How blogs help

John Porcaro writes about how blogs help him do his job:

One of the key benefits of blogs is that they connect people as individuals, rather than rely on thinking of customers as an indefinable mass of "users". Robert's blog has helped me understand the issues our customers are concerned about (good, bad, or otherwise!). And putting a "human face" on Microsoft helps build trust, and hopefully helps customers know that we're listening.

I get the same sort of sense of the community from the Cincom Smalltalk blogs - and the wider arena of my subscriptions that John talks about. There's a lot more feedback coming from this than from anything we have done previously