Jan 10th, 2008 | About CorpBlawg | No Comments
A belated Happy New Year to all my faithful CorpBlawg readers! As you may have noticed, we have been on a rather extended hiatus. However, said break is now over and there is much to report about linguistic issues (for example, I recently attended the annual meeting of the LSA in Chicago), open access topics (among other things, the Berlin 6 conference) and my usual travel- and presentation-related posts.
I’ll dive into all of that as the weekend nears - for now, it’s nice to be back.
Oct 16th, 2007 | About CorpBlawg | No Comments
Things at CorpBlawg have been awfully quiet recently, a silence that coincides with the start of the Fall semester here in Germany. I’m teaching my first introductory class and the course-related preparations have occupied virtually all of my time, leaving almost nothing for blogging.
I expect things to return to normal soon, however, as I develop more of a routine. Right now I’m still learning to juggle a number of very different tasks at the same time, e.g. teaching, research, software development and open access activism. All of these things are great and I wouldn’t want to ever go without them, but one needs a very good strategy for juggling different jobs at the same time without dropping anything important.
Sep 13th, 2007 | About CorpBlawg | No Comments
Before proceeding with the scheduled programming, I just wanted to briefly let you know that I’ve updated my CV and added a few other resources (my presentations, detailed description of my thesis project etc). The result can be inspected here, for those so inclined.
Apr 10th, 2007 | About CorpBlawg | No Comments
Funny, it looks like my post on fake blogs has been ripped off (compare with this post). At least I don’t recall my name being Aaron Nimocks and posting on a blog plastered with ads.
Kinda amusing that it had to be the post about flogs. Perhaps the content thieves have a sense of irony…
Apr 10th, 2007 | About CorpBlawg | No Comments
Once again a brief service announcement: as you’ve probably noticed, I’ve recently switched to a new Wordpress template (along with a new Wordpress version). While I’m quite happy with the new look, something (of course) had to go wrong in the course of the update - apparently the folder with the manually uploaded images was erased. As a result, several posts with charts, graphs and other graphics are now missing those and thus look rather strange. Of course I’m working on fixing the problem, but since I lack backups of the graphics in question it might take a while. Sorry for that.
Oh yeah, I’ve also created an index of my favorite posts.
Let me know what you think.
Dec 16th, 2006 | About CorpBlawg | No Comments
I just wanted to make a brief service announcement: all CorpBlawg posts are now appropriately tagged. I know it was absolutely overdue but I kept telling myself that I would do it “some other time” (you know, that same day that you win the lottery, suddenly have a lot of time, wake up and feel like tagging would be a fun thing to do, etc).
When faced with the two options of either tidying up my apartment or tagging my posts, I promptly did the latter. Now what does that say about me?
Aug 7th, 2006 | About CorpBlawg, Corporate Blogging | 1 Comment
Well, here I go.
This blog aims to be a source of reliable information and informed commentary on the topic of corporate blogging. Corporate or enterprise blogging is an entirely new form of corporate communication and has - at least that’s what many people believe - the potential to impact how corporations all over the world conduct their business and how they are perceived by customers, shareholder and employees. Independently of whether it’s corporate executives blogging about their stratigic goals or company PR pros using blogs to promote a product, corporate blogging seems an attractive and budget-friendly way of getting the job done. Of course blogging does not take place in a vacuum - the level of interactivity inherent in blogging makes managing the communication process a major challenge, one that companies sometimes find difficult to overcome. The blogosphere can look like the PR equivalent of a highway with no speed limit and no rules - a place where the most perfected comporate image can be totalled in a matter of seconds. The fact that this can also happen without any participation on the company’s part is, however, what makes blogging increasingly relevant to businesses. It’s simply too risky not to participate and remain silent when everyone out there is talking about you.
My motivation for starting a blog myself is twofold. Firstly, I believe that a blog is a very useful tool to organize one’s thoughts and to keep track of ideas (they’re elusive buggers sometimes). Secondly, writing a dissertation on the practice of corporate blogging and not having a blog myself somehow seems contradictory. As I want to understand all levels of the phenomenon, it seems logical to me to participate instead of merely lurk. Thirdly, reporting on how things unfold on a regular basis seems appropriate when considering how novel the idea of corporate blogging still is. It is anything but a static practice and it will be exciting to watch and occasionally comment as it evolves.
So there you have it. CorpBlawg is a blog on corporate blogs, from an academic point of view. If that seems terribly meta and tedious, let me assure you that I’ll do my best to keep things interesting, balanced and on topic (no endless tirades about how blogging will solve all the world’s problems in a heartbeat, I promise). The public will provide the music, while I watch dutifully as the dancers (hopefully) loosen their ties and kick off their shoes. We’ll see a misstep or two of course, but nobody’s ever learned to waltz instantly.
I, for one, have no doubt that the show will be worth watching.
