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…
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:
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.
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.
Alan Meckler, CEO of Internet research and publishing firm Jupiter Media, has embraced blogs in a big way. Not only has he encouraged many of his firm’s analysts to maintain their own blogs, but he also blogs himself about general trends in the Internet and high-tech industry.
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.
Weblog supporing security services firm that has long distinguished itself on the Net by providing statistics about web traffic.
Publishers of the popular Movable Type and TypePad blog publishing tools, Six Apart maintains several customer service blogs, including:
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.
Robert Scoble, a Microsoft employee whose role is customer "evangelist," regularly posts a dozen or two entries a day, often into the wee hours, on subjects ranging from business travel, blog culture and general tech trends, but it’s mostly all Microsoft, all the time. No question, Scoble takes to the medium like a fish to water, speaking his mind and engendering large and loyal following. A poster child for how to do business blogging right, both as a thought leader and customer servant.
One post is a useful one for all our readers, The Corporate Weblog Manifesto.
>From John Porcaro, with the big-ass title “Group Manager on Microsoft’s Home and Entertainment Division’s PR and Communications team.” A breezy combination of his thoughts on marketing and technology, as well as family and personal life. It’s not explicitly a Microsoft blog, but given his disclosure of his business title, it can’t help but to reflect on Microsoft to a degree. A nice blending of the professional and the personal.
Like its competitor Jupiter Research, IT consulting firm Gartner maintains a series of blogs written by its analysts, some freely available, some for clients only.
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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
