The Great Blog Debate makes me smile

Here is an extended comment from Ross Fishman (reprinted here with permission from Ross), a marketing guru. I always enjoy reading his comments on marketing. Since there has been a lot of discussion recently on several listservs about blogging, I thought you might be interested in seeing his thoughts.

Anyone old enough to remember The Great Web Site Debate? Around 1996?

Web sites were brand new and so generated enormous interest: headline stories, bylined articles, guru speeches, two-day conferences, mountainous direct mailings — mostly by the web-development companies who sold this new product.

Of course, as an esoteric new technology, few people understood it, and it was impossible to determine how truly effective it was for your competitors who had them. But everyone heard the hyperventilating web vendors’ excited stories about how much business they were bringing in to some firms (

Categorized in: Technology