Oracle blogs: Who’s hot and who’s not

Justin Kestelyn, the editor-in-chief of Oracle Technology Network (OTN), is perplexed — he wants to know why Oracle gets no blogging respect. Kestelyn recently complained on his blog that despite having a large blogging community, Oracle has very little street cred in the blogosphere.

At a recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, “even SAP” was mentioned as having a foothold in social media. Oracle, on the other hand, has a “complete lack of mindshare in this area,” he wrote. Oracle often gets credit for embracing new technologies early (like Linux in the past, and podcasting more recently) — why, he wonders, not in this realm? Maybe because readers assume that Oracle employees’ blogs must be clogged with marketing hype or somehow directed or controlled from above?

Blogger Robert Scoble suggests that it has to do with a lack of actual community building: “I can’t remember when they did what JD did — link out to people and join the conversation. I can’t remember getting an invite to any Oracle blogging event.” A commenter on that post and one blogger at IT-eye wonder if Oracle’s general lack of respect in this community is a function of its Unbreakable Linux offering. (Offend Linux fans and offend the geek community at large?)

I myself check in on the Oracle blogs every week; it’s another source of information adding to a fuller picture of what’s going on in the Oracle world, blogwise and otherwise. But I admit that I sometimes take what I read there with a grain of salt, and the commentary often comes off as a little, well, defensive.

-Elisa