Yesterday Sandro Groganz wrote about his experience helping a customer get started with blogging to promote their open source products, and towards the end of the post he offers some good tips for common questions companies have as they enter the world of blogging. While I agree with Sandro that organizations should adhere to some basic blogging guidelines—like ensuring that different bloggers “are in line with the main marketing message(s)”—I don’t think there are any hard and fast rules around things like how often to post and whether to respond to comments via additional comments or a new post. The best rule of thumb is to do what feels right to the individual blogger and fits with the corporate culture. Bloggers in an organization often handle some of the blogging details a little differently, and that’s ok.

I’m reminded of a story I heard on NPR a year or two ago about how the social norms of email communication are still evolving. For example, if you email a question to a colleague and receive an answer in return, should you respond with another email just to say thanks? In other words, when does the email conversation end? Ask a few different people, and you’re likely to get a few different answers. The NPR piece noted that it took many, many years for society as a whole to accept norms for telephone conversations—like answering the phone with “hello” rather than “ahoy” (apparently there was quite a debate in the early years of the phone). So it may be unreasonable to expect similar conventions for email communication to be widely accepted at this point in history, and I think blogs are in a similar evolving state.

For individuals and organizations new to the world of blogging, I highly recommend Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. This book presents a number of different approaches to blogging taken by various individuals and companies, and the general conclusion (at least as I remember it) is that there’s no right way or wrong way to blog. Just be yourself, be honest and respectful to others, have fun, and understand that each time you blog you’re entering a conversation with readers from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. You can make up the rest as you go along, and odds are you’ll find yourself blogging more frequently as you get comfortable with the process and start seeing the benefits that blogging can deliver to your company.

Jesse Robbins has an interesting post on O’Reilly Radar about how IBM is building a new datacenter in Zurich that will use its excess heat to warm a public swimming pool for local residents. He references an article on GreenerComputing.com, which notes that “the Zurich data center will be completed later this year, and will generate 2,800 megawatts of excess heat each year.” According to Steve Sams of IBM, reclaiming the waste heat from the data center “will save about 130 tons of CO2 emissions.”

I often wonder why more efforts like this aren’t underway, especially when I’m sitting here in the office. Like just about any office today, we have stacks of servers and workstations generating all kinds of excess heat, and meanwhile the air conditioning is working overtime to keep the space cool (too cool, in my opinion—I keep my jacket on almost all day). Aside from the environmental impacts of all this energy use, I’m sure our electricity bills are higher than our CFO would prefer.

Google is another company that seems to be working towards environmentally friendly solutions—their solar panel project is a great example of one such effort—but I’m curious if these are isolated examples or part of a larger trend. I certainly hope it’s the latter.

Earlier this week Jimmy Guterman blogged about his decision to cancel his subscription to the print edition of The New York Times. He still loves the paper, both from a content standpoint as well as “the serendipity of walking through a print section”, but one day he came to the realization he was reading more of the Times online. “For all the pleasure of holding and print, the Times on paper is just too late. In 2008, today's paper is yesterday's news.” He goes on to lament the fact that the print version probably can’t survive if he and other adoring readers cancel their subscriptions, but that isn’t enough to change his mind.

I can sympathize with Jimmy’s point—I’m a news junkie and a big fan of the printed word—but a few years back I too realized that I was reading most of my news online while the print newspaper went straight to the recycling bin. However, while environmental concerns and the practicality of online news contributed to my decision to stop subscribing to the local paper, I have to admit that my primary motivation was an ever-increasing level of annoyance with the teenage subscription-sales reps that the Denver Newspaper Agency continually sends door-to-door through my neighborhood. Especially in the warmer months, you can find these kids trolling through the neighborhood at least once a week, and they’ll knock on your door whether or not you’re already a subscriber. Even more annoying is the fact that the Denver Newspaper Agency promises to award small “scholarships” to the kids that sell enough subscriptions, so they always deliver emotional pleas about how my subscription could help them get through college. I like to point out that it’s not a scholarship unless it’s awarded for scholastic merit or financial need and that they’d be better off getting a regular job, but the message doesn’t seem to resonate.

I eventually hung a No Soliciting sign near the front door in response to their repeated visits, but it’s had little to no effect. I don't know if they can’t read or don’t care, but either way I’m not going to reward them with my business. I’ll continue to read the local papers as well as the Times and other news sources online, but at this point I don’t really care if print newspapers go the way of the dinosaur.

A little over a month ago Sandro Groganz announced the launch of InitMarketing, his new marketing consultancy. Like any new company InitMarketing is in need of a logo, so Sandro is conducting a logo design contest through the end of the month. Being a marketing guy in the open source software industry, I figured I’d take a shot and see if I can win the iPod Touch he’s giving away for the top design. I should note that I’m not a formally-trained graphic artist, but I’m pretty handy with Photoshop and Illustrator.

As I started tinkering with a few designs I got to thinking about what makes a good open source logo. A couple of questions stood out in my head:

1) Should open source companies approach logo design differently than proprietary software organizations? I think it’s pretty neat that Sandro is holding an “open” design contest—anyone can submit designs regardless of skills or background—and I suspect that companies in or related to the proprietary software industry rarely conduct similar contests. But is an open approach more important if the company is in the open source industry? Does it produce better or more appropriate results? Ultimately, somebody (in this case, Sandro) has to decide which logo wins and will represent the organization, so does it matter if the decider is selecting from community-submitted logos versus professionally designed options?

2) Are there any key characteristics for good open source logos? It occurred to me that a “web 2.0 look and feel” might be appropriate for the InitMarketing logo, as open source software is one of the driving forces behind web 2.0 websites. But while some open source logos (think Alfresco, Drupal, and JBoss) seem to fit into this category, I would argue that most open source logos don’t. In fact, a lot of open source logos are pretty uninteresting in my opinion.

3) Should commercial open source companies take a different approach to branding than open source communities? Obviously, commercial organizations tend to put more time and money into things like logo design, but does that reflect anything other than a greater emphasis on marketing? In other words, should a company that makes money on open source try to convey different qualities or messages through its brand than a developer-driven open source community?

I don’t necessarily have answers to these questions, but I think they’re interesting. What do you think?