Blogging Naked

Okay, so that was one of those grabby headlines meant to get your attention (I feel so cheap), but it actually does tie into the topic at hand.

There's a new book out about how blogs are changing companies's relationships with customers, which as you might guess, is a topic near and dear to my heart.

The book is called 'Naked Conversations', and it's written by blog personalities Robert Scoble (who is a 'Technical Evangelist' for Microsoft) and PR blogger Shel Israel (I blogged about seeing him speak at a conference back in October).

I haven't read the book yet (it's on my list -- it's a pretty long list), though you can get a sense of some of the topics by reading the book's blog -- also, over at WashingtonPost.com, there was a live chat event today with both authors, so you can check out the transcript.

The chat is a pretty good primer on why it's good for companies to blog, and how companies should blog -- it also has some generally good advice on getting your blog noticed (yes, corporate bloggers are also known to whine "But nobody's reading my blog!"), how to interact with people, and how to not get fired when you're blogging about your company.

(On a side note, I will be self-indulgent and say: What's this? The Microsoft technology evangelist is using Wordpress for his blog [http://scobleizer.wordpress.com], not MSN Spaces for his blog? Shock! Horror! Or maybe it really is about the blog and not the blog platform...)

In other blog news, there's a good column over by BBC News Technology Columnist Bill Thompson: it's all about how the blogosphere has shifted the boundary between public and private. In his particular case, he attended an event on Media and Business at Cambridge and blogged about it, without realizing that the house rules were in effect , which meant the event was not for attribution (that is, everything was off-the-record, which is meant to help encourage candor and the free-flow of ideas).

Granted, he may be a well-known technology writer with a regular readership, but his general point is that you can't stop the bloggers -- instead of trying to control the flow of information, it may be better to participate in it.

This is a common refrain among bloggers -- in the 'Naked' chat, Robert Scoble says:

"But, truth is, people are probably already saying something bad about your company. If you don't answer them, that can be used against you in the marketplace by competitors, or by journalists, or by other bloggers (as we've seen in several instances)."

Anyway, just some more navel-gazing about the big ole sphere o' blogs.

Thanks -- Joe