I notice Forrester has joined the ZDNet family of bloggers. Yes, the entire analyst firm now joins the gallery of bloggers with individual Enterprise Irregulars friends like Dennis Howlett, Joshua Greenbaum, Phil Wainewright and Mike Krigsman. I understand at least one other large analyst firm is looking at a similar arrangement.
I think bloggers should take a full page ad like Data General almost did when IBM entered the minicomputer market.
While analysts like Jim Holicheck of Gartner have had individual blogs for a while, the firms themsleves have struggled with what to do about blogs at the institutional level. A sure sign of that continued conflict - a blogger friend recently approached an analyst firm about getting access to some of their research. The response he got was along the lines of "all you bloggers want to do is steal our content"
Steal their content? Less than 10% of my posts over the last 3 years have been sourced from - or even reference - an analyst firm. My RSS feeds do not include content from any of the analyst firms.I have not been to a conference of a major analyst firm in the last 2 years.
Oh and by the way, since most analyst firms are typically days and weeks behind bloggers in publishing their analysis, can I be brash enough to suggest the firms may actually be "leveraging" blogger content? And not even giving us the link-love us bloggers have a tradition of respecting when we "steal" content...
