When Doc Searls observed to Wired’s Chris Anderson that big companies may blog only because they’re on the way down, Anderson and a squad of interns explored the Fortune 500 to see if that may be true.
Who’s blogging among Fortune 500 companies? According to Anderson, 16 companies do. The one’s that do blog aren’t exactly among the rising stars of the Fortune 500, either. Anderson recounted the conversation with Searls that led him to look more closely at the issue:
…we got to talking about why some companies blog and some don’t. Microsoft blogs, and Apple doesn’t. Sun blogs and Intel doesn’t. GM blogs and Toyota doesn’t.
Perhaps, Doc wondered, the risks and uncertainties of public business blogging are so great that big companies only do it under duress, when their traditional corporate messaging has lost traction.
If a company is doing well in its field, there’s no reason to change the way it distributes its message. For firms whose business has been lackluster, and are seeing the public and the media mostly ignore what they do, the unfettered insight of a corporate blogger can’t hurt very much and may even help.
Anderson then decided to correlate stock performance with blogging. First, he defined business blogging as “active public blogs by company employees about the company and/or its products.” Then Wired had to hunt down those blogs before they could look at the numbers.
They found the blogging members of the Fortune 500 averaged a 5.7 percent increase in their stock performance over the last 12 months. The blogging-averse averaged a 19 percent increase. It’s indicative that Searls was right, just not conclusively.
To keep track of who’s blogging, Anderson worked with Ross Mayfield of Socialtext to create a wiki of the Fortune 500 bloggers. As more companies in the Fortune 500 create public blogs, they can be added to the wiki.
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Skype has been my quiet life saver for many months, offering free phone calls via my computer for the lengthy, and previously costly international and interstate communication necessary as a Website Marketing Consultant.
Skype is a little piece of software that lets you make free calls over the Internet. Skype is revolutionizing the telecommunications world by allowing users to make superior quality voice calls to other Skype users (who also have the software installed on their computer) for free. And the clarity of the connection even beats the humble telephone.
Skype is hugely popular and has already had over 100 million downloads of its software - and - daily 150,000 new users join up. Currently, Skype has 33 million active users worldwide.
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Macromedia, announced the release of Macromedia Studio 8, 2 months back which includes new versions of Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, Fireworks, Contribute, and FlashPaper.
Contribute and FlashPaper give designers and developers a cost-effective, streamlined approach to maintaining web content. Dennis O’Reilly of PC World writes:
Macromedia has overhauled its Studio 8 Web suite, but many of the changes are not to its individual apps. Overall, the $999 suite features tighter integration and improved links to databases and other Web resources; but if you work primarily in only one of the suite’s big-name apps (Dreamweaver, Flash, or Fireworks), you may find few reasons to pay $399 to upgrade from Studio MX 2004.
Studio 8’s rejiggered lineup adds Contribute 3 for updating site content and FlashPaper 2 for converting files to Flash or PDF. (The company released both programs individually earlier this year.) Absent from the suite is the Freehand drawing program, which was part of the two previous Studio releases.
All three of the updated suite members–Fireworks 8, Flash 8 Professional, and Dreamweaver 8–work together more closely than ever. In fact, in the beta version I reviewed, I found that their look and features overlap so much that it’s easy to forget which program you’re working in at any given point.
Studio 8 includes new CSS enhancements and visual authoring tools for XML. It also includes new tools for authoring and testing mobile content.
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