The call center industry has a few regular bloggers and now a few regular corproate bloggers. Some corporate blogs are worth reading, others are not. The blog format can give a faceless company a personality and way of communicating good ideas and enthusiasm about the technology and market in general. But when the blog becomes a marketing platform, a stream of consciousness advertorial, it's useless.

It doesn't always make sense for a company that offers tangible things to have a blog. It makes more sense if the company offers information -- consulting, research, or services. If a company makes one big product that someone will buy and not replace for three to five years, a blog format may not make much sense.

Blogs are constantly updated info-feeds. A company website that never gets repeat visitors, or gets traffic only from people who are researching a big purchase are probably better off with an FAQ format. On the other hand, a blog will list all of your old posts, so a viewer can browse your old material. Then again, past posts are dated, and a viewer might think old posts are old news, and not worth reading.

Not surprisingly, two of the best blogs are from service-oriented companies: Gartner Research and VocaLabs.

Gartner has a whole page of blogs. Their blog(s) acts almost more as an online forum -- registered users of gartner.com can participate, the website says. There is a lot of information here. Check out the CRM blog -- there's an entry called "How Paul English and 'Get Human' Got it Wrong" about one of our favorite subjects. It's by Esteban Kolsky, a Gartner analyst who was recently mentioned in a New York Times article (one we blogged about) on mobile phone companies' customer service.

The VocaLabs blog is done right. The entries are chatty but informative, and topical without being product pitches. Peter Leppik and Rick Rappe pontificate on enough of a variety of telecom, call center, and customer service related things that it's worth checking frequently.

When I interviewed Leppik for our upcoming speech recognition service provider article, we talked a bit about the VocaLabs blog. He told me, "A blog is a good place to put things that don't quite rise to the threshold of, in your case an article in a magazine, in our case, something that we might put into a press release or a newsletter; it doesn't quite rise to that level, but it might be of interest to some people. It's a good place to put observations that you've made, and stuff that's just kind of a little ... a little bit more squishy."

Unipress makes call center software. Their blog mentions … hmmm, it mentions that Call Center Magazine just gave them a product of the year award. What a coincidence. Unipress's blog entries are balanced between musings on the industry and musings on Unipress. Usually about their FootPrints software. It's a good blog, but they might try some shorter and more frequent posts (I write as this entry approaches its third page).

Informiam makes software called ClearPath. It's software that aggregates information from various systems like the ACD and puts them into one browser view. To reach the Informiam blog from the company's website, you click on a "recent news" headline. And that's basically what their blog is -- news ripped from other sources, usually online magazines.

Finally, Cisco Systems has a "High Tech Policy Blog". It isn't call center related, but it's interesting. I learned that the U.S. ranks 19th in the world for broadband penetration -- just ahead of Slovenia.

Lest you think that a high tech policy blog be inaccessible, check this post called Navel Gazing 2.0 - "Blogging Fever: Catch it!". It's a short post on blogging that includes this thought from Cisco's John Earnhardt: "To be sure, the blogosphere can be a cacophonous place, but with originality, substance and consistency a blog can be be very effective tool for getting your message to your audience." And (note the two 'be's) a place where the rules of spelling and grammar may be ignored in the interest of expediency.

But isn't that the beauty of blogs? Yes, proper grammar and spelling are good things, but blogs are about information and readability. I sometimes wonder if some of the bigger general-interest bloggers (like the Gawker people) don't insert random mistakes to increase their "street cred." If conventional journalism is like a prepared speech, a blog is like a casual conversation.

To return to my original example of Bill Wasik's "flash mob," corporatization killed the phenomenon. Blogging won't be ruined by companies, but they will change it. Just look at Walmart's pitches to bloggers (mentioned in the above Cisco post and in the New York Times). The key to a good (that is, interesting and informative) corporate blog is less product hawking, more industry observing.

The beauty of all this of course, is that I'm writing about corporate blogs from within one.

If you know of any blogs you think the call center industry ought to know about -- corporate or otherwise -- let us know.