Apr
25
2008
Sun’s Tim Bray on the Three Components of a Successful Blog
Posted in the Category of Events and Social Media and Stuff
Just finished participating in Bulldog Reporter's Webinar: Corporate Blogging Update for PR. Fellow panelists were John Earnhardt of Cisco and Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems. Our able moderator Jon Greer kept things moving right along. Fun.
Tim has been "online" since, er, at least 1983. That's 25 years. Here's a Usenet posting dated Aug. 31, 1983 from his blog archive: Doesn't Anyone Out There Read Anymore?
Wow. And I thought I was cool. I've been "online" since about 1992. Put up my first Web site in 1995. Here's a peek at my site in 1996, according to the Way Back Machine. Note: I was primarily a journalist back then, before B-school and marketing.
So it was interesting to see Tim's slides and hear his riff on corporate and employee blogging. Spot on.
According to Tim, the three most important components of a successful blog are: 1. Good writing 2. Interesting person 3. Valuable material.
Best to have all three, he said. Sometimes you can get away with two out of three. Less than that, it won't work.
His slide, below, looked exactly like this. Unadorned. The best PowerPoint style IMHO, if you absolutely have to use it.
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Comments
John Earnhardt said on April 26, 2008 at 03:29 PM
Debbie:
It was nice participating in another panel with you. I’m now at our “official” blog at Cisco at http://blogs.cisco.com/news. The one you are pointing in this entry is the first Cisco blog that I started on high tech policy February 2005.
Sean Burke said on April 28, 2008 at 11:28 PM
Seth Godin nails all three of these. I see that you have quoted him before. I am still amazed at the volume and quality of his content. How much time do you spend researching valuable information?
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