BBS 05: True Voice: The Art and Science of Blog Writing

January 24, 2005 at 4:38 PM

Blog Business Summit comments from Stowe Boyd and Halley Suitt's session on True Voice: The Art and Science of Blog Writing

Stowe and Halley introduce themselves and their sites/projects. Halley jumped right into this great point "A lot of people think that when I talk about corporate blogs they feel that the CEO should be writing. The CEO should not be writing." And followed it up with talking about passion about writing. "If someone is writing very abstractly it's boring. If I am writing about an actual thing or experience it's exciting to read."

Freshness, the writing should not only be fresh but also the frequency of posting. A few new things a day at least. The blogs you read have a voice "when people meet me they say I sound like my blog, and I hope I do." They can't sound PRish, it's deadly. Refering to handout, pointing to Fortune Magazine's latest cover with Mena Trott on the cover. Quoting Mena's blog posts, pointing out the voice and tone... as well as good business techniques.

Stowe is up to plate now. Talking about his personal experience with technical writing. You are going to get better at doing this the more you do it. "I believe it is impossible to tell a good story to change someone's view on it, unless your character comes across strongly." There was also this great word of advice from Stowe about the 15 second rule... if you drop it on the floor there is 15 second where you can grab it and eat it. Same goes for blogging, going back and editing old posts (deep editing) is like this. Going into an example post about tags in systems.

The floor then opened for Q&A. Some good questions, overall a good presentation. I would like to have heard more about chunking of information for specifically writing on the web. Other than that it was a good presentation and provided a lot of good insight.