Wednesday, February 23, 2005

ROBERT SCOBLE ON RSS AND PR

Have you read the article on Robert Scoble ("Technical Evangelist" at Microsoft) in the Economist? Here is an excerpt from the article, Face value. Chief humanising officer.

Mr Pryor figured that the straight-talking Mr Scoble would make a reassuring pilot or “a great evangelist”. So he hired him. Mr Scoble, for his part, simply kept doing what he was good at. His blog—which he has kept outside of Microsoft's computers, and to which he usually posts in the wee hours after midnight—reads like a stream of consciousness. A reader might discover, for instance, that Mr Scoble's new wife just became an American citizen, or how to win a cheese contest. “A good blog lets you see the mess; lets you see behind the scenes,” he writes in one entry. ...

Inspired in part by Mr Scoble's success, executives at other companies—so far, mostly in tech—are starting their own blogs. ...

Will corporate bloggers start to get tongue-tied and sound just like tedious press releases? Mr Scoble, for his part, hates the question but concedes that, theoretically, Microsoft's corporate view and his own could come into severe conflict, and it is not clear what would happen then. (Economist, 02/10/05.)


If you want to find more blogs by top executives, read John Cook's article, Venture Capital: Startup tags along as weblogs go corporate. Here is an excerpt from the article.

But as more companies experiment with blogging, issues quickly arise about what information is meant for mass consumption and what should stay behind closed doors. Bloggers at Microsoft, Google and Wells Fargo have lost their jobs in recent years for disclosing too much.

That potential problem and others led to a new product from Seattle startup WhatCounts, which earlier this week unveiled what it called the "first technology appliance designed to address the growing need for corporate blogging." (Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 02/18/05.)


Fredrik Wackå of Corporateblogging.info thinks that PR Becomes More Valuable With Blogging. Read BusinessPundit's post, The Proper PR Response for a Blog Attack.

Debbie Well of BlogWrite for CEOs is asking the following question: So... what's Robert Scoble (aka Scobleizer) like in person?

After reading Robert Scoble's post, More misunderstanding of RSS, I think I have to subscribe to his link blog. Dave Winer of Really Simple Syndication says: "No one got fired for supporting RSS". For more on RSS, read my post, EGO RICH SITE SUMMARY (RSS). For even more information, go to:


So, how do you keep up with reading all the blogs you want? Brian Gongol suggested in an email that I should try a tool for the Firefox browser called Sage. It will be interesting to learn more about the features of Internet Explorer 7. On February 16, a reader wrote this comment:

If you can't read the whole blogosphere, try Findory. It learns what you like and you will always read the most interesting (for you) articles of the web.

Now I'm only subscribed to a few RSSs: Findory News, Findory Blogs, del.icio.us/popular, DayPop Top 40 and 4 or 5 feeds I can't live w/o. (EGO, SPOTLIGHT ON NEW BLOGS AND BLOGROLLING, 02/15/05.)


Related: My post, MSN NEWSBOT AND FINDORY NEWS.

Tags [Hat tip to Blog Business World.]:


UPDATE 02/27/05:
Here is an excerpt from Dave Beal's article, Are blogs good for business?

Technological innovations are driving the blogging boom.

One is the "permalink," a one-of-a-kind Web address for every blog posting that enables bloggers to link to one another's posts and keep them up indefinitely.

Another is the "RSS" or "really simple syndication" feed, which enables a reader to quickly find a reference in a blog without having to scroll through endless chitchat.

A new business model — complete with blog search engines, raters who measure the popularity of blogs and ad agencies — has emerged. Power Line is among a relative handful of blogs that have built up a modest ad base, generating revenue of about $2,000 a month or more than enough to pay expenses, says partner John Hinderaker. (St. Paul Pioneer Press, 02/27/05.)


UPDATE 03/05/05:
Read Bernard Moon's post, RSS: Real Simple Syndication or Really Saturated Space? [Via Pheedo.]

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