This is cool. I'm thrilled to announce that Bob Lutz, GM's vice chairman of global product development, is writing the Foreword to my book.

Bob is GM's most high-profile blogger, as you probably know. I guess you could call him one of the first A-list bloggers for the Fortune 500.

I asked him... and he said Yes. He just emailed me a draft of the foreword. More than a draft really. It's terrific. He's an awfully good writer and yes, I think he wrote it himself. Thanks Bob, for a wonderful contribution to the book.

This is cool. I'm thrilled to announce that Bob Lutz, GM's vice chairman of global product development, is writing the Foreword to my book.

Bob is GM's most high-profile blogger, as you probably know. I guess you could call him one of the first A-list bloggers for the Fortune 500.

I asked him... and he said Yes. He just emailed me a draft of the foreword. More than a draft really. It's terrific. He's an awfully good writer and yes, I think he wrote it himself. Thanks Bob, for a wonderful contribution to the book.

The Penguin folks and I have gone round and round on this one. Not disagreeing, mind you. Just trying to nail something that, er, felt right. Interestingly, the final choice is surprisingly close to many of the suggestions offered by over 100 loyal WordBiz Report readers in a book title survey.

And the sub-title is...

Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right

Your comments? Feel free to weigh in. The "get it right" part is key, I think. It's what I hear over and over from clients and other corporate types I talk to. In addition to worrying about the time suck.

Not a subscriber to WordBiz Report? Hey, it's never too…

I gotta say that I'd run screaming the other way if I were a manager reading Andy Wibbels' recent blog entry titled Blogging Cheatsheets. Andy offers four PDF downloads, each a mindmap illustrating in (terrifying) detail how to use the various features of the popular Blogger, WordPress, TypePad and Movable Type blogging platforms.

The fact that he needs to do this makes a crucial point for where we are right now with blogging as a business tool: it's still too techie. Even TypePad, which I use and am a huge fan of, is too confusing for some execs to jump into quickly. (Andy's done a great job, BTW, if you want this kind of…

In writing the chapter called "What Your Organization Could Do With a Blog" I've rounded up all the usual suspects. A partial list:

• Blogging as a complement to (or replacement for) traditional PR
• Blogs as the new corporate Web site
• Blogs and microbrands (thanks to Hugh Macleod)

I queried some blogging colleagues on their ideas for "categories" of business blogging. True to bloggy form, the conversation immediately veered off into a spirited discussion of why putting blogs into categories is a bad idea because a blog is just a publishing tool or content management system, etc. Dave Taylor sums it up here.

Despite the detour into "just content management," I'm packaging up the chapter as "ways you…

Sorry, I can't let this one pass. As much as I'd like to believe the reported results of the iUpload and Guidewire Group Corporate Blogging Survey released this week, I can't. The survey reports that 89% of companies are blogging. And that corporate adoption of blogging is entering the hyper growth phase.

Addendum: here's another skeptical look at this survey. Along with a thoughtful response from Guidewire Group's founder Mike Sigal. (Mike, feel free to blast away at my take on the survey.) And a debunking of a corporate blogging boom from BusinessWeek's Blogspotting.net.

Here's the rub. The conclusions are based on 140 respondents. That's far too small a number from which to draw such…