Reading Six Apart - Movable Type News - "Why do you care about business blogs so much?"

Outside of the blogosphere's echo chamber, most people who want to publish a page on their intranet at work are still stuck asking a geek down the hall to make the changes, and then waiting 3 weeks for it to happen, and another 3 weeks for the fixes for the mistakes in the first update. Those people deserve a tool as powerful and simple as blogs, if only to help preserve their sanity. And just maybe, some of those people will start to think "Hey, there really is something interesting about blogging."

Having an easy way to publish to your website is critical, and overdue. There is nothing more painful than knowing exactly the small change you need to make, and being a prisoner to an engineers schedule, believe me I know.

That said, I would hate to see blogging -- short form diary-style public personal unedited musings-- become a synonym for content management or publishing. Too often corporations put up a "blog" which is heavily edited and very much the party line, and the only thing it has in common with blogs is length. And sometimes not even that.

Corporate blogging is a huge opportunity for companies to speak to their constituencies in honest, informal terms. Let's not let them think they can buy a tool and get instant credibility.

I think it might be too late already Christina - with my pessimist hat on (it fits so well!) it seems that larger corporations are already confusing blogging with content management. Many of the corporate blogs in the UK seem to ignore the strengths of blogging (cross-referencing and a dialogue with the reader) and are using it either as fuel for mechanised SEO or as a publication route for PR.

I think this might be emblematic of a wider issue - whereas early blogs used an appropriate, light-weight blogging technology as a means of discussion, corporate adoption has tended to focus on publication. The two might not be mutually exclusive but the absence of the former weakens the value of the tool.

It is early in the morning, and I'm coffee-deficient, so I might be uncommonly grumpy at the moment..!

I disagree. There are already a lot of different blog flavors, and I don't think there's a lot of value in trying to constrain blogs into just being "short form diary-style public personal unedited musings". The blog is the technology, not the use.

I have an issue with blogs that are one thing but masquerade as another (such as "personal" blogs where the blogger is actually being paid to shill for a company or product). But I think people are pretty good at recognizing the different blog flavors and treating them differently.

That said, if a company simply wanted an easier way to do publishing, I think they should use PublicSquare. =)

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