About a month or so back we received an email at work inviting us to a blogging seminar. It was entitled ‘Blogging for Business’. It was today. At least there was a breakfast, and some coffee.

Although I’ve ‘only’ been blogging for nearly two years now, I have to say that even amongst professionals there are some things which they can still disagree on, or confuse. I consider to be one of the simplest blogging platforms out there, but perhaps that’s because I code and know my way around a computer. For a beginner or novice it could be considered somewhat complicated I suppose (I say that even though I don’t believe it). The presenter went through , , and then finally onto WordPress. Frankly I think WordPress should have been first.

He did talk a bit about aggregators, RSS readers both web and desktop based. But I think he was a little bit confused about RSS, not in terms of what it can do or does, since he showed his own aggregate list, but he thought it was “software”. It is merely a format, I wish people would get this right. I think he is completely wrong however, calling Google Reader a “bit simple”.

The presentation seemed to dwell a lot on the accepted rules of blogging, the behaviour you should exhibit, what you should and shouldn’t say etc., I would have thought that anyone with social skills would already know these. Does the Internet make us act differently somehow? Is the impersonality of technology stripping us of any manners? Perhaps we bloggers are a thin-skinned bunch?

But, the one thing we were there for, “blogging for business”, seemed to be a little covered subject. Most of the people there were there because they knew that blogging was supposedly something that could help them. But, the question begs to asked, why?

That being said he did mention the real reason, if only for a minute or two, marketing. And not just marketing, but reaching out to customers and interacting with them. To me, that is a big strength of blogs, giving businesses an outlet for creativity and customer participation.

Lastly he went on about , et al, tracking conversations and so on. But then it seems a little strange to me, for him to focus on a blog by a sheet metal company and yet mention Technorati - does technorati track that many blogs/conversations about sheet metal?