Blogging Roller

Business blogging superstar Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft and that means it's time to warn folks again about those out-of-control bloggers, lament the loss of our last example of a productive business blogger and worry about the end of honest corporate blogging. Balderdash I say!

Are stars like Scoble of Microsoft or Schwartz of Sun the most important part of the corporate blogging value proposition? Stars speak to a broad audience and that's important, but the value of corporate blogging is that the "the people who are really doing the work tell the story to the world, directly" as Tim Bray wrote in his July 2005 piece on The New Public Relations. The thousands of employee bloggers and product-oriented bloggers that help build community around a company's products, services and initiatives are where the big value is -- especially for development platform companies like Microsoft and Sun.

Some good examples of product-oriented bloggers at Sun are The Aquarium, a group blog devoted to Java EE, Roumen Strobl, a Netbeans evangelist, and Tor Norbye of Java Creator and Java Posse podcast fame.