Stale Blogs, or How to Tell When A Company is Left for Dead

It used to be the “News” section of any company web site – the fastest “tell” on a site to determine if in fact the company was still ticking along at any measurable pace was often found by checking out the date on the most recent news item. Next up was the press release section.

It’s hard to have much confidence in a company when the last thing they felt was newsworthy – even by their own standards – was a customer win or conference booth sponsorship from nine months ago.

Now that so many companies have got on the blogging kick, it’s even worse. It was kind of forgivable to have a couple month gap in “major” news announcements or press releases (actually, these days, a deliberate lack of press releases can be argued to be a mark of a company who “gets it”). But when a company blog that was running at 2-3 posts a week just stops updating – and they still link to it from the company home page – that’s damn near egregious.

The example I ran across today is Qumana – in my never-ending hunt for a Mac-based quality client blog editor that compares with Windows Live Writer, I looked this guys up again (I previously played with the Windows version back in my ‘Softie days). Site seems OK, but as part of my “are they still alive” check I popped on over to their site and…

Damn, May 16th. Moving on to the next option from a company that maybe isn’t quite gone…

Postscript: On the subject of Mac blogging clients – what is really out there besides MarsEdit and Ecto? I’m writing this on Ecto, trying to get a feel for it again. I ran across this nice summary post of blog client options for both Mac and Windows, but it largely confirmed my suspicion – Mac blog editing clients as a software segment is basically dead. I guess between ScribeFire and just in-browser editing the need isn’t there any more. Or Ecto and MarsEdit just rock enough (I have quibbles with both) to render the competition impotent. From the linked blog post, I jumped over to check out one I’d never heard of (Bleezer – from Larry Borsato, a blogger I used to read frequently), but lo and behold, last blog update was June 2007. Arrrrgh…