’s original vision as being "directory for news and advice on business blogging."

This blog is a landmark of business blogging’s past. With this new iteration it’s my fervent belief it will continue to be an integral part of its future as well.

tA couple of months ago, I announced "my semi-retirement from this blog." Some took that as my "retirement from blogging" (what are Bruner Blog and Executive Summary, chopped liver?)

But it turns out, it hasn’t stuck anyway: I’m back. I got a number of kind emails and comments giving me the sense that this site was perhaps more popular than I thought. Then  Paul Chaney of Radiant Marketing proposed I turn the site into a big group blog on the topic of business blogs and related issues. Sounded good to me, so the following folks have all just been deputized to blog here:

La Shawn Barber of The Language Artist
Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing
Bob Bly of Bly Blog
Steve Broback of Avondale Media
Rich Brooks of Flyte
DL Byron of Textura Design
Paul Chaney of Radiant Marketing
Henry Copeland of BlogAds
Jill Fallon of Estate Vaults
Josh Hallett of Hyku
Kevin Holland of Air Conditioning Contractors of America
Wayne Hurlbert of Blog Business World
Tris Hussey of Larix Consulting
John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing
BL Ochman of What’s Next Online
Michele Miller of Wonder Branding
Lee Odden of Top Rank Results
Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion
Todd Sattersten of A Penny For…
Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts
Dave Taylor of Intuitive Life for Business

James Turner of One by One Media

Dana VanDen Heuvel of BlogSavant
Des Walsh of Thinking Home Business
Debbie Weil of WordBiz and BlogWrite

Andy Wibbels of Easy Bake Weblogs

Jeremy Wright of Ensight

• Stay on-topic: the role of blogs in business communications and marketing
• First and foremost, I see the value of this site being a directory for news and advice on business blogging. Please help the site stay on top of relevant articles in the mainstream press or greater blogsophere. Working as a large group we should have no excuse to miss anything.
• Long-winded treatises on business philosphy, not so much.
• Profiling good (or particularly bad) examples of business blogs is another focus. But there are a lot business blogs out there now. We don’t need to catalog every one, just the particularly noteworthy ones
• No blatant self-promotion
• Use the "extended body" field for longer posts. Keep the homepage scannable.
• Use the categories
• Blog for good, not for evil

Well, it will be interesting to see how this phase of BusinessBlogConsulting pans out.

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So, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been posting to this blog a lot less lately. Regular readers may know that I took a full-time job six months ago (at DoubleClick) and a few months after that, I ended up taking over my department (Director of Research), as a result of which, I am very busy these days.

Sadly, evangelizing the marketing value of blogs is not tightly aligned with my job or DoubleClick’s business interests, so this site has been a labor of love. More to the point, however, I think the mission of the blog has to a certain extent been accomplished. When I began it, I felt there was a need for a voice on the web articulating this business value and highlighting the many new business blogs as examples for others to follow. In the just over a year since I started the blog, however, stories like the recent one in BusinessWeek have been making the case very well in the mainstream media, and there are many other blogs talking about the same issues, including those I link to on the left of this page under "From Whom We Steal." The best of those, IMHO, is Steve Rubel’s MicropPersuasion, in whose shadow I think this blog has been living for some time.

Therefore, with mixed feelings I am going to make formal what has been de facto the case for a few months: I don’t plan to update this blog very often going foward. Perhaps I’ll find something on-topic to say from time to time, and I welcome the other contributors to this site to feel free to remain as active as they want (which past performance suggests not especially active).

Meanwhile, if you need a fix of Bruner postings, I do still post a few times a month about general Internet marketing topics at ExecutiveSummary.com and more often about general nonsense at my personal site, Bruner Blog. I also do have plans to launch some new topical resources in the coming months, so stay tuned. Until then, thanks for your attention and I wish you all productive business blogging!

Oops. I just realized the first post (nothing special) to this blog was March 19, 2004.

So, I’ve been meaning to write this post for several days, but I’ve been busy. Busy getting ready for a new full-time job. Yes, as a few of you might have already seen here or here or here or elsewhere, I have taken a position at DoubleClick as Research Manager.

Honestly, I’m thrilled. My private consulting was actually going quite well over the last three years, especially this year, but this job is just a great fit for lots of reasons. It will, however, leave me less time for extracurricular blogging. (You can bet one of my first recommendations on the job will be a…blog, but that wouldn’t be extracurricular, now, would it?)

Less time, but not no time. I am pleased with this little resource I’ve started here. I have ended up getting a few reasonable consulting leads out of the blog, though I can’t honestly say that response on that score has been overwhelming. Moreso have been press interviews — I’ve been averaging about two a week on the subject of business blogs for the last few months.

Anyway, instead of walking away from this or updating it with a post here and there every few weeks, I’ve decided to turn it into a modest group blog. A lot of smart folks out there already touch on this topic of business blogs, but most do it in a rather scatter-shot fashion, along with posts on lots of other unrelated topics. A few others also concentrate on this topic (including some of those I link to in my blogroll), but with all due respect none that I follow do it with as much dedication as I think this resource could offer. Therefore, I’ve asked already a couple of other bloggers to pitch in, and I plan to ask two or three others to pitch in over the coming weeks.

So, without further ado, I’m pleased to announce that Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion and B.L. Ochman of What’s Next will begin blogging here, as soon as they see fit. Steve, as many of you probably know, is a blogging machine, consistently scooping me already on things related to this topic. B.L. is someone I’ve gotten to know personally in the last year or so and have a lot of respect for. They’re both PR professionals, which I don’t hold against them. I’ll try to find some other folks to help out here who come at the topic from a different discipline, so this isn’t doesn’t turn into just another PR blog. (BTW, I’ll update the site shortly, probably over the weekend, to include pointers to them in the left column About This Blog stuff.)

Anyway, thanks to all my many (several?) readers who seem to have found value in this site over the last few months. Anyway, this isn’t goodbye, it’s just hello steady paycheck.

UPDATE:
Great news: Todd S. of A Penny For… has also agreed to pitch in.

I’ve never been the biggest fan of the “trackback” feature on many blogs — it just seems to further clutter the footer of posts, it seems generally underutilized and, as far as I understand, it’s available only to blog publishers using TypePad or MovableType. But, since a few of you have asked me about it, I’ve turned it on for future posts. I better start seeing some trackback links now soon, or I’ll be turning it off again eventually.

UPDATE/CORRECTION:
Okay, okay, as a few of you have pointed out, I am wrong about MT/TP being the only blog softwares that enable Trackbacks. See comments and trackback-comments for details. I’m also seeing trackbacks on other posts, so I guess I’ll leave them on for a while and see how it goes.

Again, just want to say I’m sorry that I’ve been such a slacker about this blog, but I’m so frickin’ busy these days I can’t believe it. Just got back from AdTech Chicago (well, okay, Tuesday night) where we once again produced the AdTechBlog. Meanwhile, I’m actually writing a couple of blog-related reports fairly soon, as well as other projects that actually pay the bills around here. But enough apologies; I’m actually posting a few important new updates this evening…

Hello there. So, I’ve blogged so far 184 posts to this site, which doesn’t seem shabby for less than two months’ work. Originally, I thought I would quickly enter about 100 examples of business blogs into this directory and then it would be a simple matter of keeping up with the handful of new ones that subsequently came to my attention, while I also turned to more strategic advice on the subject. As it is, I realize that close to 200 examples of business blogs, I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of what is out there.

I hope it is proving useful and informative just to see so many examples. I do want to get to more prescriptive advice at some point, as well as more research (such that it is) and resources related to blogs and specifically business blogs, but to start with, there are simply so many business blogs just to show examples of, I will be busy for some time. If you’re one of the many bloggers who has sent me an email suggesting more business blogs to take note of, rest assured I’ve made a note. I have a long backlog of material I’m trying to catch up with, while I continue to work for a living at the same time.

I’m eager for feedback about this project. What is working for you, and what would you like to see more of, or instead of what I’ve been writing to date? How can I improve what I’m doing here?

Anyway, I’m using this opportunity to let you know that I’m about to begin several weeks of travel as of Thursday, visiting locations including the British Virgin Islands (my 10-year wedding anniversary!), San Francisco (for AdTech), China (because I’ve never been to Asia and why the heck not?) and Maryland (for a reunion of college friend). Thus, my blogging here will be quite light until mid-June. Please don’t forget about me, and do check back in a few weeks as I dive back into this project with vigor.