Pinkie’s Realm

Having read quite a bit of Kline and Burstein’s Blog! by now, I believe I’ve read about Microsoft’s chief humanizing officer Robert Scoble more than once. That being said, I was still surprised by how interesting I found his interview, “Blogs: Humanizing the Face of America”. I didn’t find him overly sarcastic or haughty like some of the interviews I’ve read thus far. He discussed what he believes makes a good blog. He states that you have to “humanize it”, write with honesty, and pay attention to what others are saying and asking in relation to either your company or products (that is, from a business perspective). He also mentioned two things that he any decent blog simply must have: it must be passionate, and authoritative…in the sense that you must demonstrate in your blog you are an authority on the thing you’re passionately blogging about. He then went on to talk about the main 5 things that make a blog hot: ease of publishing, discoverability, cross site conversing, permalinking, and syndication. Aside from those 7 things he mentioned in the interview, he has even set up a Corporate Weblog Manifesto consisting of 21 rules that aid the creation of a great blog. These 21 rules are mostly summarized in his interview, with particular emphasis on honesty and communication with those talking to you and about you. After reading Scoble’s interview I went on to read “The Blog Business: It’s More Like Music than Publishing”, an interview John Batelle. He’s very accomplished, like most of those interviewed in the book, but he just didn’t impress me as much as Scoble. Appropriately enough, Scoble just seems noble to me. Batelle’s interview focused more on not so much of what makes a succesful blog, but what the purposes of blogs should be, and how to advertise them. I just didn’t get the sense that he was interesting in blogging for the same reasons that Scoble is. Nontheless, I’m sure his blogs would fit some of Scoble’s noble criteria.

So after reviewing Scoble’s manifesto, I was curious if some of my favorite blogs were up to his standards. I browsed through TreeHugger and decided that it was certainly was could be called a great blog. It’s passionate, authoritative, helpful and informative, and certainly not as snarky and sarcastic as other blogs can be. The writers of TreeHugger always focus on matters of the earth and the environment and keep their readers up to date and involved.