Shel highlights a new (Canadian) business blog, the new Nortel blog written by its CTO. Mark covered this on his Nortel blog (and elsewhere), but I like about Shel’s post is the perspective of time.
Corporate blogging has not caught on as fast as Robert and I thought it would when we wrote Naked Conversations. But it has caught on and it is instigating the sort of fundamental change we predicted. It reminds me of Ethernet, when it’s inventor Bob Metcalfe went around for years extolling it’s virtues, closing his talks with, "And I predict this years, as I have predicted for the past six years, will be the year of the computer LAN."
No one quite knows which years actually was the year of the computer network. It just happened steadily. At the time, it seemed adoption was painfully gradual, and then we looked back and it was so obvious that it would happen and the time it took did not seem that long after all.
In fact it really wasn’t.
I see the same slow, steady progression happening with business blogging. Again I’ll trumpet my feeling that "blogs are dead", in that term "blog" should be retired. That the narrow definition of what a blog is or should be dropped and we focus on the aspect of rapid publishing. Publishing with the reader in mind. Publishing that lets search engines slurp up our content to be indexed like a data milkshake.
As more business adopt this new realm of publishing, the boundaries are going to continue to be push, new and exciting innovations found. And like Ethernet, we’re going to look back and see that it didn’t take very long at all.
Tags: business blogging, business publishing, web 2.0
