Blog

Blogs have already become part of the mainstream media. Now, corporations are finding uses for them, too.

Blogs are a great way for a company to share information and news about itself to employees, customers and investors. Blog posts can be made regularly form a record of the blogger’s thoughts and the company’s fortunes. Anyone can go to the website for free with no registration or subscribe to receive news updates via RSS. They are also a great way to get feedback (again, from employees, customers, and investors).

Johnathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, has been blogging for 2 years and is now asking that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) allow companies to release investor related information to the public via blogs on their website. He argues that given the fact that investors could be located worldwide, the internet is even more accessible than the typical press release or the Wall Street Journal. What this means is that instead of holding a teleconference or issuing a press release, a company could simply blog about news that investors need to know, which the SEC could still supervise and regulate. See Mr. Schwartz’s blog, and a newspaper article about it here.

Key language from this post:
mainstream media
-the media are things we use to get information or entertainment from, such as newspapers and TV; it is mainstream if most or many people use it or think of it as common
blog posts
-post here comes from its older use as a verb “to post a letter’, i.e. send something by mail or to “post a note or bill” which meant to put up a public notice; blog posts are when a person writes a new entry and puts it on their blog
the company’s fortunes
-whether the company does well or poorly; its luck
subscribe
-to become a member; to receive something regularly, as in a newspaper, magazine - recently internet sites for newspapers or blogs allow users to subscribe and receive new posts automatically using RSS
RSS
-(Really Simple Syndication) A distribution format that was developed by Netscape in 1999 and became very popular for sending and receiving updates to blogs and the latest news from websites
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
-the U.S. government’s agency that protects investors by making and enforcing rules for companies that offer shares on the stock markets
release information via blogs
-to use blogs to publish information; via often means ‘through’ , ‘using’ or ‘by this way’.
press release
-to give out information to ‘the press’, which usually means newspapers, TV, radio and their associated reporters