More on Business Blogs
From Ephraim Schwartz at InfoWorld:
Ben Gaucherin [of Sapient] says blogs “are a fad fueled by pop culture’s desperate search for the next big thing.”...He told me that blogs are the digital equivalent of the pet rock....
The fact that blogs may be the technological equivalent of the pet rock has a great deal to do with their success -- it is easy to post a blog -- and ultimately their benefit to those same companies that Gaucherin feels duty-bound to warn....
I called Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems...to see what he thought about Gaucherin’s comments. Sun has a very forward-thinking blog policy that allows anybody in the company to post to its blogs.sun.com site. About 1,500 employees currently do so.
“We have a list of dos and don’ts following existing corporate policy,” Bray tells me. Among the don’ts are discussions of existing litigation, financial information, and trade secrets, he said. This is a pattern any company can follow.
Chief among the benefits of blogs is that they become not posting sites so much as listening posts. Bray says blogs engage Sun with the community....
Sun employee Scott Jolly just started his blog today. After reading Scott's initial entry, I think that Sun has the right strategy.
At Sun, I'm the US Software Product Boss. I didn't pick my title, if I had I would be the US Software Product Manager or something clever, but the Boss actually means something to folks in higher places than mine, so there it is....
As Product Boss, I have a part finance, part sales operations, part putting my fingers in the holes in the floodwall type of role. I'm a one man team and hopefully have multiple people that think I work for them. At the end of the day, I try to help a variety of folks in the US field sales org be better able to talk about software, sell software and make sure that the different groups work together to further the software cause at Sun....
I joined Netscape as a consultant and was part of the implementation team for the best software product ever built, ECXpert and TradingXpert. As a consultant, working with customers, I was such a pain to the product management team for ECXpert that they decided to hire me....
I'm now living in Charlottesville, Virginia with my wife of 12 years and two little ones that keep me jumping. At ages 6 (almost 7) and 4, my son and daughter keep me from getting too wrapped up in stuff that in 5 years might not matter as much as it does right now....
Definitely engaging.
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