It's a Blog World After All

By: Jena McGregorApril 1, 2004

Blogs were once the domain of angst-ridden teens and doomed presidential candidates. But the likes of Verizon, IBM, Microsoft, and Dr. Pepper are all climbing on the blogwagon. Turns out, Web logs are a nifty knowledge-management tool. And companies also see them as a promising medium for advertising (naturally).

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Robert Scoble may well be one of the most powerful people in Redmond right now. "The Scobleizer," as he's known to his daily readers, writes a Web log, or blog, posting comments on topics that range from the world's largest pistachio factory to how cheap it is to eat in Shanghai. Mostly, though, he writes about Microsoft. On January 27, 14 of the 31 posts he made between midnight and the time he went to bed, sometime after 3:41 a.m., were about the software giant or its products. But the Scobleizer is no ordinary Windows-obsessed blog jockey. He is, in fact, a Microsoft employee. He's a "technical evangelist," to be precise, whose job includes communicating with customers on the Web. One way he does this is by writing blogs. He gets feedback from tech-savvy readers on how to improve Microsoft products, and at times, he's even mildly critical of his employer. After Microsoft threatened a teen who registered MikeRoweSoft.com, Scoble wrote this: "It's unfortunate that we went after a 17-year-old named 'Mike Rowe,' though. I'm sorry that happened to you Mike."

What's this? Humility from the House of Gates? That's life in the blog world, where one whiff of PR or marketing spin will instantly mark you as phony. "If my credibility goes down," says Scoble, "then what do I have?" Though he's just one of hundreds of employee bloggers at the software giant, Scoble is by far the most widely read. More than 850 blogs and 1,300 sites link to him, putting him right up there with Howard Dean's Blog for America at its height. And he's aware of his power: "I know I'm playing with dynamite," Scoble says.

From Issue 81 | April 2004

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Recent Comments | 41 Total

December 1, 2008 at 10:08am by Matt Timothy

The reason this open-source market of thinking and writing has such potential is that the always adjusting and evolving collective mind can rapidly filter out bad arguments and bad ideas. The flip side, of course, is that bloggers are also human beings. Reason is not the only fuel in the tank. In a world where no distinction is made between good traffic and bad traffic, and where emotion often rules, some will always raise their voice to dominate the conversation; others will pander shamelessly to their readers’ prejudices; others will start online brawls for the fun of it.

It's a Blog World After All

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