doodledee

There's been a lot of talk in the media lately - like yesterday, I think - about huge companies and web logs (or "blogs") and how the companies sometimes read blogs to see what people are saying about them. I guess we're all supposed to be shocked to learn that giant multinational corporations who spend billions of dollars carefully constructing a brand would go so far as to care about how it's perceived. Put me down for a "duh".

Over the years I've also read blog entries stories from the web-savvy dork crowd bemoaning the fact that more companies don't blog for themselves or at least provide news feeds or some such similar public persona. And in a way, I guess I can kinda agree with them, because hey, who doesn't want to read about how things are going down at the scotch tape factory and/or the SUPER funny thing Guidant's cat did that afternoon in the stent lab. Oh wait. What I meant to say was that consuming PR dronespeak via RSS holds no more appeal to me than it does when it's delivered via 'traditional' channels - hint: no appeal - and I honestly don't get why anyone would say otherwise. Forcefeed much?

I guess there are some cases where a company might have a valid reason to publish or syndicate information to the public, though they're not immediately obvious and they're certainly not without risk. I bring this up because the other day I was browsing IBM's website looking for information on how they were re-tooling their latest product stack to be buzzword compliant and I saw a link titled something like "Blog With the SOA Rock Stars". Being a fan of service oriented architectures, rock stars, and banner ads, I naturally clicked on it without hesitation. This is gonna be gooooood!

So up comes a page full of Rock Stars with little bios and links to their blogs. I was happy to see that most were actual geeks, not just marketing doofs. "Neat," I think, "maybe this particular giant company has figured out a good blogging strategy, I'll read a few and see what they have to say". So I start to dig in and OF COURSE the content is mostly "weeee! this blogging stuff is gonna be fun!" followed by maybe an insightful entry or two followed by a few months of nothing followed by a cliche post about not posting much. Now I'm not ripping the people who write them - especially the dude who's a Fellow, they don't just give that title away - because I'm sure they weren't given any free time to write or whatever, but how bad does it look when a company FEATURES a bunch of blogs and then they turn out to be worthless? Can you say way worse than if they had never blogged in the first place? I thought you could.

In conclusion, until notified otherwise, all blogs everywhere remain stupid.

Blog With The SOA Rock Stars [websphere]
Businesses Get Blogged [strib]
Blogging for Business [mnteractive] - covered better in a different entry, but I couldn't find it.