Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe caught two themes of the Jupiter conference: blogs as marketing, and blogs as self-expression, and is convinced that they will cancel each other out.
“It’s a clever way to give Internet companies a human face. But is it really blogging? Sure, the corporate weblogs use the same technologies,
but their hearts are not really in it. The best blogs don’t just deliver
authoritative information; they resonate with the personalities of their
creators.”
“Just as e-mail, born as an academic convenience, is now a marketing
tool for human growth hormone, the blogs are bound to go commercial. Who
knows? Maybe a few will even get it right. There are good TV
commercials, after all.”
These stereotypes aren’t much like the top work-related public blogs
(Mark Pilgrim, Jon Palfrey), where articulate professionals converse
with peers and build reputation with articulate essays on technical
subjects. Nor are they like the real-life intranet blogs in the IT
departments of Verizon and the State of Connecticut, in which employees
manage projects, talk with internal customers, and brainstorm about
managing through a reorganization.
Bray caught the hype and missed the reality.
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