Blogging is a channel

Scoble has a great post up on the value of blogging to a company. To summarize, it puts a face on an otherwise faceless entity. Take Scoble for instance - there's the caricature of Microsoft you see in trade rags, and then there's the voice that Scoble himself provides. heck, he doesn't always agree with his management, which gives him more credibility.

He gives a number of good examples - both of the failures of silence:

Kryptonite. Lately I've been asking audiences I've been speaking to "who knows the Kryptonite story?" 75% do . If you don't know the story, do a Google search for Kryptonite and "Bic Pen". We'll wait. We just watched the destruction of an American brand. 75% know about it. Why? Because of one or two weblogs and the new word-of-mouth network. Yes, Engadget and Gizmodo do have that kind of power. Engadget alone has 250,000 of the most influential readers the world has ever seen. My second question is: "What have you heard from Kryptonite about this issue?"

And also of good examples - Mark Cuban, Channel 9 at MS, a nifty looking Ford blog. Scoble has all the links and explanations on this - go ahead and read his article.