New blogs at Deseret Book

Deseret Book is starting to host a couple of blogs; John Bytheway and Michael Mclean. It looks like they might begin to offer more as well. I've written a note to Matthew McBride (their contact for the Internet Division) and Jeanne Crippen (their Marketing Division contact). Here's what I wrote:

Matthew,
I love the fact that Deseret Book is making a leap into blogging. I think
you've made some good decisions in having Michael McLean and John Bytheway
as your first two bloggers. I'm anxious to see who else ends up blogging
for you. I have a couple of concerns though:

1) Bloggers for hire don't seem to have the voice or the passion that
most bloggers do. I'll be anxious to see how this works out. For
example, neither of Michael nor John has posted any replies to the
comments on their blog entries -- blogs work best when they are a vehicle
for conversations.

2) You don't provide an rss feed for the blogs. this makes them almost
useless for me. I use an aggragator to browse blogs I'm interested in,
then jump to the blog to read the entries that catch my attention. I
think you'll find that this will become the way almost everyone reads
blogs -- please don't paint yourself out of that picture.

There are a number of interesting, strongly written LDS blogs out
there. I hope to see good things from Deseret Book's bloggers as well.

-pate