True Voice in Business Blogging

In following the Blog Business Summit online, I saw that Halley Suitt presented a talk entitled "True Voice: The Art and Science of Blog Writing" in which she cited Mena's Corner as one example of good corporate writing. Thanks to Halley for the compliment, especially since I've always believed that a strong personal voice is perhaps the most important element behind a successful weblog. Using Mena's Corner as an example makes me very happy since I try to keep it interesting.

That said, I do agree that it's probably better to write 12 posts rather than 12 paragraphs. I must say I'm guilty of verbosity when it comes to writing over here -- in fact, as a bit of trivia, the LiveJournal acquistion post was trimmed from 2,800 words to a measly 1,784. It's difficult to be succinct when there is so much back history to the news I post over here. And there is always such a build-up to our news that it becomes hard to write a post about 6 months of work in under 2,000 words. But perhaps that's the problem. If Mena's Corner suddenly goes bold in your news aggregator, the news shouldn't always be about funding or an acquisition. There's other things about Six Apart and weblogging that's worth mentioning.

Halley contrasted my early writings at dollarshort.org with my writings here. I took some time today to read through some of my old posts over there and see such a different person -- primarily that in 2001 I was not as afraid to portray myself as the odd card that I am. Even though I'm still peculiar, I try to hold back from writing these sort of posts now since they are often taken out of context and, as a representative for the company, don't want to seem too odd.

Still, we're an odd bunch here so that should show through a bit more.