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…
Communication consultant Debbie Weil dings the executive bloggers at Boeing and GM for neglecting to comment on recent big negative news about their companies (CEO resigning in sex scandal and major drop in earnings forecast respectively).
She’s got a good point. It’s also probably the kind of scenario that freaks out most companies about blogging. But, as she points out, if you’ve got it, you might as well flaunt it (i.e., you’ve earned positive credibility with an audience of readers through these blogs, so you may was well use the channel to advance a positive interpretation of such bad news rather than ignore the elephant in the room).
Debbie Weil: GM & Boeing: Corporate “Tell-It-Not” Blogs
Tim Bray thinks the media obsession with bloggers getting fired for blogging is a crock. Rather, he makes a compelling argument that blogging is actually good for one’s career. He’s a posterboy for the idea himself; after being a prominent blogger for years stemming from his experience as an experienced technologist and entrepreneur, he was appointed Technology Director of Sun Microsystems last year, a company that now has several senior managers blogging.
Another case in point: Microsoft just announced its acquisition of Groove Networks, makers of a peer-to-peer-style employee knowledgement management system, whose founder CEO, Ray Ozzie, has now been appointed chief technology officer at Microsoft. Granted, Ozzie is well known in some circles for having founded Lotus Notes once upon a time, but he is also a revered blogger, although curiously he hasn’t posted to his once-popular blog in a year.
If you can get past the corny lead without puking, the story suggests that Jupiter Research’s blogs are actually driving real business leads:
The at-times offbeat journals are stirring sales leads from clients who otherwise might not have contacted Jupiter, says David Schatsky, chief of research at JupiterMedia’s Jupiter Research unit.
“One example is tech vendors whose marketers are checking to see if Jupiter mentions their products and what we say about them,” Schatsky said.
The company can’t say just how much business the blogs have generated. But Schatsky says scores of potential clients have contacted Jupiter because of the blogs.
Investor’s Business Daily: Blogs Bring A Boost To Jupiter Research
Reader David of ContentCentricBlog points out this new blog by CEO and founder of Edelman PR. The blog is titled 6AM. Edelman explains in his first post:
Why 6 AM?–because I wake up early and hope to get you some useful insights as you come in to work. I plan to post weekly, and by calling it 6am, rather than say, Every Monday, so I’ll have a little wiggle room in terms of when I post!
He’s got the jump on Aaron Bailey by one minute.
A few weeks ago, I wrote that high-profile venture capitalist Tim Draper was blogging. Looking back at that site, I’m not sure it’s really a blog at all. He’s an author on Always-On, and it’s really hard to call things on that site blogs, as their system is kind of retarded.
Regardless, his colleague Steve Jurvetson, of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, is now blogging, and there’s no doubt it’s a real blog: it’s hosted on Blogspot, after all.
Big-shot venture capitalist Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson has a blog (of sorts) at Always-On. (Free registration required.)
Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission is now blogging (sort of) at Always-On. (Free registration required.)
Suw Charman is indeed attractive (judging by her picture, anyway), and the way she spells her name is a bit strange (from a guy whose sister is named “Sue”), but I don’t think either of those help explain her blog’s name, a new entrant from the excellent Corante family of blogs. Once again, I am pleased to see a blog with a clear mission statement:
In Strange Attractor, Suw picks out patterns from the apparent chaos that is the blogosphere. She explores business blogging as well as adjacent territories such as social technologies, writing and storytelling, e-learning, digital rights and journalism.
It really is remarkable how cool Microsoft is about blogs. This post on Community Kitchen explains:
We just launched the Microsoft Community Blogs Portal, a searchable listing of blogs by Microsoft employees, categorized by product or technology topic. The project also makes it easier for pages across Microsoft.com to publish lists of relevant blogs and posts from those blogs.
Isn’t this the kind of thing you’d expect from Apple, considering how innovative they’re supposed to be and all (yet, do they actually do anything with blogs as a company?).
Thanks again to Olivier for the link.
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.
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.
It was just a matter of time. A month ago, Microsoft founder and richest man in the world Bill Gates raved about blogs in a speech to business leaders. Now, the Seattle Times is suggesting Bill may launch his own blog imminently.
Seattle Times: Bill Gates Could Join the Ranks of Bloggers
UPDATE: Here’s the latest on this from Dave on the “transition plan.”
NEW, IMPROVED UPDATE: God bless the Internet. Waxy.org has put out a challenge for folks to product remixes of Dave’s audio note. Hilarity ensues. This one is the funkiest so far.
ORIGINAL POST: Dave Winer frequently claims to be the first weblogger. As the architect of the RSS XML syndication protocol, organizer of BloggerCon and the founder of Userland, which makes Radio and Manila blog publishing tools, there is no doubt he has had a great impact on the blog trend. He’s also something of a prickly personality who has both many admirers and many critics. The latter camp are certainly on alert with Winer’s recent decision to shut down Weblogs.com as a free web hosting service for some 3,000 sites with this brusque announcement:
I can’t afford to host these sites. I don’t want to start a site hosting business. These are firm, non-negotiable statements.
Winer invited people who have sites hosted on the service to leave a comment on the above entry and that he will export the content of the sites for them to do what they will with the data. In similarly tart style, he wrote at the top of the comments thread:
Groundrules: Personal comments, ad hominems, will be deleted. And no negotiating or whining. Just post the url of your site.
Winer does provide considerably more perspective about his decision in a separate audio essay, in which he explains, among other things, the stress of keeping the servers going out of his own pocket is taxing his health (he suffered a heart attack a couple of years ago). Doc Searls, one of the most prominent webloggers who still uses the Weblogs.com domain, also offers his thoughts on this development, which is basically forgiving (Doc is a really nice guy).
This sorry episode just goes to show the liability in using a free host for a blog or other kind of web site, all the more so if it’s a “business blog.” Recently I wrote to someone who pointed to their blog as an example of a business blog for inclusion in my directory, and when I noticed it was a Blogspot blog, I wrote back saying that it looked unprofessional as a business blog, in my opinion, to be hosted on Blogspot, akin to hosting a business site on Geocities some years ago. I doubt Google would abandon its million-plus users of the Blogspot system as uncerimoniously as Winer has done with Weblogs.com, but you never know. Me, I’m happier paying a real host with a track record and business model and cash flow, where I have a greater confidence the data still will be there tomorrow.
I’ve written here before about Nick Denton, the publisher behind Gawker, Wonkette, Fleshbot, Gizmodo and, most recently, Defamer, all blog properties he hires other writers to produce, all of which are doing considerable traffic and have played host to real advertisers like British Airways, Absolut Vodka, Jose Cuervo, Warner Brothers Music, Intuit and others.
Not to name drop, but just for context, Nick and I are buddies from years ago (as in, he had Thanksgiving at my place last year), back from when he was a journalist for the Financial Times (and I for Boston Globe and others), before Nick quit journalism for dot-com entrepreneurship to found Moreover and then rather accidentally made a bunch of money on First Tuesday. Nick was the guy who turned me onto blogs, and in the last couple of years he has dedicated himself to being at the forefront of those pioneering the idea of commercial weblogs.
Nick’s a genuinely nice guy and obviously an uncommonly creative thinker (check out his latest project: ad campaign blogs), but what is perhaps most interesting about him (and anyway it’s the point of this rather embarrassingly butt-kissing post) is what a media darling he is. I’ve never known anyone since I did PR for Marimba’s Kim Polese who was such a publicity magnet. Towit, here are three articles about him published in just the last few weeks in major media, only the tip of the iceberg for this sort of stuff:
I think Ad Age may also have something in the works, but I haven’t seen it yet. Another buddy, Steve Hall, interviewed for the NYT piece, told me that the journalist Nat Ives asked him, “Does it seem like we’re writing about Gawker a bit too much?” Uh…yeah, maybe! FYI, my cell phone is 646 554-0963, if anyone wants to interview a blog expert other than Nick Denton anytime soon…
UPDATE:
ClickZ writes: “Questions for Gawker Media Publisher Nick Denton” (July 6) in which he reveals part of his secret: “Exercise, sometimes. Alcohol, often.”
If you’re still on the fence about the power of blogs in business, our cause has a new advocate: Bill Gates. At the recent Microsoft CEO Summit 2004, a conference for CEOs, Gates raved about blogs and product-oriented communities, two related trends I’ll be talking about later today at AdTech. Thank you, Bill, you just made my presentation! Read the complete speech in the link above or read the BBC’s assessment of the key points on blogs, or just read the pertinent section of the speech excerpted without permission here:
Another new phenomenon that connects into this is one that started outside of the business space, more in the corporate or technical enthusiast space, a thing called blogging. And a standard around that that notifies you that something has changed called RSS.
This is a very interesting thing, because whenever you want to send e-mail you always have to sit there and think who do I copy on this. There might be people who might be interested in it or might feel like if it gets forwarded to them they’ll wonder why I didn’t put their name on it. But, then again, I don’t want to interrupt them or make them think this is some deeply profound thing that I’m saying, but they might want to know. And so, you have a tough time deciding how broadly to send it out.
Then again, if you just put information on a Web site, then people don’t know to come visit that Web site, and it’s very painful to keep visiting somebody’s Web site and it never changes. It’s very typical that a lot of the Web sites you go to that are personal in nature just eventually go completely stale and you waste time looking at it.
And so, what blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to write something that you can think of, like an e-mail, but it goes up onto a Web site. And then people who care about that get a little notification. And so, for example, if you care about dozens of people whenever they write about a certain topic, you can have that notification come into your Inbox and it will be in a different folder and so only when you’re interested in browsing about that topic do you go in and follow those, and it doesn’t interfere with your normal Inbox.
And so if I do a trip report, say, and put that in a blog format, then all the employees at Microsoft who really want to look at that and who have keywords that connect to it or even people outside, they can find the information.
And so, getting away from the drawbacks of e-mail — that it’s too imposing — and yet the drawbacks of the Web site — that you don’t know if there’s something new and interesting there — this is about solving that.
The ultimate idea is that you should get the information you want when you want it, and we’re progressively getting better and better at that by watching your behavior, ranking things in different ways.
Another big phenomenon is building communities around Web sites, around products. And virtually every company ought to have on their Web site the ability for their customers, their suppliers, various people, to interact and their employees to see the dialogue taking place there and jump in and talk to them and help them.
The idea of these communities making these things fun, how you make sure nobody dominates the community or invades the community, a lot of progress there that make those things important. Built into every one of our products now are connections back to the community, a thing called Office Online, or Visual Studio, our development tools have the developers online, that’s called MSDN. And we learn so much about what people are doing or what they want from that and we literally require our employees to engage in those communities so they’re up there and visible and getting that direct exposure not through statistics but through particular customer dialogue.
Information visibility. This is one that we often talk about, because our view is what’s being done in terms of insight in information is so small compared to what can be done and what should be done — seeing trends in customers, seeing quality type issues, tracking those, even the most basic things around budgeting, forecasting, sales analysis — getting it so somebody can take form the back-end systems that have the information in a very complex form necessarily and navigate that and bring that into their ad hoc tools, typically Microsoft Excel, and play around with it and yet still be connected to the updates and not run any issues about is it secure enough that they’ll let you get at that information, that’s been a big challenge. Steve will talk about a few cases where I think we’ve really got some best practices here in terms of insight into the information.
My only question is, where’s Bill’s blog?
Microsoft.com: Remarks by Bill Gates…Microsoft CEO Summit 2004
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.
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.
Along with Nick Denton of Gaker Media and Jason Calacanis of Weblogs Inc., Tony Perkins is one of the early advocates for using a blog-like format to power a commecial web publishing model with AlwaysOn, which launched nearly two years ago (as of this post).
AlwaysOn has its critics among the old-school blogger community, many of whom question whether AlwaysOn is a blog (or network of blogs) at all. It does seem to have elements of a more “traditonal” online magazine, with many or most posts being longer essays as opposed to short blurbs like those of most blogs, and a broad team of contributing writers. It’s also unclear (to me, anyway) whether there is a traditional editorial hierarch to the site (i.e., posts get approved first by an editor) or whether every writer posts directly to the site in blog tradition. But it’s certainly blog-like enough to merit inclusion in this directory.
Like Red Herring, Perkins’s prior venture, the topic area of AlwaysOn is primarily the intersection of finance and technology.
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.
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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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
