I’m delighted to announce that the female drought on our cult Celebrity at Work blog is now over. That’s not something we want to go through again.

B.L. Ochman is a name you’ll bump into many times if you wander around the business blogosphere. She has developed an enviable niche in the U.S. online business world and around the conference circuit as a speaker.

I asked B.L. to expand a little on this almost totally new career path for business-minded folk who blog:

Editor As an Internet marketing strategist and corporate social media consultant — which is a mouthful in any language — who is also well-known around the business blogosphere, what’s your take on the major trends right now; and how do you see your own career progressing?

Read B.L.’s reply.

Syntagma Media is very happy to announce another coup for the network as Steve Newman joins us as a blogger. Steve is the Commissioning Director at British publisher, Humdrumming, and has just begun posting on our newest blog: Jazz Groove. Regular aficionados may remember his spot over on Celebrity at Work.

I’m also delighted to announce that Steve’s personal blog is moving over to a berth at Syntagma and will be renamed: Diary of a Publisher.

More on that soon.

Sir Benjamin Slade is still looking for an heir after all these years. Well, it certainly feels like that long. As someone who was caught up in the aristocrat’s plight through a tidal wave of traffic to one of our sites, I’m amazed this story still has legs.

Back then it was Aristocracy Anecdotes’s busiest post. We told the tale of an English Aristocrat - a baronet who could trace his ancestry back to King Alfred the Great — but who couldn’t find a heir for his magnificent country mansion and estate in Somerset, England.

Sir Benjamin advertised around the world. The story went out on America’s Today show and countless local radio broadcasts. He, and our blog, were inundated with hopeful, wannabee English aristocrats. Sir Slade, as he was usually erroneously called, had become something of a star.

Read the continuing story of Sir Benjamin Slade’s search for an heir.

Over at Celebrity at Work, our new celeb is Allan Weisbecker, the bestselling author of In Search of Captain Zero, A Surfer’s Road Trip Beyond the End of the Road, and the well-received novel: Cosmic Banditos..

His new book, Can’t You Get Along With Anyone? will be published by Humdrumming. Allan is a very graphic writer, not in the least afraid to speak his mind about anything at all. I asked him the following question:

Editor As a bestselling author in the USA, what are the circumstances of your teaming up with a British publisher, and do you think the British will appreciate your books?

Read his reply.

Illustration by Brian Stauffer.

There are many ways to communicate a point of view : conversations — face-to-face or via telephone or video link — instant messaging (chat, IM), email (the last vestige of the mass letter writer), and, yes, by snail mail.

In other words, you can talk, type-talk, or write.

Which then is best for conveying a complex viewpoint, which might be business, polemic, or just a description? This is not an idle question because much business is done on the phone or at local meetings, and New Media is inexorably forcing down a conversational route.

In my own world here at Syntagma I discount anything spoken or produced in an interactive conversation. The reason is that any conversation involves the intermixing of at least two minds, two value-sets, two entrenched positions, and two emotional intelligences. If that’s not a recipe for disaster, I don’t know what is.

Put any group together and ask them to thrash something out and you’ll get a long transcript full of inauthentic statements. People don’t function properly in conversation mode. Go to any conference and, unless a policy has been worked out beforehand, only chaos rules. Enjoyable chaos, I agree, but not something to base business decisions on.

I was once involved with creating a document of telecom standards in the new liberalized marketplace here in the UK. This involved travelling to IBM in Portsmouth and chairing meetings between groups of experts and what we would now call “stakeholders”. My abiding memory of that job was the extent to which people changed their minds after the meeting: “I was a bit hasty, there,” being a common excuse.

When you write something, it’s a different situation. There’s only your mind involved. You’re not interacting, you’re not being thrown off your own authenticity by undigested memes coming at you from all directions. You can be yourself.

You can also be considered in your point of view, mulling over the logic of your arguments before presenting them to the world’s memepool. Spitting out unconsidered comments and suggestions may be good for “getting stuff off your chest”, but it hardly adds to the functionality of the world. Utility is always preferable to misguided self-expression, especially as the latter will be in response to others’ responses in an infinite regression.

If you’re discussing business, do it by email rather than phone or IM. Conversations are for entertainment not decision-making.

The carefully-written printed document is never going to die, as some inauthentic enthusiasts think. Have you noticed that the best blogs are written by professional writers or those with similar skills?

That’s where I add a fifth point to the four Toltec principles in my recent post, A Code for Blogosphere Conversations:

5. Always write down important business decisions or proposals, and never hold anyone to something they say.

How many wars might have been averted if that principle were universally practised?

Check out our Tech Biz Writing blog/course here.

Syntagma Media is pleased to announce the latest addition to our growing stable of blogs: Stage Latest, which covers the stage and theatre worldwide.

Our blogger is Ian Alexander Martin, an actor, director, stage journalist and Senior Editor with British publisher, Humdrumming. Ian accomplishes all this from his base in Vancouver, Canada. Regular readers may recall his recent piece for Celebrity at Work.

We are delighted to welcome Ian to the fold.

Dr Who’s time machine, the Tardis.

So Rose is leaving the cult TV series, Dr Who, and the Doctor is looking for a new female companion.

Now, do I have your attention? Right, then I’ll begin. Our blog Celebrity at Work has a shortage of female would-be influencers of the zeitgeist and requests applicants. Go here.

You’ll need to have some prominent position in life, even if it’s only as a blog network owner (sigh). Alternatively, you may know of a “real” celebrity and their contact details. Do tell.

Go here.

Earlier, in a momentous week for Redmond, Robert Scoble announced his long-expected departure from the comforts of global megabrand, Microsoft. His move to Silicon Valley to an unknown startup company in the rather geekish field of podcasting, is a great gamble for a man approaching the male menopause. But maybe we need look no further for a reason.

Now we hear that Bill Gates is beating a very leisurely retreat from Redmond in a long march that’s coming to resemble Mao Tse Tung’s back in the late 1940s.

There are also calls for CEO Steve Ballmer to saddle up and head for the Rio Grande, despite the traffic coming the other way.

As the wits will have it, to lose one big cheese is careless, to lose two is verging on … [add your choice of expletive]. But potentially to lose three is a Category 5 storm.

It’s all very gentlemanly so far. Last night, here in Britain we watched Robert Scoble and Irwin Steltzer debate the Gates affair — Gatesgate? Well, he is heading for the gate.

Appearing on the BBC’s flagship often-grumpy, late night political commentary programme, Newsnight, Robert put up a stout defence of the man he clearly admires a lot. Steltzer was less sanguine, choosing to bounce the topic off his well-rehearsed economic liberalism. Both men made excellent contributions and, since they weren’t totally opposing each other (a common BBC tactic), an interesting exchange of views took place.

So what is happening at Redmond? Is meltdown round the corner? Are we starting to see the glimmerings of the end of the parabolic career of a once-great business? Is this IBM all over again?

With Ray Ozzie moving into pole position at Microsoft, I suspect Microsoft will transform itself radically in the years ahead, moving more and more online, and adopting a swifter trajectory on product launches.

Once you resist the fear of having to maintain yourself at your present size, a common fast-food neurosis, you can let yourself adapt to the market rather than attempting to make the market adapt to you.

Conversation.

Do you remember the story of when the London art gallery, Tate Modern, invited a Japanese “artist” to London, booked him into a luxury hotel where he smoked continuously for two days. Before checking out, he emptied the contents of the ashtrays into a bag, which he carried to the Tate. There, in a special enclosure carefully roped off for him, he tipped the fag ends and accumulated ash. The exhibit was pronounced a triumph by visiting dignitaries from the art world.

Hilariously, a few days later, a cleaning lady reputedly named Betty (they’re always called Betty) swept it all up and chucked out their prize exhibit.

Well, another joyous story has emerged from the crackpot world of modern art:

Artist, David Hensel, submitted a sculpture of a laughing head entitled One Day Closer to Paradise to the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Society of Art. But, in the course of transit, the head was mistakenly knocked off its plinth and remained separated. You know what happened next if you know about modern art:

The empty plinth was considered by a panel of “experts” and judged to be worthy of exhibition. The head, considered as a separate work, was rejected.

You couldn’t make it up. But I wonder if there’s a lesson here for us all. Were Tony Blair and George Bush a pair of plinths without heads when they stood for election? And what happened to the rest of them?