Avantgo is the second most useful third-party app on my ageing Palm Pilot. Thanks to its off-line browser, I was able to pass the time on the bus journey home reading an article Does Your Company Belong in the Blogosphere? in Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge. The author commends blogging to corporates as an effective direct communications channel for execs to reach opinion formers in the media and the marketplace.

I suppose it was inevitable that corporates will try and dominate this emerging communications channel in the same way they dominate traditional media. It will be a challenge to see whether citizens of the net can distinguish between a genuine CEO blog penned by the great person themselves, and one put together by the corporate new technologies communications team in support of a distinct purpose and goal.

I confess to being a recent convert to blogs. A few months ago I could never have imagined posting to a blog with this heading (or any other). However, the penny has now dropped (d’oh): in the day job, there’s all sorts of casual chatter going on – Susan’s pet rabbits, Kathy’s attempt to set up a cello class. It’s an important element of people working together, and one of the reasons people give for not choosing to homework. With net-based communities like the OpenOffice.org project, our blogs form a valuable way for virtual team members to chatter about what interests them. It’s no substitute for the real chatter that took place in the cafes of Koper during the annual conference, but it’s still good to blog.

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