The cult of blogging

Blogging certainly isn't going away in the short term, with corporates desperate to get in on the action. Steve Strauss on USA Today lists several advantages of blogging for smaller businesses:

- Strengthen relationships
- Build your brand
- Improve customer service
- Increase employee awareness
- Build your reputation
- Bump your search engine rankings

Perhaps the weirdest new take on blogging is that detailed in Blogoriented.com, a blog by two guys who are trying to set up a self-proclaimed "blogsploitation" venture:

"Our general business model is a two tiered effort to hire Chinese citizens to write blogs en masse for us at a valued wage. The first tier is to create original blogs. These blogs will pop up in various areas of the net and appear to the unknowing reader to be written by your standard American. Our short term goal for these original blogs is to generate a steady stream of revenue through traditional blog advertising like google adwords. We estimate that our current blogforce of 25 can support around 500 unrelated blogs.

[...]

"The second tier of our plan is a blog vacation service where our employees fill in for established bloggers who need to take a break from regular posting. As all bloggers know, an unupdated blog is quickly forgotten. For a nominal fee we can provide seamless integration of filler."

A bizarre though interesting idea. If you start spotting the odd Shanghai in-joke on AME Info blog next holiday season, you'll know it's succeeded.