Jonathan Schwartz

Jonathan Schwartz was appointed president and CEO [make that COO; d’ho!] of Sun Microsystems just this past April, and by June the 38-year-old, ponytailed executive started a blog.

Bill Gates, take note.

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Okay, okay, we get it, Microsoft loves blogs. Yet another advice piece from them for small businesses for blogs.

So, where is Bill’s blog, anyway?

Microsoft Business Solutions: The Four-Letter Word That Can Get People Excited About Your Products

B.L. Ochman writes about this new project:

It’s 28 people who blog about PR all getting together next week to blog about making blogs part of the marketing mix. Being PR people, they’ve turned it into a big academic thing for the most part. I am sticking to practical stuff, examples only, no theory, as is my wont.
:>)

The New PR Wiki is an accompanying wiki.

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AdTech is the leading conference for Internet advertising and marketing professionals, with some 3,000+ attendees expected for the next three days in San Francisco. I am one of the co-creators of the AdTechBlog, along with the other folks from MarketingVox and a team of volunteer bloggers. We pioneered it in November at the NY show, and the folks who run AdTech liked it enough they agreed to let us partner with them again.

It’s an interesting partnership whereby they retain “ownership” of the product, at least in as much as the domain name, yet they cede to our team total editorial independence. They make a handful of free passes to the three-day show available to our team (which otherwise sell for $1,500 each), and we agree to write something (as we see it) about many of the show sessions, as well as the after-hours party scene, the buzz at the exhibit hall, etc. Promised to be fun.

Frankly, I think it’s a model that would make sense for a lot of industry conferences.

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Wayne Hurlbert has been blogging on the subject of “blogs in business, marketing, public relations, and search engine optimization for successful entrepreneurs” since last October. Is his blog “competition” for mine? Well, it’s a big happy bloggy world out there, so I’m not really worrying about it. He doesn’t seem to be solicitiing consulting business from his blog so directly, which is the stated purpose of my blog. He’s been at it longer, though I think I am on track for more posts per week at this rate. The subject matter is also somewhat different, where he’s offering more how-to stuff, such as his recent post on blog promotion, where I have set myself the sisyphean goal, at least in the near term, of cataloging every example of a business blog I can find. Eventually I’d like to get to more content-oriented posts, too, but in the foreseeable future I seem to believe there’s value in just a big directory of examples of business blogs.

Anyway, Hurlbert is definitely offering value on the subject in his own way, so check it out. While you’re at it, check out his roller derby blog. (Whatever.)

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Steve Rubel

Steve Rubel is a PR pro, VP of client services at Cooper Katz. He called his blog to my attention after I noted the ANA’s blog earlier this week, one of his clients. I see he’s been blogging for only a month (as of this entry), and normally I’d be reluctant to include a blog in this directory that is so new, as so many blogs run out of steam after great ambitions at the beginning. But browsing his archive, I see he’s been on quite a tear since he launched himself into it, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that he’ll still be at it, with gusto, when we check back in on him in a few months and later.

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Martina Zavagno has been blogging for a year (happy birthday, Adverblog!). Based in Italy (though blogging in English), she is a freelance journalist and e-learning project manager, but she makes no bones about what her objectives are in blogging:

I’m dreaming of a future in marketing and advertising, as marketing/account executive.
That’s why I came up with the Adverblog idea…
So if you like this blog and feel like offering me a job… drop me a line, I’ll be on the next plane with destination anywhere!

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Jennifer Rice

Jennifer Rice, who runs Mantra Branding, has been blogging here about branding since December 2003. She writes me by email:

I recently got a project from a Fortune 50 company from my blog… it’s the best thing I’ve ever done for my consulting business!

Hell-yeah! If ever there was a reason to blog, for consultants, anyway, there it is.

One gripe — a nit I have with lots of business blogs — while she links to her business site from her blog, I don’t see a link from the business to to the blog. How are your customers going to know you blog if you don’t point it out? Hopefully just a temporary oversight and not an indication that bloggers don’t think that blogging is “professional” enough to link to.

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Gawker Media has just released its latest commercial blog property, Defamer, a Hollywood gossip site. Knowing Gawker’s style, the blog promises to be smart Hollywood gossip, which would really be something new. Remains to be seen, however, whether an industry that takes itself as seriously as Hollywood will be able to laugh at itself or will just devote all its energy to decrying the Defamer.

Publisher Nick Denton writes in an email announcing the site:

in so far as a city ever needed a gossip rag, LA is crying out for a Defamer. For a city that’s in many ways the cultural capital of the world, it’s woefully under-gossiped.
Sure, the celebrity weeklies give the latest tittle-tattle on the reality TV romance of the week. But the real stars of Hollywood are the producers, and agents, and PR flacks, and studio execs, and screenwriters. They’re usually behind the scenes. No longer.

Unlike the other Gawker media products, the author of Defamer, “a Hollywood peon” him- or herself, will remain anonymous (we’ll see how long that lasts before he/she is outed).

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I’ve been a fan of Seth Godin‘s since his days running the one-time online marketing agency Yoyodyne, before it was acquired by Yahoo and he became a guru author of umpteen marketing books. (I even happen to know a piece of useless trivia that the name Yoyodyne comes from Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49.)

He recently sent me a review copy of his new book, Free Prize Inside. I haven’t yet had a chance to get into it, but the title and packaging alone are so clever I’m sure it’s destined to be another winner for him. Meanwhile, he also just released an unrelated free e-book BullMarket 2004, a long list of marketing resources (I’m pleased to say my ExecutiveSummary.com site was among them, although when Seth and I exchanged email a few weeks ago about it, I had hoped he’d also include Business Blog Consulting, but it seems he hasn’t; oh well).

But what I really wanted to note here was this: Just when you think the guy has got to be out of great ideas, I see he’s now on a virtual “Business Book Blogging Tour.” Details on the initiative are thing (Godin himself has only a short note about it on his blog), but it seems that for the next two weeks he’s blogging on various other business blogs as a guest blogger. [UPDATE: Todd S. of A Penny For.. notes that details of the program are here.]

First stop is at A Penny For… (here’s Godin’s last of several post today). Michelle Miller, who will also be hosting Godin next week, offers a schedule of Godin’s blog stops.

Michelle Miller

Michelle Miller, who works at the marketing agency Wizard of Ads, started this blog a few months ago focusing on the always hot (no pun intended) topic of marketing to women.

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Tim Bray

Along with Microsoft’s Robert Scoble as well as the team from Macromedia, Tim Bray is one of the highest profile bloggers in the tech community, both for the quality of his commentary and the size of the organization he works for: Sun Microsystems, where his title is technology director. Bray, who has been blogging for a few years, just joined Sun two months ago (as of this post). He is a long-time Internet technology pioneer, having co-created XML and previously ran Antarctica, a maker of business intelligence visualization software.

Like many prominent bloggers with prominent jobs, Bray disclaims on his blog, "The opinions expressed here are my own, and neither Sun nor any other party necessarily agrees with them." At the same time, however, he recently helped craft the Sun Policy on Public Discourse, which, in fact, lives on Bray’s blog.

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Robert Liodice, president and CEO of the ANA, has been blogging for a little over a month. The ANA is one of premier industry trade associations for marketing industry. I have to say, I’m surprised that “a suit” seems to really get blogging as well as Loidice demonstrates. For example, he links to Wikipedia to clarify concepts in his posts, which is a smart blogger thing to do. Not surprisingly, he uses the blog to boost for the industry (e.g., “Great (Not Just Good) Times Are Ahead for Marketers”), but he also uses it to comment on an initiative of another industry association (“NAB Responsible Programming Taskforce”) as well as to respond to how the press is clarifying ANA initiatives (“NUDG: What Really Happened”). A great example of why every industry association should adopt this handy communication tool.

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Jerry Michalski

Jerry Michalski is one smart cookie. For five years, he edited Esther Dyson’s reknowned tech industry newsletter Release 1.0. Since 1998, he has been operating as an independent consultant to leading Silicon Valley companies, and others. Sadly, he blogs infrequently. I’d be interested to read his insights a lot more often than he doles them out.

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Nick Usborne

I’ve known Nick for years from our time together on the Internet marketing speaker circuit. Not only a great speaker and consultant, but Nick is also the author of the popular book NetWords about online copywriting. He’s also been running a newsletter on the topic for a while, and, online wordster such that he is, a blog was only a logical extension, which he’s been doing since last August.

If I may be so bold, Nick, as to offer a bit of advice for the blog: 1) link to it prominently from your main consulting page, rather than making folks dig into your About Me page to find the link, and 2) fix your archives, so that you can navigate all the way back to the start more easily from the main site navigation.

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Esther Dyson is truly a thought leader in the Internet and technology space. A consultant and venture capitalist through her firm EdVenture Holdings, her newsletter Release 1.0 has been an important read for technology executives for more than a decade. Release 2.0 is the title of her book, and Release 3.0 is the name of her fortnightly column for the New York Times Syndicate. So, it’s only logical that when she started a blog last year, it became Release 4.0. Dyson is also the host of the prestigious technology conference PC Forum.

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Rich Ottum

Rich Ottum runs the eStrategyOne consulting firm, focused on Internet marketing. He has been observing industry news and trends on this blog for nearly a year (as of this posting).

He recently wrote an article “10 Steps To Marketing With Business Weblogs” on WebProNews and on his site he also he also offers this (Word doc) white paper, “Marketing with Business Weblogs Primer.”

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Once upon a time, The Industry Standard was the best magazine in the world, covering the Internet economy better than anyone. Then, evil bastards over at IDG pulled the plug on its financing at the first whisper of the economic downturn. Well, now the Internet is back, and, to a lesser extent, so is The Standard. Only this time, it’s just a blog. Mark Glasser, a former reporter for the publication, explains over at the Online Journalism Review, the back-story:

[F]ormer Industry Standard online honcho Matt McAlister — who is vice president and general manager of online operations at IDG’s InfoWorld — has decided to bring the site back to life as a moonlighting project. His plans are modest, with a rotating schedule of guest bloggers over the coming months, but he is clearly optimistic that the Standard still has a place in the media universe.
. . .
[F]ormer Standard contributors Jimmy Guterman, Rafat Ali, James Ledbetter and Mike Butcher have signed up to blog without pay. There will be no editorial oversight before posting, and bloggers will write to the style that suits them best — but mainly with links to news and comments.

Frankly, it’s a former shadow of its former self, but it was so great back when, I’m happy to take whatever reminders of that I can get.

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“Commentary on startups, small business, business planning and growth strategy” from the folks at Bplans.com, a business plan resource tool, and Palo Alto Software, a business plan software tool.

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This blog (by an anonymous author, as far as I can see) appears to have a media revenue model (i.e., ad support), as opposed to consulting. It just celebrated its one year birthday last week (Happy Birthday!). Various useful resources for business bloggers, which I will monitor regularly.

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