So Google CEO Eric Schmidt has joined Apple's board of directors. Count on the blogosphere to put two and two together to five...or six or seven. Does this portend an Apple-Google mega-merger? Will Google provide iTunes with even more momentum to sell millions of those white earphones...er, I mean iPods? People have to remember Silicon Valley is an incestuous, tightly-woven spider's web where everyone knows everyone else. Speculate all you want about what Schmidt's appointment could man but don't let your imaginations get too carried away. What I can tell you is Apple has an intriguingly divergent board - ranging from environmentalist/ex-U.S. VP Al Gore to J. Crew CEO Millard Drexler to Mr. Jobs.

Well, here's a pleasant late-summer surprise: I'm one of 30 people named to Garrett Smith's list of VOIP bloggers - joining pals such as Om Malik, Alec Saunders and Andy Abramson (aka #1). While flattered, I'm secretly hoping to make another VoIP list this year (video) by posting on YouTube's every move...:) Thanks for the compliment, Garrett.

I've almost finished reading Naked Conversations, which is part of my summer reading series (The Long Tail, The Golden Spruce). Although I share Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's ardent enthusiasm for blogging, Naked Conversations comes across as almost too evangelistic. They believe blogs are/will be an essential marketing/communications tool that few companies should be without. They cite examples such as Kyrptonite, which was savaged a couple of years ago in the blogosphere when someone discovered you could open one of the company's locks with a Bic pen. Kryptonite didn't have a blog so it had no way to fight back other than using traditional PR tools. It lost the battle and ended up paying $10-million to compensate customers. Scoble and Israel's belief in blogs got me thinking about the Canadian corporate landscape and who's blogging. To the best of my knowledge, I don't think there is a large Canadian company that has a blog. Nortel, for example, would be a good candidate but the only blog dedicated to the company is one I write. Another good candidate would be Canadian Tire, one of Canada's largest retailers and one that's part of the country's cultural fabric. A corporate blog strikes me as a great way for Canadian Tire to talk about issues such as new products, store re-designs and new internal developments. So why are so many Canadian companies so blog-free? I'm not exactly sure other than Canadians, by nature, tend to be conservative. This includes the Internet where we lag behind the U.S. in e-commerce and online advertising even though we have the second highest broadband penetration in the world.
Update: Someone who left a comment suggested other potential corporate blog candidates include Tim Horton's, WestJet, Loblaws and the banks.