Thursday, May 04, 2006

Blogonomics 06 (7)

Louïc Le Meur is one of the founders of SixApart. This company developed the blogging software Movable Type, Type Pad and Live Journal, which is now in use with 15 million people worldwide. He started out to make a remark about blogging in Europe. There are 7 million people in France blogging. The Germans do not like blogs; they better like wikipedia.

He also signalled a change coming up in professional blogging. Blogging is replacing Intranets. Not just blogs, but password protected blogs. This is already happening in Alcatel and Nokia. Analogue to this professional blogging software, SixApart will launch Comet, a private blog software with password protection at various levels. Can you imagine: you the blogger is given privileges to some people, while refusing reading to other people.

Louïc believes in professional blogging. But he thinks that a company should not have employees blogging for them; a company should use external bloggers. He illustrated his belief with an example from the cosmetic company Vichy. They started a blog, which drew a lot of criticism: a photograph of a model and a text from a copy writer leaving out any criticism. It was so obviously wrong that Le Monde put an article on it on its cover. Vichy apologised and asked help from the bloggers. It turned criticism into a constructive discussion with a positive feedback. In fact it selected in the end a small group of some ten bloggers and asked them to run postings.

Tags: blog

Blog posting number: 369

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