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Awareness of blogging has by now reached even the ignorant upper management stratum of most organizations. Unfortunately, an awareness of how to do it has lagged behind the awareness of its existence, at least in the publishing world.

Take a look at publishers’ blogs –David Godine’s, for example, or Chronicle Books’. While these blogs sometimes offer something of interest (Chronicle in particular sometimes serves up actual content, such as recipes or how-to instructions), they will never reach a wide audience as long as they remain extensions of the companies’ publicity operations. Nearly every post on these blogs has only one purpose — to flack the publishers’ books. How many people want to subscribe to a blog that does nothing but promote product?

Compare those blogs to that of the typeface vendor Veer. Its blog, Veer: The Skinny, is interesting and informative, and it rarely promotes Veer’s products in a direct way. Another example of a good business blog is Brittney Gilbert’s Eye on Blogs, a new blog of San Francisco’s CBS5; Gilbert understands that linking out is a good way to build up a blog’s presence.

In blogging as in many other things, publishing is backward compared to other industries. Why is this so often the case?

Can anyone recommend a good publisher’s blog?

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