Mena Trott

Publishers of the popular Movable Type and TypePad blog publishing tools, Six Apart maintains several customer service blogs, including:

• SixApart’s homepage for general company news.
• Mena’s Corner, from Six Apart’s president and co-founder Mena Trott, “is our outlet for updates about Six Apart and the weblogging space through our perspective. It is, an attempt, to show the inner workings of a start-up and let the outside world understand the challenges we face and achievements we accomplish.”
• Everything TypePad, for product and customer service announcements about the company’s hosted solution, TypePad (which is what we use to produce BusinessBlogConsulting.com).
• Movable Type’s homepage is also a weblog with product annoucments and customer service news for that product.
• Mena.Typepad.com, company president Mena Trott’s personal blog
• Ben.Stupidfool.org, Six Apart’s CTO, co-founder and Mena’s husband and high school sweetheart (awwww) Ben Trott’s blog, which it looks like he doesn’t update lately.

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It’s disappointing that Blogger.com, the guys who basically invented blogs (now owned by Google), don’t showcase the potential of business blogs more prominently with their own service, but they do update Status.Blogger.com sporadically, pertaining to system status issues, and Blogger.com’s homepage is itself a blog, though it likewise appears to be updated only once or twice a month. On the other hand, several folks on Blogger’s management maintain their own blogs, including Evan Williams, Jason Shellon and Biz Stone.

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A new national magazine and website (it’s not clear, actually, whether this is a print publication at all) dedicated injecting social responsibility and personal fulfillment into the business world: “think Fortune meets Oprah with a dash of Vanity Fair,” says co-founder Anita Sharpe on her bio page. Contributors to the site include a couple of A-List Left Coast bloggers (Halley Suitt and David Weinberger), as well as towering management consulting guru Tom Peters, among others.

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Garland Coulson

“About Us” copy begins: “Garland Coulson, ‘The E-Business Tutor,’ teaches small business and home based business people how to successfully promote their web sites and businesses on the Internet.” The site’s homepage functions as a blog, though I can’t recognize by looking at it what tool Coulson uses (Builder Spot perhaps?).

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Business 2.0 also has a blog, not surprisingly.

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My first column today on research topics at iMedia Connection. Not surprisingly, I kick things off with a blog theme. Includes original research about the characteristics of blog readers from Quris.

iMedia: Blogging Is Booming

20 solid pieces of advice about business blogging from Microsoft’s A-List in-house blogger, Robert Scoble. Here’s a taste of the top five:

1. Tell the truth
2. Post fast on good news or bad
3. Use a human voice
4. Make sure you support the latest software/web/human standards.
5. Have a thick skin

Scobleizer: Corporate Weblog Manifesto

Boston Globe technology reporter Hiawatha Bray has been maintaining a blog since June 2003.

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Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble, a Microsoft employee whose role is customer "evangelist," regularly posts a dozen or two entries a day, often into the wee hours, on subjects ranging from business travel, blog culture and general tech trends, but it’s mostly all Microsoft, all the time. No question, Scoble takes to the medium like a fish to water, speaking his mind and engendering large and loyal following. A poster child for how to do business blogging right, both as a thought leader and customer servant.

One post is a useful one for all our readers, The Corporate Weblog Manifesto.

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Two new blogs from the London News Review, one on music and one on books.

Edmonton radio station’s community calendar. This is a perfect example of a business blog — many radio stations could copy this model.

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Another great example of a small organization using a weblog to keep the site dynamic and useful.

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Supporting the consulting business of Tim Slavin.

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Senator and 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry’s web site maintains a blog written by campaign staff.

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MediaMap, which services PR companies with information about trends in the media industry, recently started a blog.

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>From Hammock Publishing’s CEO Rex Hammock, whose company specializes in publishing client magazines. The blog focuses on the magazine industry, custom publishing and business communications.

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Terrific article on the trend of business blogging, with comments on blog initiatives by the likes of Microsoft, Verizon, DaimlerChrysler, American Airlines, Hartford Financial Services, IBM, Dr. Pepper and Macromedia.

The story notes that “to meet corporate demand, both UserLand and Six Apart, makers of popular blog software programs, are coming out with enterprise-level products later this year.” It also contains this great insight:

Corporate America is jumping onto the blogwagon for many of the same reasons all those journalists, brooding teenagers, and presidential campaigners are already on board. Unlike email and instant messaging, blogs let employees post comments that can be seen by many and mined for information at a later date, and internal blogs aren’t overwhelmed by spam. And unlike most corporate intranets, they’re a bottoms-up approach to communication.

Fast Company: It’s A Blog World After All

The blog is called FC Now, from trendy business magazine Fast Company, written by a buddy, Heath Row. Insights on the world of high tech businesses.

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Sporadic blog (posts seem to average once a week or so recently) from investors in August Capital.

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While not exactly a business blog, as it’s produced by the UK’s Leeds Business School, close enough.

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