Blogs Underutilized by Schools?

I hypothesize that schools and parents underutilize blogs as tools for parental & community involvement. This is based on a small sample involving public high schools on Oahu. Anybody know of any stories, good or bad?

Naked conversations build trust

My copy of Naked Conversations arrived recently in Hawaii by boat. I 'm almost done. Great book! It is encouraging that my hypotheses about how blogs build trust are pretty consistent with the claims of Scoble & Israel. In the best academic tradition, I suspect that fleshing out the details proving some of the relationships will be a little more complicated. But then that's why we do research! Trust is simple a first glance but quite complicated below the surface.
Similarly I see culture and trust as having an intervening construct called climate. Organizational climate in social science speak.
Bring the book tour to Hawaii!

Blogging gives your firm a "conversational human voice"

See Tom Kelleher's paper just published in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication at

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue2/kelleher.html


Abstract
This study develops and tests operational definitions of relational maintenance strategies appropriate to online public relations. An experiment was designed to test the new measures and to test hypotheses evaluating potential advantages of organizational blogs over traditional Web sites. Participants assigned to the blog condition perceived an organization's "conversational human voice" to be greater than participants who were assigned to read traditional Web pages. Moreover, perceived relational strategies (conversational human voice, communicated relational commitment) were found to correlate significantly with relational outcomes (trust, satisfaction, control mutuality, commitment).