It was a thoroughly enjoyable morning listening to Dave provide sound guidance and tips to business people preparing to blog for their companies. It was difficult to find anything I could readily disagree with; Dave's style and material was well planned, came off at a zippy pace, and left me wanting more. There was also some great guidance on some of the controversial issues like trackbacks and commenting, and spammers. There was one area that I disagreed with; an over generalization that all blogs should have commenting enabled. In general, this is probably an accurate statement, but with impressionable newcomers to business blogging, I think it's better to err in favor of wider possibilities and business requirements for enabling comments. I'm biased (of course) because we currently do not support open commenting for our own blogsites, but that's a different story that we'll be addressing soon. Imagine a blog that is intended to distribute an authoritative list of recently added SKU's in a manufacturing facility. In such a use-case the blog is really a directive that allows management to rapidly disseminate information in a [more] humanistic way. Tabular reports are difficult to read and afford no opportunity to make a human connection with the recipients. Tabular reports also do not allow you to easily annotate the data to increase the effectiveness and understanding of the information. With commenting enabled, you open the floodgates of debate on a subject that should have no debate - it's simply a knowledge feed. I suspect there are dozens (perhaps hundreds) of business use-cases where comment-less blogs provide an ideal solution for business requirements for corporate blogs, internal and external.  Relevant to today's event is a recent HP Survey concerning the use of blogs for marketing purposes by small businesses.
"Ten percent of small business owners in a recent study reported that they have included blogs in their marketing plans. And 16% plan to invest in blogs over the next 2 to 3 years." -- HP Survey Dave also hammered home the issue of staying on-message; touching on it many times. I agree - this is important for many reasons but the most important - focused content is easier to find. Blog-drift is costly, and anything you can do to stay on-message will pay high dividends. This is why we've designed our OnMessage Report for our Platinum customers. OnMessage tells you if your blog writing matches your blog objectives. It's a blog-compass that guides you. | 
