hoo boy, where to begin with this story. First, there is no way to credibly say that Jonathan "gets credit for pioneering the corporate blog as a tool to reach customers, employees, and others," as the story does. He certainly was one of the earlier bloggers, but the list of those who were reaching customers, employees and others is way too long to list. Second, he said:
"Historically, communication took place by being a celebrity CEO who met with heads of state, and got the local media to cover it," he said in an on-stage interview with O'Reily Media chief Tim O'Reilly. "You got the message out in an inefficient and environmentally irresponsible way. Then the Internet came round and gave you a way to reach the entire planet."
Let's talk about channels of communication. One reason you don't see too many celebrity or CEO blogs is that they have many, many channels of communication available to them, to include the CEO speech, the interview, the white paper, the corporate web site, the 1:1 meeting, and so on. Any one of those can be an extraordinarily effective way to reach customers, partners and others. So the intrinsic value of a blog to a CEO is somewhat lower than it is to others. So if Jonathan is waiting for the rest of the executive world to catch up to him and make blogging anachronistic, he's got a bit of a wait ahead.
On the flip side, if his point is that blogging will become ubiquitous and continue to fall in the hype cycle, while simultaneously becoming more useful, then I totally agree. Somehow though, I don't think that was what he was saying....