Ironically, blogs are not just another forum for businesses to sell their products, they are a chance to listen on a large scale to their customers. Blogs offer businesses a very inexpensive hearing aid. Now we just need to figure out what to do with the information our customers are telling us.
Eight and a half million people are writing blogs, up from 100,000 two years ago, and a new one begins every seven seconds, according to Technorati. Some large companies, including Boeing, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, are letting senior executives blog.
The Strategic Board Blog has a great list of CEOs who are blogging.
Some interesting blogs:
Matt Blumberg, CEO, Return Path – blogging since May 10, 2004
Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman, General Motors Corporation – blogging since January 5, 2005
Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext – blogging since October 14, 2002
Greg Papadopoulos, CTO, Sun Microsystems, blogging since February 7, 2005
Chris Abraham has a great listing of companies that are blogging. Here are some of the more interesting entries:
Blogging, darn now look what you’ve made me done, now even I have joined the masses. Oh well… give in a year or two and will be proclaiming, “Me? A blogger, but blogging is so 2005.” Then ten years after that we shall all take it up again, you know just for the nostalgia and because we’re so fucking old school.
However I am vastly interested in this phenomenon, to such an extent that I wrote my A level Media Studies, course work on the subject of blogging. Since I live in Northern Ireland that always lags behind what the rest of the world is doing due to our minds being preoccupied by the troubles. When I wrote the piece, I was hailed as some edgy prophet that spoke in a strange tongue bring a magical gift from a distant land known as a blog. Which I lapped up – just call me the blog father.
If you pay attention to the machinations of the game journalism world, you may have observed the following sequence in the past week:
* Tony Rice set up a set of links to interesting game blog posts called the Carnival of Gamers on his generally excellent blog, Button Mashing.
* The Carnival gets noticed by quite a variety of influential weblogs which point lots of traffic its way and generally get people to notice some blogs they might not have known about.
* Matthew Gallant at Computer Games Online sees the Carnival and writes a rather negative take on the whole thing based entirely on the Carnival’s first entry, a diatribe called The Best Reviews Money Can Buy on peterb’s Tea Leaves blog.
* Josh at Cathode Tan wrote up a quick post taking Gallant to task, which resulted in a lengthy string of back and forth comments which quickly descends into petty insults between Josh, Matthew and other involved/interested parties.
* Places like Mile Zero, and Tea Leaves itself jump in to comment, leading to more comment thread flame wars.
If you missed all this Internet drama, I consider you lucky.
The Video Game Ombudsman: Bloggers vs. The Establishment — Round Googol
I’m always on the lookout for the kind of article you can copy and plop down on a colleague’s desk and say “y’know all this stuff I’ve been saying about wikis, well HERE’S a good overview of some of what we should be doing…”
G.Burton’s recently (re)published text in Infoconomy is one such article.
wikiSquared: INFOCONOMY review of corporate blogs & wikis
Marshall’s Web Tool Blog: Introductory Article Re Corporate Blogs and Wikis
angelheaded hipster: Blogging, New Media, Etc.
BusinessPundit: Why Companies Don’t Want to Blog
