Just finished participating in Bulldog Reporter’s Webinar: Corporate Blogging Update for PR. Fellow panelists were John Earnhardt of Cisco and Tim Bray of Sun Microsystems. Our able moderator Jon Greer kept things moving right along. Fun.

Timbray
Tim has been “online” since, er, at least 1983. That’s 25 years. Here’s a Usenet posting dated Aug. 31, 1983 from his blog archive: Doesn’t Anyone Out There Read Anymore?

Wow. And I thought I was cool. I’ve been “online” since about 1992. Put up my first Web site in 1995. Here’s a peek at my site in 1996, according to the Way Back Machine. Note: I was primarily a journalist back then, before B-school and marketing.

So it was interesting to see Tim’s slides and hear his riff on corporate and employee blogging. Spot on.

According to Tim, the three most important components of a successful blog are: 1. Good writing 2. Interesting person 3. Valuable material.

Best to have all three, he said. Sometimes you can get away with two out of three. Less than that, it won’t work.

His slide, below, looked exactly like this. Unadorned. The best PowerPoint style IMHO, if you absolutely have to use it.

Timbray_slide