Fortune 500 Corporate Blog Review: InterActiveCorp (#313) - slim pickings

Well, being that IAC/InterActiveCorp owns some of the most prominent internet properties in the world, like Ask.com, Match.com and Lending Tree, as well as Bloglines, an RSS aggregation service, you'd probably guess that their corporate blogging program is alive and well.

And you'd be wrong.

There are no blogs to be found at InterActiveCorp's website, via Google and Technorati searches--and, in trolling more than a dozen subsites of its various businesses, I located ONE subsidiary that has a corporate blog, and that is Ask.com.

So, we'll talk about that one.

Name: "Ask's Official Blog"

History: regular posts since February 2005.

Frequency of posts: about five posts per month

Nature of posts: they're product-focused, but many include links to external sites. Matter-of-fact with some humor (they had a nice post on "Talk Like A Pirate Day"). They're signed by "the Ask team" or "the International team," less frequently by a named individual and often have no byline at all.

Design/functionality: nice-looking with lots of pictures. Offers RSS and Atom feeds. Several ties into bloglines, their subsidiary. They allow comments (moderated) and trackbacks. The adminstrator is not identified.

Links etc.: The blog is ranked #3,155 at Technorati, and is unclaimed. They are linked to by many blogs, including the Google blog, and themselves link to the Google and Yahoo search blogs.

Another irony in the InterActiveCorp blogging story is the fact that its chairman, Barry Diller, is a minor celebrity (married to Diane von Furstenberg) and as such is a frequent subject of bloggers worldwide. Perhaps as a result he dislikes blogs and bloggers?

blogs, corporate blogs, marketing