The ubiquitous blog is approaching your office, coming down the corporate hallway, according to Michael Calore, writing in Monkey Bites, which is, of course, a blog. He describes the efforts of two mid-size hosting companies to offer blogging platforms to help large companies make use of the blogging concept.

Clark IP offers a similar approach for smaller businesses and non-profits, but its low-cost CIP Sitemaker© service also integrates the blog into a comprehensive publishing platform that is adaptable into a full range of sites and is not limited to a blog-dominated structure.

"Big corporations are working on what KnowNow calls their "customer facing presence," Calore says.

"Business are not only using blogs to interact with customers, but they are also harnessing the use of blogs as viral marketing tools that can get customers excited about products and services while they're still in development. Microsoft is one particular example of a company that's benefited from encouraging its employees to blog about the product development stage."

"So, there's definitely a race going on to get the Fortune 1000 set blogging. The two enterprise products may be signaling the next big turn in blogging as it's adopted by businesses. Blogs are easy to start, but running 1000 blogs in a large corporation can become a nightmare. It appears that KnowNow has the know how to handle the scalability problem. Does Six Apart?"

"Enterprise folks are notoriously slow to adopt new technologies, especially something like blogs, which many people in big business still see as "dangerous" and uncontrollable. Hopefully, this shift towards enterprise self-publishing will improve the speediness with which businesses react to customer demands.

"It will also be entertaining to see how many businesses hop onto blogs without fully understanding the secret ingredients that make them unique -- right before they fall on their faces."

CIP Sitemaker is pointed at a similar goal set and is intended to bring similar services to organizations that would normally not consider a comprehensive publishing strategy but rather might often depend on volunteer labor to create a patchwork approach.

Calore Article