“I’m just a poor moose, who was born on the wrong side of the tracks. But I wanted to make something of myself so after I failed at medical school, flunked out of law school, lost my job at a Fortune 500 company, and eventually was let go by the local Taco Bell franchise, I decided to become a spokes-moose. That’s when I made it big!”

A Character blog from the States to promote Moose Tracks Ice cream. The blog is currently raising money for an orphanage in Latvia showing that blogs can tie-in to other corporate initiatives.

In France, bloggers claimed they were responsible for defeating the new European constitution. Now the EU is fighting back.

Margot Wallström, the European Union Commissioner responsible for communications strategy, has launched her own blog. In a speech on June 28th, she gave a powerful defence of why blogging is important in government.

“Why blog?” she asks. “Not because I am particularly masochistic – but because I want people to see that the Commission is not made up of “faceless bureaucrats” but of real human beings.
I read the comments with interest, and the depth of the debate is impressive on - for instance - the Constitution and the referendums, the whole question of democracy in the EU and, indeed, the question of whether we really need the EU at all.

The message? You can only deal with bloggers by joining them. You have to engage in the debate.

Wallstrom is making exactly the right point. Blogging is partly about communicating, but is also about humanising institutions, making them less remote and less threatening. That is a valuable lesson for the EU, but also for any organisation or company that fears it is losing touch with the public.

HP’s network of blogs has a corporate look about it. In general I think it’s better if blogs look more informal. All the same, the posters are making a good effort to come across as human beings rather than corporate daleks. One blogger talks about a friend who has died. This one, I think, goes a bit to far when he thanks both his wife and his cat for being so wonderful.

Not surprisingly, web designers are among the most advanced bloggers. There are quite a few lessons which others businesses can learn from the way the webbies have embraced blogging.

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Microsoft has announced that it is going to make the ability to subscribe to blog-syndication feeds an integral part of Windows in its next incarnation, Longhorn.

Almost all blogs have feeds. Currently you need to download a dedicated ‘newsreader’ to subscribe to them. All that technology will be incorporated into Internet Explorer 7.

This will mean that you can add feeds as you cruise the web. Then blogs will come pouring into your email or your browser or a folder on your desktop all day long. I think some people might think it’s a bit too much. God helps us when the spam merchants start adding feeds to your browser without you knowing.

A blog run by a group of Microsoft Geeks have posted an hour long video interview with the head of the Microsoft Longhorn project about this very subject.

A note on the video interview itself. It’s completely unedited and you have to listen to loads of irrelevant chit-chat. It shows three things:

1. Microsoft is letting ordinary employees put out information over blogs. These days we meet not Gates or the PR man, but the ordinary Microsoft geek in full living colour.
2. It’s amazing that you can post (and syndicate) videos on blogs.
3. It’s amazing how boring it can be if it’s not done properly - you need some editing skills.

New to blogging? Want to know what it’s all about?

Here are a couple of links that reveal all:

WordPress introduction to blogging with lots of info about trackbacks, pings, RSS and other mysterious phenomena.

And here’s the good old (well rather new) Wiki encyclopedia’s explanation. The Wiki can be considered to be a blog’s nearest relation. It’s publishing without the need for a publisher.

Technorati aims to be the Google of blogs. It’s not as fast or as elegant as the world’s favourite search engine, but its pretty important in the world of blogs. It tracks seven million of them, and says the number is rising fast.

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The Pew Internet Study is the most widely quoted study on the blog phenomenon. It shows that blogs have taken of in a huge way in the states. They aren’t nearly so influential in Europe yet. But just wait….

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A very comprehensive list of blogging tools:

Weblogs Compendium - Blog Tools.

Some bloggers are already turning into media empires with strings of blogs linked together. The Blog Herald (itself part of a Blog Network) has compiled a list of blog empires.

» List of Blog Networks

Podcasting is the latest frontier of blogging. It allows you to create an audio file and broadcast it from your blog. Visitors can subscribe to a feed and receive your audio broadcast on their computer when you publish it. They can listen to it at their convenience - even on the move using the latest mobile phones and iPods or similar devices.

Blogging has enabled anyone to be a publisher. Now anyone can be a radio station. The possibilities for corporations are interesting and are only just beginning to be explored.
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