Blogs and Podcasts Together

A growing number of companies are employing blogs and podcasts as part of their communication mix. Their problems seems to be where to put them. After all, an organization's website is typically a hierarchical information resource: Follow the path to get the answer to your question. Some of the companies best known for blogging are still trying to figure it out. Visit Sun Microsystems' website, for instance, and you're lucky if one of the executive bloggers has recently updated his site; mention of a new post may just appear on the scrolling headlines. Similarly, there is no link to blogs on IBM's home page, or Microsoft's. "You can engage us but only if you can find us," these companies seem to be saying. Once you do find blogs, you may still be in for a frustrating experience. Finding Microsoft's employee blogs requires a search of the site. The blogs appear under the heading, "Microsoft Community Blogs," but the only items displayed in the list this morning were four posts by Raymond Chen and one from the IE Team. What about, say, Scoble? I used a pull-down menu in a search utility dedicated to blogs, but it listed only Microsoft products and business categories. I found Robert's blog only after typing his name into the blog search engine. Sun Microsystems keeps all of its blogs on one page, but they're not organized in any way that makes sense. You can see recent posts to any blog along with a listing of "Hot Blogs" (dear God, when are we going to see an end to the overuse of the word "hot" on the web?). But if you're looking for a blog on, say, Java Studio Creator, you're back to using the search engine. And as for IBM, I wasn't even able to find a list of company blogs. The company's podcast, however, is discoverable...if you happen to visit the Investor Relations page. It's no easier to find the blogs and podcasts from BMC Software, but once you find them, at least they're aggregated in one place: Reader Comments... Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.