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This year, Macromedia -- the company that makes Flash and Shockwave -- has posted a $305 million quarterly loss, laid off 110 people and lost a $2.8 million copyright infringement suit to Adobe.
But for all the company's apparent troubles, in the last week there's been a lot of good feeling directed toward the firm, with people saying that Macromedia is one of the few companies to appreciate the new topography of the Web.
That's because Macromedia is blogging.
Not only has the company started to tailor its software to the needs of people who run their own weblogs, but it's also dived headlong into the much-hyped "blogosphere" itself, setting up its own weblogs as a way to nurture ties with its customers.
Macromedia calls this "the blog strategy," and some see the company's moves as the start of a trend. These days, it's almost unfashionable for a self-respecting Webophile to not have his own blog; if Macromedia's effort is any indication, soon a tech company that doesn't embrace weblogs may seem equally dated.
(For the uninitiated, a weblog -- or blog -- is a frequently updated website of personal ideas, thoughts, musings, news, information, or discussions of what one has eaten for breakfast.)
Late last month, when Macromedia released new versions of four of its applications, it expected that its customers would have lots of questions about how to use the new stuff, said Tom Hale, the company's vice president in charge of developer relations.
Macromedia's software -- Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Cold Fusion -- builds and maintains websites, and the many new features in such complex applications can take some time to get used to.
"We were releasing a tremendous amount of software to the Web," Hale said, "and you pretty much don't know what's going to happen when you release that much that quickly."
The firm needed a way to quickly respond to questions developers might have as they use the new products -- and although some at Macromedia thought about creating a blog on Macromedia's site to address customers' questions, "we decided to experiment with the (third-party) blogs," Hale said.
Macromedia had five of its "community managers" create their own weblogs using Radio and Blogger, two of the most popular blog publishers. (The bloggers are John Dowdell, Mike Chambers, Matt Brown, Vernon Viehe and Bob Tartar.)
The blogs would provide a forum for the managers to discuss the new products, show developers how to use some of the new features and answer questions. Most importantly, the community managers would write like bloggers, with that casual, this-great-idea-just-occurred-to-me tone which sometimes makes weblogs so addictive.
"Giving the community managers a platform on which they can use their own voice, that was our idea," Hale said. "Our format (on Macromedia.com) just wouldn't be as quick as a blog is. We do have a community section in there, but a blog is five sentences and 10 links. And that gets to the heart of why people trust blogs -- they like the format."
Hale added: "Would it have been a true blog if we put it on Macromedia.com? Not really."
Indeed, it was important to Macromedia that its blogs seemed true, that readers perceived them as the thoughts of very helpful community managers instead of corporate shills. If the effort felt disingenuous, like the company was merely jumping on the blogwagon, it could have backfired.
"I'd hate for you to think this is some kind of marketing agenda," Hale said. "If there is an agenda, our agenda is related to getting good information in people's hands."
The blogs are just a week old, but they're already being praised by Macromedia developers, and nobody seems upset with the fact that the bloggers are employed by Macromedia.
"Rather than try to make it feel like they're astroturfing" -- the practice of cooking up a grassroots campaign where none exists -- "they say we work for Macromedia and this is stuff that we find interesting," said Branden Hall, a programmer at Fig Leaf Software who has become a fan of the Macromedia blogs.
Hall has his own blog, and he often links to the Macromedia blogs, and they link to him, and others link to all of them -- creating a community of Flash blogs that the company says addresses the needs of its customers.
But are Macromedia's community managers allowed to express their opinions, and does the company have any input on their blogs?
Hale said that Macromedia asks only that its bloggers keep their postings relevant -- no blogging about what they ate for breakfast, in other words. They're free to discuss any aspect of the software, Hale said.
Mike Chambers, one of Macromedia's community managers, said that since he's had his blog up, he's found it easier to stay in touch with developers.
"If we have an announcement to make, in the past the normal way to do it would be to go to each forum on the Web where people are discussing it and post it there," Chambers said.
Now he blogs it once, and makes sure the link gets out.
The important items -- the best Flash examples, the most interesting tips, the most pernicious bugs -- are passed through the developer community at blog-speed, which can be quite fast. The unimportant stuff isn't passed around as quickly -- which of course is just how it should be.
Dave Winer, the blogging evangelist and software developer who runs Scripting News, described Macromedia as being on the "leading edge" of the movement to incorporate blogs in business, and he said that other companies would soon start blogging too.
But does this raise the specter of the corporate blog -- the advertorial weblog that taints the community with its hard-selling?
Hale said he didn't think so, for one obvious reason: "My perception of the blogging community is that it's self policing, and if the blog isn't valuable to you, don't read it. And if it's transparent, people won't read it."
