Has blogger backlash come too soon?

It was bound to happen. Blogger backlash has set in.

Witness Sapient, a leading business consulting and technology services company, issuing a “media alert” with the headline, “Blog tech doesn’t live up to blog talk, according to Sapient CTO.”

Ben Gaucherin, the CTO in question, says blogs “are a fad fueled by pop culture’s desperate search for the next big thing.” When I spoke with Gaucherin he was even more emphatic than he was in his news alert. He told me that blogs are the digital equivalent of the pet rock.

It’s true that until now bloggers have gotten buckets of ink and hours of broadcast time. Too much hype always results in a backlash. How could discerning viewers not be turned off by blogs when CNN and other news stations try to make themselves seem hip by including opinions from the blogosphere in their news reports -- “Now let’s see what the bloggers have to say about this” -- as if bloggers constituted a separate sphere of intelligence.

Speaking for myself, I don’t want to hear what bloggers have to say about most current events for the same reason I’ve always disliked the person-in-the-street interview. My response is, Who cares? It is not representative and usually sheds no real light on the subject.

However, although I often turn to Gaucherin when I’m writing my column because I respect his opinion on technology, this time I think he has it wrong.

The fact that blogs may be the technological equivalent of the pet rock has a great deal to do with their success -- it is easy to post a blog -- and ultimately their benefit to those same companies that Gaucherin feels duty-bound to warn.

“Unless you are willing to put in place controls over what is being said,” Gaucherin says, “these stream-of-consciousness thoughts might touch on things that they shouldn’t.” As examples, Gaucherin cites the possibility that a company could be liable for a sexual harassment suit for comments made in a blog or that a blog might reveal proprietary financial information.

This argument is a red herring.

I called Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun Microsystems, to see what he thought about Gaucherin’s comments. Sun has a very forward-thinking blog policy that allows anybody in the company to post to its blogs.sun.com site. About 1,500 employees currently do so.

“We have a list of dos and don’ts following existing corporate policy,” Bray tells me. Among the don’ts are discussions of existing litigation, financial information, and trade secrets, he said. This is a pattern any company can follow.

Chief among the benefits of blogs is that they become not posting sites so much as listening posts. Bray says blogs engage Sun with the community.

“[Sun’s] success has come when we have a strong community of developers and users around technology, and our weak periods have occurred when we haven’t been engaged,” Bray says. “It is essential to our business.”

Gaucherin tells me he understands the benefits of a collaborative environment within a distributed enterprise, but he’s still missing the bigger collaboration picture Bray talks about. Blogging is a tremendous way to keep in touch with your community, to share ideas, gripes, and news. As Bray points out, it gives a human face to what the public might perceive as a faceless corporation.

See you in the blogosphere.