It’s not news saying Scoble is often blinded by the RSS/blog light and he even calls himself a “marketing weirdo” so I’m relatively certain he won’t take offense to this commentary. I, too, am a blog/RSS proponent but I can’t go as far as he goes on a lot of the evangelism, especially considering his recent thesis:

Here’s my thesis: companies that have lots of bloggers will end up making better products, will end up having better marketing and PR, will end up making more profit at the end of the day, and will be more likely to have more than one “hit product” and will be more likely to last 100s of years.

I disagree that companies with “lots of bloggers” will do all of these things. The company still is a singular company and has a singular product voice, as already mentioned by a commenter, no matter how many employees or shills for the company who blog. Personally, I would rather see one very high quality group blog per company/product than hundreds of mediocre to occasionally interesting shilled/employee blogs.

It’s OK, IMO, for someone as big as Microsoft to have an official Office blog and OneNote blog and Windows blog, etc, but having a department with every developer, tester, etc having his own company-based blog is just confusing, not helpful for the customer who has to try and determine where and when to receive the information/help h/she needs.

One of Microsoft’s toughest challenges is the overwhelming amount of information at its disposal and maintaining this information in a logical structure. IMO, Microsoft has failed overall at providing fast, simplistic paths to information their customers need. Sure, in some cases this doesn’t apply, but in many cases it does. Microsoft has so much going on that sometimes it can be incredibly difficult to figure out what, where, when, how, etc.

So blog segregation by department/product/service doesn’t really help but hinder this problem, because now you have a bunch of different people potentially giving much of the same information. If every blog had new, different information than that potentially would be helpful, but we both know of the hundred bloggers there would only be a handful at best providing new, useful, helpful information to existing and prospective customers and the rest would primarily be entertainment vehicles.

Lots of subpar bloggers are excess noise and require filtering (like what Robert does with his 1000+ RSS feed filtering). Since this is highly subjective as to what’s good and bad, numbers alone won’t have much bearing on a product’s success or longevity.

Most blogging today is the equivalent of visiting any major publishing house’s slushpile: in many cases it isn’t even as bad as most unsolicited manuscript quality, it’s raw, rough draft quality. Sure, every once in a great while some outstanding material rises from the slush pile, but ask anybody in the publishing industry how often that turns into a bestseller, much less a work that will last for generations.

Also, if a company produces a good, useful and/or entertaining product and has excellent customer service to back it up and is priced competitively than *that* can increase its longevity. But blogging alone, no matter how many people in an organization do it, isn’t going to have a significant impact on the longevity of a product/service on the web any more than a combined advertising plan with TV, radio, print and traditional web advertising. Especially if the product and/or service sucks and/or it is in a market where the saturation point is high.

Put simply: no amount of signal will help a noisy product.

As for this comment by Scoble in the same blog post:

>>Phil: blogs won’t cure cancer but maybe a blogger will. Either way, you’ll probably hear about it on a blog first.
>>
Robert - Just heard over the weekend (on the radio, not on blogs, BTW) that a recent PEW study showed that TV is still the #1 way that people receive their news. Radio was #2 with 18%.

Therefore, TV and radio presence are still very important parts of the puzzle and currently blogging and RSS have almost nil to do with either of those platforms.

With this said, I’d still like to see more worthwhile integration of TV with RSS, like what could be done with the TiVO API or MCE 2005. Imagine being able to kick back in a picture-in-picture and read the news and blogs, watch a movie, download content and make/receive calls (via skype or Vonage) all with only a remote.

This started as a comment reply to Scoble but grew so long that I decided to post it here. Not edited, may contain errors, pensive but perhaps not completely well conceived and ready for it to be turned into swiss cheese by insightful readers. In two words: draft material.

Did this post make you go hmm?

 Loading ...

• Will second batch of blogging books be better than first?
• Microsoft may release blog-only search in first half of 2004
• Some bloggers worry too much about traffic
• Not taking the Forbes bait
• Scoble says he’ll quit on the spot if Mini is fired
• Microsoft loses Lenn Pryor to Skype