Journal: News & Comment

Corporate weblogging

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Darren Barefoot pointed to a recent republishing of the "Corporate Weblog Manifesto" by Robert Scoble. The new version is in PDF only, so I decided to covert it to XHTML 1.0 Strict, just for fun. (Actually, it was because I thought the PDF was the only version, until I found Scoble's February 2003 original on his website.)

Some good stuff in Scoble's list, even if I disagree with some of it. As Barefoot notes, #18 ("Link to your competitors and say nice things about them") is the hardest to do for many companies. I'd guess that the second hardest is #8 ("If you screw up, acknowledge it. Fast."), followed by #15 ("Never lie") and #1 ("Tell the truth. The whole truth. Nothing but the truth.")—which are subtly different. Commendably, Scoble almost meets his own point #4 ("Make sure you support the latest software/web/human standards").

UPDATE: Here's a good example for "don't lie"/"tell the truth." Quick summary: Deneba's Canvas 3.5 Mac drawing program (very old—current is version 9, but some old files don't work right in it) will expire on 31 August 2004. The new owner of Deneba claimed it was a hexadecimal date-counting bug, but clever Mac users delved into the program and found, (a) the hex bug would have expired the program in 1972, before the Mac existed, and (b) the expiry date was deliberate, although perhaps a programmer's undocumented hack rather than company policy.

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