CEO blogs used to be all the rage within the business blogging community. Remember when we’d hear blog consultants gush about CEOs who dared to blog with transparency and authenticity. I rarely hear much talk about CEO bloggers anymore. Do you?

Remember Jonathan Schwartz? He was the poster child of blogging CEOs, the now former (as of February 3rd) CEO of Sun Microsystems. All you could hear was crickets on Jonathan’s blog from May of last year until finally Jonathan’s farewell post on January 27. Clearly he had a few things going on; Oracle was in the process of acquiring Sun. When you’re selling your company that is pretty much all that occupies your mind. I know that first-hand, as I’m happy to say my company (Netconcepts) was acquired by Covario last month.

The thing that most struck me was the name of Jonathan’s new blog. It’s titled “What I Couldn’t Say”. Hmmm. I guess transparency within a corporation only goes so far.

With the economy is in freefall, perhaps the tolerance of various boards of directors for CEO transparency has lessened? Or it could be simply that CEOs are just too busy and blogging isn’t such a priority, now that “blog” isn’t Word of the Year anymore.

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, is another CEO blogger who was acquired and who we don’t hear from any longer in the blogosphere. His last post was July of last year, and that wasn’t so much of a blog post as it was a copy of a letter that was sent to all the Zappos employees announcing the acquisition by Amazon. Before that, Tony last posted in January 2009.

I’m guilty too. My own “CEO blog” hasn’t seen any activity in over a month — no posts since Covario acquired us. But the reason for my ‘radio silence’ has nothing to do with the acquirer. I may no longer be a President/CEO, but I am still encouraged to keep blogging. The reason I don’t blog frequently is the same one as last year (when I was only posting a few times a month at best): I’m preoccupied running around speaking at conferences all over the U.S., writing for magazines, etc.

Then there are the corporate blogs where the CEO occasionally chimes in with his/her own post. My acquirer, Covario, fits into that group with its “Actionable Insights” blog. Trinity Road, an etailer of religious products like first communion dresses and rosaries, has a corporate blog, but you rarely if ever hear from the CEO on it.

Then there are the CEO blogs where you wonder if it’s actually the CEO who’s blogging because it’s so polished. Steve Spangler the science toys e-tailer, I think fits into that category. If you look at the posts on Steve’s blog you’ll see a gradual evolution to a style that is more and more polished.

Chris Baggott, CEO of the Compendium Blogware, has one of the best CEO blogs out there, in my opinion. It’s full of valuable content, it’s not overly polished, his personality really shines through, and he blogs regularly. It figures though. If any CEO would have that kind of a CEO blog, it would be the CEO of a business blogging software company!

Henry Copeland of Blogads has a pretty compelling contrarian review of the recent Business Week article Blogs Will Change Your Business.  In short, BW is "often jumps on the bandwagon just as it goes off the cliff", or so says Henry.  I tend to agree, and do have some issues with the short shrift techno babble cursory manner in which they dealt with blogs.  They usually do this on any number of topics, so no real surprises here.

At the end of the day, I guess I’m thankful that they’re raising the level of blog awareness among the BW audience.  (mid to upper level managers in almost every company in the US)  On the other hand, I’m already being asked by my corporate friends about some of the facts, figures and examples that were handily glossed over in their cutesy blog-like format of the article.  More work on my part, but at least were having the conversation on blogs.

So, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been posting to this blog a lot less lately. Regular readers may know that I took a full-time job six months ago (at DoubleClick) and a few months after that, I ended up taking over my department (Director of Research), as a result of which, I am very busy these days.

Sadly, evangelizing the marketing value of blogs is not tightly aligned with my job or DoubleClick’s business interests, so this site has been a labor of love. More to the point, however, I think the mission of the blog has to a certain extent been accomplished. When I began it, I felt there was a need for a voice on the web articulating this business value and highlighting the many new business blogs as examples for others to follow. In the just over a year since I started the blog, however, stories like the recent one in BusinessWeek have been making the case very well in the mainstream media, and there are many other blogs talking about the same issues, including those I link to on the left of this page under "From Whom We Steal." The best of those, IMHO, is Steve Rubel’s MicropPersuasion, in whose shadow I think this blog has been living for some time.

Therefore, with mixed feelings I am going to make formal what has been de facto the case for a few months: I don’t plan to update this blog very often going foward. Perhaps I’ll find something on-topic to say from time to time, and I welcome the other contributors to this site to feel free to remain as active as they want (which past performance suggests not especially active).

Meanwhile, if you need a fix of Bruner postings, I do still post a few times a month about general Internet marketing topics at ExecutiveSummary.com and more often about general nonsense at my personal site, Bruner Blog. I also do have plans to launch some new topical resources in the coming months, so stay tuned. Until then, thanks for your attention and I wish you all productive business blogging!

In case you haven’t seen it yet, BusinessWeek came out with a great story last week aptly titled Blogs Will Change Your Business. Here’s a taste:

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business — including yours.

I also refers to Steve Rubel as "an all-knowing Thumper in a forest of clueless Bambis," which is probably one of the weirder things they guy has ever been called. Anyway, required reading for followers of this trend.

BusinessWeek: Blogs Will Change Your Business

Man, I am a bad blogger. I spent much of the evening last night spamming marketing bloggers about a new report I’ve just finished writing. What was striking is how much more frequently they all blog than I do.

Ah well. Here’s what I’ve been busy with lately, anyway: The Decade in Online Advertising (PDF | landing page), a wide-ranging retrospective of the development of the web marketing industry. Needless to say there is a section on blogs. It’s free to download.

For a sample chart (my favorite), click here.