Company bloggers can help put out fires: “This is what blogs are about. Everything has changed. We have to be transparent and honest. People are talking about this, they’re posting these images, we can’t ignore it. We have to deal with it directly.” That is a quote from the article by Lionel Menchaca who is Dell’s chief blogger. I could not agree more. Openness and transparency are the name of the game in corporate PR and will only be rewarded with accolades and public forgiveness. Though this is a somewhat jaded view of the world looking through rose colored glasses, I believe that blogs can be a fantastic vehicle for corporations to listen to their target audience and get their candid message across. There are lots of interesting examples in that article.

Feedburner announced today that they are now offering FeedBurner Integration for Blogspot Blogs but what they failed to mention was that now you can redirect the feed of your BlogSpot blog to any other URI. That should make a move from Blogger to WordPress (or any other blogging tool) completely transparent to your feed consumers. You could also insulate against or prepare for a future migration and move your feed over to another source. Thanks to Digital Inspiration for the tip.

FeedBurner MyBrand Now Free: Feedburner’s service that allowed publishers to publish their feeds through their own domain with the help of Feedburner, is now free of cost. This service used to cost upwards of $3 and might be a good way to retain the transparency and control over the feeds of your blog if you choose to serve them through Feedburner. [EDIT] Looks like Google decided to make the Pro Stats feature of Feedburner free as well. This is definitely good news!