Whatever your political persuasion — right, left, or center — the blogosphere is a great place for bloggers to share their political views and make plenty of friends and enemies. We try to follow the conservative, liberal, and everything in between of politics and political blogs/blogging — but only when it intersects with business blogging.
Have a read below of our latest entries on politics and political blogging…
Wayne Hurlbert has been blogging about the intersections of blogs and businesses on this site since October 2003. It doesn’t appear to be a business blog itself, in that I don’t see any About Us or consulting service links on the blog, but it is a useful resource for folks following this trend.
As usual, you can count on me to rip off all of his best links for this blog. (As either Stravinsky or Picasso is meant to have said, “Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.” Probably Stravinsky said it first, then Picasso simply stole it.)
Marketing resource for the pharmaceutical industry from pharma-specialized agency Greater Than One, with help from marketing and web design consultant Ari Paparo
Consultant Debbie Weil has been publishing an email newsletter called WordBiz about business copywriting online for more than two years (as of this writing). She makes money by running seminars, consulting and selling reports, as well as ads in her newsletter and on her blog. Her blog features the same kind of breezy writing and straight-forward advice that has made her newsletter so popular among small and large businesses.
Her blog also includes a category on Blogging for Business, which I’ll be sure to scrape for all interesting entries to plug into this directory in the coming weeks.
Rafat Ali, formerly a journalist for Silicon Alley Reporter, runs this blog about trends in online publishing. He also sells advertising for the blog, which is his sole occupation for more than a year. He says he earns more off the blog than he did as a staff reporter, although he also spends a considerable amount of time selling ads himself. He notes that he has also lost advertisers due to his uncompromising coverage of the industry. He’s a pioneer among one-man-brands as far as commercial blogs go.
Marketing Vox (which I co-founded, I mention both for bragging rights and full disclosure) produces this email discussion list / blog about online publishing. Blogging, and particularly business-related blogging, is a major theme of the forum. I used to be the moderator of this forum for a few weeks, anyway, but it got to be too much work, so it is now capably moderated by Adam Kalsey.
I had the pleasure of sharing a car ride with Judith from Boston to NY after BloggerCon II and got to hear a lot about her remarkable professional background: an impressive mix of executive experience at marketing, operations, technology and more (she programs in something like 8 or more languages, after having been sent to programming classes by the IT department of a F500 company when she worked as a marketer constantly pushing the IT department to outdo themselves with special programming requests).
These days, she’s a high-priced (I’d assume) consultant focused on knowlege and social networking, and other corporate collaboration issues. She also blogs at socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com.
Amy Gahran is a writer, editor, trainer and speaker. One of her recent posts (as of this writing) is “More Corporate Blogging Resources,” each of which I’ll be sure to scrape as individual entries in this blog as soon as I have time.
Ross Mayfield is CEO of Socialtext, what I would call knowledge management software, but he’s told me should be called “enterprise social software.” Anyway, Ross is a leading thinker in the space of social software and people-powered publishing (such as wikis, business blogging, social networks). In addition to his personal blog (linked in the headline of this entry), which itself tends to be more about business than his personal life, he also blogs on Social Text’s site as well as part of a great group blog about social software called Many2Many on Corante.
A new blog (as of this posting) by British consultants Wayne Robinson and Tim Duckett. The About Us reads:
We run a marketing and technology consulting business that helps smaller companies in the UK. A lot of our work is now centring on using technology to reduce information problems. So this blog is designed to share our knowledge and first hand experience.
A criticism I have of this blog, other than its somewhat clunky layout (e.g., the page is too wide for my laptop screen and I hate blue link borders around images, but whatever [UPDATE: they’ve since fixed that, but the CSS is still acting a bit funky for me]), is that the above About Us statement claims “we run a marketing and technology consulting business,” but there’s no information about that company anywhere on the site that I can see. The consultants link to short profiles of themselves, and I gather that is the “business,” but it’s not even clear what the business is called (the URL is Infosential.com, but the blog seems to be titled “Cutting Through”), but I’m nitpicking. The content seems worthwhile (particularly since they already linked to my blog).
Ray Ozzie is a well-respected commentator in the tech space on his blog, while his day job is running Groove Networks, “virtual office software that allows teams of people to work together securely over a network as if they were in the same physical location.”
Microsoft is certainly a bastion of innovation, but over the years it has demonstrated an inclination towards secrecy bordering on paranoia. It is therefore somewhat surprising that Microsoft has been so welcoming of the whole blog phenomenon. Certainly hundreds, if not thousands, of Microsoft employees maintain blogs, among the most high-profile of which are Robert Scoble’s and Channel 9. In addition, however, Microsoft links to more than 100 blogs (see link in the headline above) by employees about products and programming topics.
Macromedia, the software firm that makes a range of web and multimedia authoring tools, has been a pioneer in letting its knowledgable inner circle of product architects communicate directly with customers through a series of weblogs. These blogs, many of which both note that they represent the private opinions of their authors and carry the Macromedia company logo (go figure), touch of a range of topics, including the authors comments on general technology trends, as well as comments specific to Macromedia products. The company’s blogs include these:
A wacky look at the world of taxes from Kerry M. Kerstetter, CPA, who uses his rather irrevent blog (dispelling once and for all the stereotype of uptight, humorless tax consultants) to “help capitalists, investors & small business owners win the tax game.”
Dan Bricklin is currently president of Software Garden, a small software applications developer. Bricklin is best known for codeveloping VisiCalc, the first electronic spreadsheet application. Until early 2004, Mr. Bricklin served as CTO of Interland, Inc., after it acquired his previous company, Trellix Corporation, maker of enterprise publishing software. As a blogger, Bricklin has distinguished himself as one of the leading strategic thinkers in the technology sector.
Weblogs, Inc., is a blog publishing venture founded in 2003 by Jason Calacanis, founder of Silicon Alley Reporter, a popular newsletter in the NY technology venture capital market. Calacanis also maintains his own blog on the system.
Presently, Weblog Inc’s blogs are mostly focused on business sectors, including the following titles:
Weblogs, Inc. partners with bloggers to create advertising-supported nano-publishing sites. The business posts a Corporate Philosphy which reads in part:
Weblogs, Inc. is dedicated to creating trade Weblogs (a.k.a. “blogs”) across niche industries in which user participation is an essential component of the resulting product.
. . .
Traditional journalism is, in a word, broken.
The jury is out on whether or not Weblogs, Inc. will turn blogs into a real media business, but we’re eager to find out. Rumor has it that multimillionaire entrepreneur and NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has recently invested in Weblogs, Inc. Cuban also has a blog on Weblogs, Inc.
(UPDATE: Since first writing this, I spoke with Calacanis and asked him about the investment, and he was deliberately vague in answering, in one breath denying it and then suggesting might be true. I honestly don’t know what to think.)
Nick Denton’s Gawker Media is Weblogs, Inc’s closest competition as an out-and-out weblog publishing company.
Olivier is one smart guy. A friend and colleague, he’s one of the smarter bloggers out there commenting on technology and e-business issues. This is a relatively new URL for him. Previously, he had been blogging at WebVoice.Blogspot.com, which he recently gave up in favor of this new domain, and I see the old one is already some piano blog (I’d add it to this site’s index, but it’s not clear what business, if any, it supports).
Olivier makes his living as a strategic consultant. He also blogs in almost as many places as I do. He is a the main blogger behind TheEndofFree.com, about the trend towards user-paid content online, as well as a co-founder, along with myself among others, of MarketingWonk. In addition, he blogs at Lockergnome’s RSS site, and elsewhere, no doubt.
Red Hat, vendors of commercial Linux services, staged a worldwide customer outreach tour in early 2004, and supported it with this blog about the behind-the-scenes activities of the tour. During the tour, the blog was averaging more than 3,500 visits a day. MarketingSherpa has a great case study about this event and blog.
This site uses blogs as a marketing vehicle with a clever twist on the sweepstakes model. The basic idea is that marketers offer up some of their products as a prize for a sweepstake, which Blogstakes encourages blogs to promote. The hook, however, is that both a random visitor from one of the blogs and the referring blogger both with the prize. That is, Blogstakes tracks where the click-throughs to its site come from, and they give a prize also to the blogger from whose site the randomly drawn winner clicked. Because bloggers have some skin in the game, the site has been popular with bloggers who link to it.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I was the winning blogger of one of the first contests, for Clip-n-Seal. I had written on MarketingVox about the launch of Blogstakes, and based on that post, I referred the winning entrant to the contest. I also received a sample package of Clip-n-Seal’s product, a clever device to seal open bags with, and I have to say, it is a terrific project. I think this marks the second time in my life that I won any such contest (once, when I was around 25, I won a CD in a radio call-in drawing, the first CD in my collection!).
Utterly brilliant example of a business blog from a somewhat surprising source: Microsoft. Brilliant in terms of philosophy (well thought out) and execution. Here is a post that lays out the The Channel 9 Doctrine, and here is the "What the…" schpiel in the left-column of every page:
Channel 9 started as a personal story from one of us about fear of flying. Lenn realized after years of dealing with it, that it was actually a fear of the unknown. The fear was conquered through learning. The more transparency into what it took to fly a plane, the more the fear went away. Lenn got to know pilots who flew planes everyday, and every time he flew he turned on Channel 9 on the in-flight audio system to listen in to the cockpit.
We think developers need their own Channel 9, a way to listen in to the cockpit at Microsoft, an opportunity to learn how we fly, a chance to get to know our pilots. Five of us in Redmond are crazy enough to think we just might learn something from getting to know each other. Were we wrong? Time will tell.
Join in, and have a look inside our cockpit and help us fly the plane.
Welcome to Channel 9.
One of the most innovative features of the blog is the use of video clips of developers interviewing each other. You know it’s the real deal when these not-exactly telegenic gentleman (I haven’t seen any women yet) cite a Star Trek movie as informing their programming considerations. Serious geeks, in addition to the video blog posts, the site comes complete with a moblog and a wiki.
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Business Blog Consulting is a site devoted to demonstrating how effective weblogs can be for communicating with customers and marketing to new customer prospects. You will find here lots of examples of business and corporate blogs, as well as resources to help you learn more about the topic.
Looking for a company that offers consulting on corporate and business blogging, including design, development and strategy? Consider Netconcepts.
Other stuff? Email us.
Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing
Andy Bourland of Bourland.com
Rich Brooks of Flyte
Paul Chaney of Blogging Systems Group
Sally Falkow of Expansion Plus
Josh Hallett of Hyku
Tris Hussey of Larix Consulting
Lee Odden of TopRank
Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts
Dave Taylor of Intuitive Life for Business
Jim Turner of One by One Media
Dana VanDen Heuvel of BlogSavant
Des Walsh of Thinking Home Business
Debbie Weil of WordBiz and BlogWrite
Jeremy Wright of Ensight
Rick E. Bruner is co-author and principal analyst on this report
Our own contributor Jeremy Wright is the author of this book
"The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right" with a foreword by GM's Bob Lutz..and the rest by Debbie Weil.
Produced by contributor to this site Debbie Weil. Rick E. Bruner is one of the featured experts in this report
This report is written by contributor to this site BL Ochman
I guess this was inevitable
