Matt Mullenweg and Jonas Luster have teamed up to form WordPress, Inc. - a company that will build WordPress based solutions for corporate entities. Good luck to them!
Here’s a great (not-so-technical) analysis by a recent convert.
March 17, 2005 – 10:33 am
Blogger interrogated, strip searched, banned from United States
Jeremy Wright of Ensight.org, famed for many things including selling his blog for profit, auctioning his services on ebay and for being an all round good guy, has been detained, strip searched, and banned from the United States after attempting to legally cross the Canadian-United States border on a trip to New York to meet with uber-publishers McGraw Hill, who were set to sign him as a consultant to the company on blogging.
Whilst posts to his site (since removed for legal reasons) are not clear on all the circumstances of the detention, Wright writes that US Immigration officials accused him of lying as they did not believe that he could be employed by blogging, with one official allegedly stating “you couldn’t be doing this blogging thing for a living”.
As a blogger of good repute, an established family man with a bright future in blogging and promoting the blogosphere internationally, Wright’s treatment by US Immigration Officials is a complete disgrace. Whilst all the facts of the matter are not yet totally clear, none the less anecdotally a career may have been ruined by the actions of a couple of two-bit hick guards who probably only use the internet to access porn.
Great post yesterday from Steve Rubel’s blog:
Lucy Kellaway wrote a terrific piece on CEO blogging for the Financial Times. Her thesis is that the key point about executive blogs is risk.
“If they are made risky in any way - either through publishing negative comments, or because the author is honest about themselves or their business, people will take notice. If they are merely another conduit for sanitised corporate information, or exercises in executive vanity, they will go the way of the corporate mags, the voicemails and the company spam.”
Amen. As I told the crowd at Search Engine Strategies this week: if you’re a corporate exec who embodies Dr. Phil and you know how to talk human and “keep it real,” then blogging is for you. If you’re a corporate exec who embodies the Soviet Union, locks down information in a silo until the message missile is ready to be fired upon the masses, then blogging is not for you. Lucy’s piece mirrors my thoughts.
February 18, 2005 – 11:54 pm
I think one of the hardest things to convey in electronic communication (e-mail, blogging, etc.) - or maybe any written communication for that matter - is humility.
It goes without saying that you think that your own opinion is correct; otherwise it wouldn’t be your opinion. But it seems that even if you frequently go out of your way to explain that you’re completely open to changing and/or reconsidering your opinions on any issue, you still come off as an arrogant bastard if you try to write about something serious.
And it doesn’t help when you avoid using smilies either.
January 10, 2005 – 9:01 am
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like a lot of blogs still haven’t ramped back up from the holiday break (in terms of posting & commenting frequency).
January 6, 2005 – 9:52 am
Why There’s No Escaping the Blog - by David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth
Freewheeling bloggers can boost your product—or destroy it. Either way, they’ve become a force business can’t afford to ignore.