A ClickZ article talking about the recent business blogging conference they sponsored.  Bloggers are being hailed as “powerful influencers”, a “viral tornado”.  Here in West Michigan, blogging has yet to really catch hold in the business world.  Most of that is probably due to the current economy, with layoffs leaving corporate IT and Marketing folks too busy doing “business as usual” to look at new technologies.  But I’m expecting that will change - it seems like with every new site I get involved with I see opportunities for blogs, even if they don’t get talked about as such.

This was featured in the local paper today, under the headline “Synod urges fuel-efficient vehicle use”.

I’m sorry, I find this to be absolutely silly.  Who is going to set guidelines around what constitutes “high efficiency” and “good emission ratings” and just what is “beyond” my needs?  What’s “large”? And what’s a “need”?  And what’s better - buying an already-existing but older and more inefficient vehicle or creating the demand for a new vehicle, which means the consumption of more of the earth’s resources just to create (for example, did you know it takes nearly 40,000 gallons of water to manufacture ONE car? )  In other words, why do the same people who want me to recycle everything else want me to buy new cars just because they get a little better gas mileage? 

This strikes me as being a knee-jerk, PC response to the recent (and just as silly) What Would Jesus Drive campaign. 

I’m not convinced the church has any business helping me decide what vehicle to drive.

I wonder what old Thomas would have thought of internet pop-ups?  ;)  I’m thinking about news and newspapers because I’m playing with a different way of reading the blogs I like to keep up with. 

While syndication feeds are old news to most bloggers, many folks out in the overworked business world aren’t aware that many blog tools do more than just create web pages.  Many of them also publish an XML feed of that same content, which other tools can then monitor for new content that gets posted.  For a look at my feed, scroll down and click the orange XML button in the footer of this page.

The tool I’m playing with at the moment is NewsGator, which pulls these feeds into Microsoft Outlook.  So far I’m pretty enamored with it - since on a daily basis I’m already reading a bunch of personal email and email newsletters I’m subscribed to.  Bringing blog content into Outlook means all my incoming news is in one source.  Cool!

Interesting post, and I definitely agree!  Inability to quickly change, re-think and re-learn in this field will drive you batty.  It’s one of those aspects that I both love and hate at the same time.

Links here to either purchase the Sun style guide, or download the Apple version.