Yes sir! Australia’s most corporatised car magazine, that sticks by the Camira as a great ‘Car of the Year’ (COTY) recipient has started a blog. Great, we’ve stepped into 2001 here! Don’t get me wrong, they’ve been fairly modest about it and skipped the whole song and dance routine, but come on guys, pick up the slack! The content is great but the execution is rubbish.

Seems that now even telcos do blogs, that it’s acceptable for every Tom, Dick and Harry to put their corporate masthead on a blog. Corporate flirtation with Open Source tools (such as blogs and wikis) intended for individuals and non corporates can be disasterous. They usually reak of some beardy old management type overhearing an IT guy talking loudly about some new fangled technology in the pub.

Then Monday morning, thinking he’s all clever, he calls a meeting to get people onto it. And at that critical moment in time, the IT boffins get some wind in their sails and believe they can actually do something cool and new for once. With management endorsement, you can do anything! Pity that management type thought that blogs take only 3 clicks to setup and cost nothing. It ain’t true fella. Like anything they take a lot of hard work to get right.

Don’t get me wrong, there could be some longevity in the Wheels blog. It’s a genuinely good read. It’s the execution that sucks. Each page load is taking me about 3 minutes - literally! Who tested this thing? And this by the way is on a very, very fast corporate LAN. It must be atrociously slow on dial up. The layout’s very poor (it took me about 10 minutes to notice there were categories listed on the right) and reaks of absolutely 0 IT staff or designer involvement. Just some blog template straight off the shelf.

Fellas don’t be discouraged. But please, listen to your customers and get this right. Yes year 9 kids can do blogs and they’re cute. Corporations don’t (and shouldn’t) get such liberties).  You can find the Wheels Blog here. Oh yeah and why do you guys whinge about wanting to take back the COTY for the frog eyed Subaru Impreza,  yet boast about  not giving out a COTY because the XD Falcon was such a lemon? Get off your high horse!