Blogs, Captive Audiences, and One Way Conversations

The CEO of our little company has his own internal blog. I guess he started it because blogs are "way cool" these days. I love it when people try to do the right thing but don't understand the underlying reasons for doing it. It always seems to lead to some oddly inconsistent behavior in relation to the "right way" of doing it.

For example, he sends out an email telling everyone in the company to go read his latest blog entry. This is essentially the same as if he had just emailed the text to everyone. What's the point of putting it in a blog post? It's an internal blog, so no one else can subscribe to it. His theoretical maximum of people that give a shit (actual number far lower) is exactly equal to the number of employees at the company--all of which he just emailed and told to go read his blog. The blog does actually have an RSS feed, but what's the point if he's going to email me every time he updates it?

I went to his blog like a good little drone and read what he had to say. It boiled down to "A-B-C. A-always, B-be, C-closing. Always be closing! Always be closing!!" Well, I'm not in sales and have exactly zero customer interaction at the moment. Am I supposed to be closing something? No? Then why the fuck did you include me in your little email blast? Ass.

If I were incredibly stupid I could leave a comment to that effect on his blog. Oh, wait. There's no section for leaving comments. They're not just turned off for this post, they're completely unsupported on this "blog." I realize that a lot of public blogs don't allow comments for whatever reason, but I think most of the valid reasons don't apply here. If he intends to use his blog for something other than a persistent record of his email blasts, I would think he would enable comments. Maybe start a dialog (you know, a conversation) with your employees like the blog gods intended.

Now if only there were a way I could get away with emailing him to come read my latest blog post...