What is a Plog?
I don’t usually blog about blogging, because it’s circular and boring, but Amazon’s home page is dedicated to their riff on the technique and I couldn’t avoid it.
Aside from being an awkward verbal construction, a “plog” is just boring. All good blogs are “personal” in that they are about the writer. (good blogs become great blogs when the stuff about the writer is interesting and universal and the reader wants to read it). The whole idea of corporate blogs is difficult for me to get excited about, because they quickly become yet another firewall between me (a real person) and someone at the company (who I hope is a real person). Corporate blogs get stiff and scared.
Example? at the bottom of my plog it says, “E-mail plog-feedback@amazon.com to share your thoughts and suggestions on this feature. We’ll read everything you send, although we cannot promise an individual response.”
Well, Amazon’s plog (the P is supposed to stand for personal) isn’t personal at all. It’s certainly not personal about Amazon, and it really isn’t personal about me. It contains details about when my books are going to ship.
We don’t need to start corrupting the blog idea in order for Amazon to present a list of when my books are going to ship, do we? Can you imagine saying, “I need to head over to Amazon and check my plog?”
if it were me, I’d just announce that Amazon now provides RSS alerts. RSS is going to happen, and it will be a boon to Amazon to be able to cut through the email clutter. But a plog isn’t the answer, imho…