Todd and Commoncraft mentioned that Boeing VP of Marketing Randy Beseler has dipped his toe in the blogging waters. Well, sort of. Both of those guys already pointed out that the blog lacks the requisite trackbacks, comments, permalinks, and on top of all that, the design is lackluster.

Seriously folks. Be smarter. Don't do it half assed. Ever.

Then again, maybe it's not 'really a "blog"'??? I mean, it doesn't really look like a blog? Maybe it's something else. However, if you subscribe to the 'lowest-common-denominator-definition' of a weblog as being simply a reverse-chronologically ordered website, well, then we have a blog.

Wow, the arrogance! I didn't realize that there are rules that one must absolutely follow when putting up a journal! A "blog" is short for "web log" i.e. a journal on the web. Nothing more, nothing less.

You'll notice that Randy is not "cheating" by using WordPress or Movable Type, his journal is just a simple webpage, likely manually edited. I would not expect such a page to have the fancy trackbacks, comments, permalinks, and RSS feeds.

You basically just said that the presentation is more important than the content. I personally don't care what the page looks like, as long as what is said is interesting. In a way I prefer Randy's layout, it's much less cluttered than many that have the long distracting left/right column of links.

Yeah, I know, the rules are really coming from the marketers, if you will. What our friend at Boeing has is a blog, as I aluded to in the post, if you subscribe to the lowest common denom. of blogging. However, I really do care about connecting and communicating using standard blog tool conventions, like comments and trackbacks, neither of which the Boeing site has. Especially when they mention, in their "interesting content" that they had people reasearching weblogs to figure out best practices.

I applaud their efforts, but vis-a-vis the efforts of other bloggers, I think that Boeing is a bit behind the curve in terms of connecting with their audience.

At the end of the movie, it all depends on your goals. If the site meets their objectives, then I'm all rooting for them!