Versant Blog Center

Blogs for Business

When we launched our new Web site last year, we decided to also launch this employee blog. Initially we started with a core group of about four bloggers, but as word got around, more people started to blog. We now have 16 contributors and the list is growing! Versant has come a long way from our early blogging days and now has four blog channels that cover a range of topics as they relate to our business.

As Technology Director, I am a regular contributor to our technology blog. I've covered a range of topics, however, when I reflect on what I've written, two posts stand out to me.

When Adobe acquired Macromedia last year, I wrote an entry about my feelings on the impact it would have in the industry. That post was tracked and linked to on a Macromedia blog. That's big, folks. The ability to link to any blog via TrackBack and/or syndication are some of the great features built into blogs!

Another, more recent entry I wrote, was about our partnership with a Content Management System vendor, Ektron. Ektron read my post and asked if they could use an excerpt of it in a press release for their latest product! You can't ask for better exposure than that!

Companies at all levels are blogging. Microsoft, GM and Google have launched their own employee blogs. The business blog is here to stay!

After a year of developing our own employee blog, we have launched a new product offering called Blogs for Business, which aims at helping other companies plan, manage and launch their own company blogs. You can find out more about this exciting offering at www.blogs4.biz.

Ask Jeeves Acquires Bloglines

Search engine company Ask Jeeves has acquired Bloglines, the preeminent Web-based blog and news subscription service.  Micro Persuasion mentioned a potential acquisition of Bloglines because of its growing, Google-like dominance, then also reported on it.  There have been a lot of questions about how the acquisition will impact Bloglines, especially since it has become the feed-reading standard for so many people.  Bloglines has posted a FAQ on its site to address those questions.  The impact will be interesting - will Ask Jeeves maximize the huge database of blog data within Bloglines for search?

AMA Blog Event

Last week I attended an event put on by the American Marketing Association (AMA) about blogging.  It was really great - they had many of the blog "evangelists" there to speak, including Steve Rubel and Ben McConnell, as well as some of the businesses dedicated to blogs as marketing tools, like Pheedo and Wisconsin's own BlogSavant.  If you can attend this event in other cities, go, because it's a good one.