Posted on September 28, 2007 at 2:15 PM in @earthlink
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
In this final entry on Earthling, I mainly write to say thank you all for reading, commenting, e-mailing, talking, listening, and contributing. The blog helped us make the porous membrane between internal and external conversations a bit more...porous, helped resolve lots of individual one-off needs from customers, departments, and partners, and gave us a way to participate in conversations going on around us. I have enjoyed sharing my view of the internet with you, and hearing about yours.
I'd like to extend a huge thanks as well to all of the people inside and outside of EarthLink who supported the blog in numerous ways, made me feel welcome at their meetings and planning sessions, invited me in to their corner of the world and helped me get issues addressed, strategies refined, and problems solved.
If you'd like to keep up with me, you can do so over on Extraface, my own blog. Grab the Extraface RSS feed here. And if you happen to be at BlogOrlando where I am today, come find me and say hello.
If you'd like to keep up with EarthLink news and announcements, we've developed the new RSS feed below just for that purpose:
feeds.feedburner.com/elnk
As a final programming note, on Monday I'll be permanently closing comments and trackbacks and I’ll be preparing the site for its role as an archive throughout next week. Expect to see some visual changes then.
Thanks again,
Dave Coustan
Comments
Good job, Dave. Hope you enjoy the next thing, whatever it may turn out to be.
Posted by Jeff | September 28, 2007 2:54 PM
I'll miss reading your posts on Earthling, but look forward to reading your new blog. Great work!
Posted by Nickie | September 28, 2007 4:04 PM
Oh, no! Oh, no! I just discovered the Earthlink blogs at the beginning of this year and found out through one of the posts (or perhaps through a link) how to contact Ben Kaplan; this information was really helpful, as I was having problems with my PCC 2.0 and needed someone to converse with other than the phone or live chat tech people, with whom I always seem to have communication issues; Ben was very helpful in resolving my problem. Now it is my mother who is having her own PCC problems, so I came to the Earthlink blog site to see if Ben's e-mail address had changed now that PCC 3.0 had come out. Now, to my horror, I find that this blog--which helped me to get in contact with the actual product manager who could help me with my problems--is coming to an end! Somewhere I found a link that led me to Ben's Protection Control Center blog, but I found that (1) it hasn't been updated in over a month, (2) Ben's e-mail address for contacting him is not given anywhere, and (3) his Protection Control Center Blog link is not listed on the Earthlink Blogs homepage; all of this leads me to suspect that his blog, too, is becoming an archive--with no way to contact him in real time--and this is distressing to me! When I originally discovered these Earthlink blogs, and especially Ben's announcements and contact information, I was delighted that now I could bypass Live Chat and phone support and could communicate directly with the corporate person whose "baby" the PCC actually is and who could thus be of the greatest help to me. Now that I need help again, I pull up this blog site only to read all of this restructuring talk and hear that this Earthling blog (with its helpful news and announcements) is coming to an end and is being archived, and I fear that perhaps other Earthlink product managers are following suit--leaving us no way to contact the very people who could help us the most when we have problems! I wish you success in whatever you do next, Dave, but I am sorry to see you and your helpful blog go, and I hope that Ben plans to keep updating his blog and will not simply let it become an archive.
Posted by Carol E. | September 28, 2007 7:49 PM
Dave - You've done to help people understand how a corporate blog can be done right. Thank you! Best of luck with your next venture.
Posted by Toby | September 29, 2007 11:50 AM
Dave!
I'll miss this blog for the warm personality behind it. Thanks for your help and for serving as an example of good blogging.
I hope our paths cross again.
Sandi
Posted by Sandi Solow | October 1, 2007 9:05 AM