Very interesting points but I can only speak of what I experience and my experience with blogs have not been bad.
Firstly, I could not convince my clients to set up a forum on their site but they were more than willing to post on a blog - note the difference was explained in detail. I think the reason is the amount of work involved - with blogging they do not have to moderate.....human beings are lazy by nature...
Secondly with blogging, we incorporated it into their sites with the same look and feel and they like to log in and do their weekly bit.....it is so easy to use for people that do not want to spend money on CMS systems - please also note that we have in general Technophobes in South Africa being 4 years behind the rest of the world in many ways....
Thirdly and this is a good one - actually was just an experiment - blog set up on 28 February - first sale in real estate in October this year - this gave the estate agent enough income so that we could design his own site which will be done......
Besides the above it served all my sites well from a
PR point of view and I got quite a number of compliments on the blogs we run.....they (being the targeted audiences) seem to like what they see.
So let me see - branding,
PR, traffic and actual sales - are those not positive points?
BTW we also do RSS feeds and it is all working well driving qualified traffic to our sites - how do we know - well all in the stats....
Just my two pence - as long as it works like this, I will keep blogging!