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Back at the beginning of October, I blogged about the British Heart Foundation’s Stop Smoking Blogs. Back then I wondered where the blogrolls were, and made a point about how the network effect is what actually makes blogging so useful.

For some boring reason, I stumbled upon the BHF’s blog project again today, four months later. Still no blogrolls, and the Technorati results for the blogs show the results:

Sorry, no results found.

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times: Anyone can set up a blog. Some 23,000 blogs are created every day. Understanding the medium, the elements that make it so powerful, and the network that surrounds each individual blog is the bare minimum that an organisation needs in order to be on their way to successful blogging. For every company that thinks it doesn’t need that knowledge, or believes some know-nothing PR or web agency that tells them they have this blog thing all figured out, we’ll have another example of mediocre-at-best blogs that are barely - if at all - hooked into the network they need to engage. (Just two days ago, a PR who claims to be an expert in blogging admitted to me that he had no idea that linking to someone’s personal email address instead of their professional blog, in the context of a professional blog post, was bad form. The mind boggles.)

So I am afraid Niall Cook’s prediction for this year, that there will be more examples of bad corporate blogging in 2005 than you would care to shake a stick at, is proving to be true. And - give me strength - we’re barely through mid-January.