Bothersome Business Blogs

[MCWebsite.Staff]

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[bharder@nlrha.ab.ca]

Bothersome Business Blogs

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Your secrets, such as you have chosen to divulge, are safe with me. Now, Joe over there, I can't speak for him! Here's my question. How are blogs really any different from the personal Web sites that were so briefly popular back in the 90's? Let's see, both use HTML and all the infrastructure of the Internet/World Wide Web. The publishing tools are often different, but need not be. Blogs are clearly meant as a kind of personal journal, to be updated frequently. The personal web sites tended to be more static, but again need not be. So in the end it's just a personal web site updated often. I suppose you could say that blogs could be posted to corporate sites instead of personal sites. Woo hoo, that's a big difference right there!

[Guest.Visitor]

Bothersome Business Blogs

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Joel, I thought the whole point of a blog was for someone with an enormous ego thinking that the he should share his thoughts with the entire world. There are millions of blogs and I can't think of any reason why I'd want to ready any of them. But for someone to think that a blog is going to be secret is really astonishing. Those people should be arrested and placed on a shuttle to the moon. We can't have them creating offspring and continuing their stupidity. Of course blogs are public! Unless you protect it with passwords and encryption, anyone can see it. But then it wouldn't be a blog anymore. I can't see a CEO blogging. More likely what would happen is he would dictate the blog to his assistant. The assistant then would give the information to a lackey to update the blog. Am I too old? I just don't see the appeal of blogs. I'm finished with my old fart rant, now. Back to my IBM Selectric and slide rule. Tom.

[H.Boldt]

Bothersome Business Blogs

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Back in the 90's, I read some advice from a web designer who said (among other things): "no one wants to see pictures of your cat". However, I discovered early on that there are people who do indeed want to see pictures of your cat! What happened to the "personal web sites"? They've never gone away. First, many have simply been shuffled to the bottom of the search results, so you may not be seeing as many as before. Second, some have changed focus and become more professional. Or they're just hosted on blog servers now. Finally, what do you think the .name tld is for? The bottom line is this: First, anyone can publish any information they want to, no matter how important or banal. Second, anyone can choose to read any information they want, no matter how important or banal. In other words, if you publish a picture of your cat, blue-ribbon Persian or DLH, someone out there will want to see it. Cheers! Hans

[R.Daugherty]

Bothersome Business Blogs

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This is a pretty funny thread. This is what a blog is. Joel blogs, and he's getting responses. He's not as sophisticated and doesn't have as much outlet as most bloggers because he doesn't have an RSS feed, but there is a fine line between outreach with little or no advertising and attracting readers to a site and the full bore blast of advertising for those readers who do get to the site. Or a full bore blast as some of us on occasion more closely resemble. Concerning the young person who used the phrase "post anonymously", it's more a concept or figure of speech than a literal phrase. Most people blogging expect their close friends to be reading, and who knows whom from anywhere on the internet. They don't expect all their classmates and everyone who knows them to all of a sudden be reading their random thoughts which happens on the rare occasion as mentioned when one's world is suddenly thrust into the spotlight. Blogging is not a diary, nor bloggers thinking somehow they are writing a personal diary for themselves. Then there are the true anonymous bloggers who would never have been found out who they really are until with sudden exposure they are outed. This happened with much hoopla to a blogger who was a Senate intern who liked to amuse her friends witn stories that got her fired when all of Washington started reading to figure out who was who in her scandalous blog postings. By the way, guaranteed to get big readership, Joel. Then there are the real CEO's that blog. And yes, they have people interested in what they have to say. Sun's CEO has a blog, Government Computer News editor has a blog, and they share their thoughts. Many people are interested in their thoughts. It's a much more interactive and lively interaction with readers than op-ed columns and letters to the editor, a bit like this but blogs stream to readers via RSS instead of waiting for readers to visit a site and find that op-ed piece, if they even knew to look for it. No comparison. It's communication racheted up more than a notch or two. IBM'ers blog. If I recall correctly, IBM was encouraging it, and I've seen some good ones. One of Microsoft's techies has one of the most widely followed blogs in the world. Another one had a bit of a flap with their Microsoft employer early on in blogging with a bit too much candor, but Google picked him up. And they haven't stopped picking up bright people like that either. But there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of blogs. They are like the people that started them. They are what you put into them. Most people post some, get no feedback, and get tired of it and move on. Some are as bad as home movies, some are like talking shop with a really smart person, some the best at what they do. And what do you get from all these people? The same thing you get from open source. Do you have any idea how many thousands upon thousands of open source projects are officially started before they wither away and abandoned? Do you say what a waste of time open source is, look at all these people with a start and nothing to show for it. Or do you say look at what technology like the internet and a CVS code repository has brought together that never existed before. Blogs are the same. rd