“What is coming to be known as social software and specifically weblogging is about to change all this,” wrote Ken Young in June 2003. Five years ago some of the earliest blogs were celebrating their first half-decade of life, but there was still plenty that was novel and new about this Web 2.0 game.

“Blogging is very popular among a hardcore of trailblazers but it has all the signs of going mainstream very soon,” wrote Young. “This buzz is leading researchers to take social software very seriously in the belief that it has enormous potential for business.”

Today, the amount of time I spend looking at corporate blogs is virtually nil. But in 2003, the pioneers of corporate blogging such as Robert Scoble were beginning to attain almost legendary status.

My favourite blog of the time was called Brown Knows. It offered an excellent and insightful day-by-day analysis of life inside a corporate marketing department at a Silicon Valley giant. If you wanted the official line, you read the company’s press releases. If you wanted the inside track, you read Brown Knows. It gave you a sense of who was lined up on which side of the battle lines, who was winning, and why. It was your place beside the water-cooler, it was your seat at the pre-meeting discussion table, and it was your electronic bug in the boardroom.
The success of Brown Knows and its ilk sealed their fate.

What is hard to understand is why anybody ever really thought that these blogs would be tolerated a day longer than it took the company hierarchy to realise what was leaking out.

Corporate PR is spin. It’s enormously political, and it’s a battleground where people steal marches on each other in the race to get the ear of those higher up. If you, as a mid-rank marketing figure, manage to persuade your boss to remove something from a draft press release on the grounds that it has “implications for future campaigns” you will get talked about.

Promotion-hunters have suppressed all that was valuable, interesting and innovative about corporate blogs, even while voting for more marketing funds to support them on the company web pages.