OPEN

There was a very balanced, feet-on-ground assessment of the significance of blogs for corporates in yesterday’s FT Business Life section – if you have a subscription (and its definitely worth the money) you can read it here.

It’s probably wishful thinking, but the headline "Who’s afraid of the big bad blog" does read like a side-swipe at the scaremongering, sensationalist "Attack of the Blogs" Forbes magazine cover story  (see  previous post: Blog Backlash on the Way?).

It’s written from an arm’s length point of view; for instance its definition of blogs is as follows:

Weblogs, or blogs, are the periodic rants and raves of millions of
hobbyists and armchair pundits, who take advantage of easy-to-use
publishing platforms to opine on everything from politics, to
pornography, to the latest computer gadgets, and everything in between.

But – praise be unto the highest – its conclusions basically seem to be that corporates should ignore the hype but not ignore blogs. Listen to the blogosphere and encourage your employees to try out the new media seem to be the main messages here, which is exactly the right advice to my mind.

On the latter point it says:

IBM likens its experiment in blogging to its efforts in the mid-1990s
to encourage employees to surf the internet. At the time, many of the
benefits were unclear, but eventually, as the internet changed, IBM
says that having employees with their ears close to the ground allowed
the company to change along with it.

This is the FT at its best. Balanced, informative business reporting.