Novell News

I went to a gig in San Francisco last night on corporate blogging. Mauro Lupi, one of Italy's best known and earliest bloggers, moderated a panel which included folks from Six Apart, the company behind the leading blog software, StucturedWikis, and Spada, Inc. The focus was on why companies should blog, measuring the impact of blogs, and new blogging technologies that allow increasing sophisticated blogs (i.e., with audio/video/multimedia) to be easily developed.

Lupi's list of keys for successful corporate blogging started with passion for the subject, talking to people (not 'consumers'), and being credible. While this blog may not always exhibit the flair of other blogs (hey, we're still PR folks operating within a public company environment!), we do believe in what we're doing, and we certainly are striving for openness and credibility. Based on conversations in the room last night, it sounds to me like Novell is still relatively forward leaning on the blogging front relative to many other companies, with our combination of two executive blogs (our CMO and CTO), this OpenPR blog, and a series of product focused blogs on our Cool Blogs site. Not that we can't do better, but we're out there.

One of my hopes for 2007 is that we can engage folks more on interaction with this blog. The burden is on us to come up with interesting topics. With everything that's moving in our markets, that shouldn't be too hard.