I tell my business clients that it’s OK to be personal on business blogs. In fact, I think readers prefer a bit of personality. Blogs, unlike static web sites, require a commitment to regular updates, no matter how frequent. Sometimes you run out of ideas. Adding a dash of personality to your business blog will help generate ideas, and doing so is not “against the rules.”

I found a list of seven ideas for corporate blogs over at BusinessBlogWire:

1. Get personal. Talk about yourself a little. There, that’s good. Oh - not too much!

2. Scratch another blog’s back. Forget your own company for a few minutes and compliment someone else. Be sincere. Make ‘em blush.

3. Go Bizarro. Go against your habits and do something unexpected, something opposite to your normal post topics. Yeah, it’s a bit of a risk - but variety is the spice of life.

Read the rest.

People read blogs to experience what they don’t usually find on static corporate web sites: company employees communicating with them directly. Whether you update your business blog several times a day, seven days a week or only three times a week, the sense of immediacy is very important to readers who visit, link, and subscribe to your blog.

Every year for the past couple of years, David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, releases a “State of the Blogosphere” report. See Part I and Part II.

According to the Daily Posting Volume chart, Technorati tracks 1.2 million posts per day, about 50,000 per hour.

Technorati currently tracks 26.6 million blogs, and the blogosphere has been doubling in size every five months. Mainstream media web sites still lead blogs in incoming links, but I suspect those numbers will begin to shift in the coming years as more bloggers do original reporting.

Sifry’s report has gotten coverage in the mainstream media, including the Sun-Sentinel and New York Times:

If the blogosphere continues to expand at this rate, every person who has Internet access will be a blogger before long, if not an actual reader of blogs. The conventional media - this very newspaper, for instance - have often discussed the growing impact of blogging on the coverage of news. Perhaps the strongest indicator of the importance of blogdom isn’t those discussions themselves, but the extent to which media outlets are creating blogs - or bloglike manifestations - of their own.

…

It’s natural enough to think of the growth of the blogosphere as a merely technical phenomenon. But it’s also a profoundly human phenomenon, a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in.

Related — Technorati: How (and Why) to Claim Your Blog

Law Seminars International is sponsoring a blog conference called The First Comprehensive Conference On Blog Law & Blogging for Lawyers, scheduled for April 20 & 21, 2006 at the Pan Pacific Hotel in San Francisco, California.

On the agenda: Blog Technology, Blogging in the Corporate World, Blogging’s Relationship with the Broader Cyber World, Real-World Report from Some Leading Blawgers, etc. From the site:

Blogs (short for “Web logs”) are fomenting a wide variety of legal issues. Legal blogging, also known as “blawging,” has become fully mainstream. No longer just for a few hip IP lawyers or a forum for law firm gossip, blogs are quickly replacing conventional Web sites as the key marketing tool for large and small firms alike to increase their visibility via the Internet. At the same time, a growing number of attorneys are being engaged to represent clients with problems arising from blogs. From employment issues to disputes over who owns the content, the legal consequences of blogging are expanding proportionately with the number of blogs — which by one estimate are increasing at a rate of 70,000 per day. As the first comprehensive CLE conference to look at blogging both as a marketing tool for attorneys and as a legal gray area, this program offers attendees an extraordinary opportunity to get tips from the nation’s top experts on starting a legal blog for their firms and making their existing blogs more effective, to hear the current status of case law directly from those who are involved, and to gain the insights of pioneers in the evolving world of blogging.

• Blog consultant B.L. Ochman links to three blogs run by a jewelry company called Ice.com. One blog, Sparklelikethestars.com, uses a simple design but includes photos of stars and jewelry to create a visual balance. The blog isn’t a blatant sales pitch; product links are integrated within personal commentary and entertaining tidbits.
  
  Whoever “icegrrl” is (and “rahulio”), she knows blogging.
• PR blogger Steve Rubel points to a new blog by the makers of Guinness beer. The company created the blog themselves instead of using an ad agency. Aside from the annoying sign-in page (one time only?), it’s a good move. I hope Guinness also blogs about drinking responsibly.
• Are you an ambitious business or personal blogger trying to get on the A-list? Read Climbing Bloggers Hill.
• Blog consultant Wayne Hurlbert blogs about how to say, “Goodbye, blog.”
• Ten reasons why we should LOVE small businesses
• BlogSEO excerpts an article called How to Increase Blog Traffic and Make a Living.
• I saved the best for last! Consultant and blogger Debbie Weil rounds up a very useful list of 101 posts: blogging, podcasting, and RSS.

In my lifetime I doubt I’ll ever see anything become as momentous as blogging. In just a few years, blogging has impacted government, commerce, and mainstream media in ways that neither will ever forget. As a blogging advocate who loves the power of the new medium and the act of blogging itself, I’m excited about the still unimaginable possibilities.

New York Magazine has a cover story called Blogs to Riches: The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom that is supposedly causing controversy. The article is about the rise of blogging in general, with a focus on blog networks and gossip blogs and scant coverage of political or business blogging, my domains.

Business blogger Steve Rubel had some bad experiences with the “A-list, B-list” meme, and asks, Can We Stop with the A,B,Cs Already?:

The fact is that one reason this so-called inequity is covered ad infinitum is because marketers and media (bloggers included) still rely on old-school approaches to measuring the impact of this new medium. We’re trained as humans to look for the biggest apes in the jungle. However, that’s not how this Cluetrain world always works.

First of all there are bloggers that can come out of nowhere and join the so-called elite group of top-ranked bloggers. Look at TechCrunch. It is rapidly rising up the charts.

Second, a blogger with two readers can become a reader with thousands in an instant and then fall back down to zero and then back to thousands again two months from now - or never again. Does that mean he/she is unimportant? Not.

Finally, this so-called A-list changes constantly. Go back to 2002 and look at the list of top blogs. Many of these are no longer on the list. Does this mean they failed? Hogwash. We all live in the same yellow submarine and that’s the Court of Google - our judge and jury.

So, here’s a secret. The list doesn’t matter.

Remember my post about Warren Brown? He’s a D.C. entrepreneur who just opened his third store and landed a show on the Food Network called Sugar Rush. Too cool.

Warren’s joined the blogosphere. Visit the Official CakeLove Blog.