CEO of Xero Rod Drury posted the other day, saying that his blogging days, after five or so years, were coming to an end. This comes hard on the heels of Mahalo CEO Jason Calcanis’ announcement that he too is giving up blogging.

It seems that the trend du jour for CEO’s is to give up blogging – of course blogger’s are a tiny body of people, so there’s a bunch of CEO’s out there (like 98% of them I guess) who either don’t blog or have never even heard the term so it’d be interesting to know if they’ll quickly start blogging and then quit, or if they’ll be seen as the early adopters of not-blogging and the criticism levelled at the about lack of openness will in fact turn into congratulations for being ahead of the times.

On the one hand I totally understand the quitters – being a CEO is a time consuming task, add that to the obvious conflicts of interest, accusations of corporate bias and pressure from various stakeholders and CEO blogging becomes yet another difficult task.

But it’s still a shame – whatever happened to opening um, the democratisation of dialogue and the levelling of the communication networks?

Oh well people come and people go I guess.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

5 Comments
  • I agree, it is a shame to see some CEO’s end their current blogs, though in some cases , like Rod Drury, he’s been a regular contributor for 5+ years….so the early adopters really don’t have an argument to justify their lack of contribution. Noting Rod’s not totally given up, he’s still there in http://blog.xero.com

    As noted, many still don’t even know what a blog is,though some do, but organisational “control” would have it that the PR team should write it on behalf of the CEO, probably leading to the perception of bias and using a blog as an overly worded advert.

    However, although blogging has been around a bit now, we still have the majority of companies not participating or worse “preventing” participation. Recently Idris Mootee was still asking if companies have any sort of policy for blogging…I suspect not. (http://mootee.typepad.com/innovation_playground/2008/07/the-blogging-trend-is-only-the-beginning.html)

    I’m sure the non-participants will not be the early adopters, but look towards people like Rod and wish they had started a blog.

  • It’s been 5 years for me also and I stopped my personal blog back in December last year for about a week and bowed to pressure to restart. Time to write is the No1 problem.

  • Falafulu Fisi |

    Ok Ben, you can now continue on from where Rod’s left off as an established NZ tech blog.

  • Agree with Neil’s point on still being available on the xero blog – so in his role as CEO he is still there.

    It seems that Rod just doesn’t have time to balance CEO, family and other objectives. His blog was more about driving the conversation on this last point – and it seems he achieved his goals. More power to him!

  • oh and maybe it was a way to drive more traffic to xero – got to build that brand as opposed to the personal brand

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