Five years ago today (or roughly a century ago in webtime) an article about the then-new phenomenon of corporate blogging led with this sentence: "The most powerful piece of software inside Microsoft may be the $40 application from a tiny vendor called Userland that Robert Scoble uses to write his weblog."

We've come a long way since then. As the article predicted, companies have embraced what we know call 2.0 technologies. And Scoble himself has moved on from Microsoft, writing a book and working first at a podcasting startup and now as a video blogger for Fast Company.

I caught up with Scoble at last week's ConvergeSouth conference. Some notes from our conversation:

On the sorriness of many corporate blogs: "Some blogs are like press releases for the project. New, friendly, cuddly press releases, but still only talking about what's happening in the company and with the products.The really hard thing, the thing I haven't seen too many people do, is what I was trying to do -- being an authority on the marketplace. That really helps a lot. There are a few out there. Ryan Stewart at Adobe also talks about Microsoft Silverlight, what's happening at Sun and elsewhere in the marketplace. That makes him someone I want to subscribe to, because he's not just pitching me."

On corporate social networks: "A lot of enterprises are looking outward, at the public. They're customers are moving to Twitter, and they're trying to learn how to do it. Some are doing it effectively. Zappos has 400 employees on Twitter. H&R Block talked to me on Twitter while I was doing my taxes -- I twittered that I was at HYR Block getting my taxes done, someone at the company was watching for their name on Twitter, and they wrote back to say, let me know if you need anything. this was while I was in the office. It was more brand building than tax advice. It was the fact that somebody was listening. She was linking to anyone talking about taxes, starting a conversation with them about taxes and H&R Block."

"In terms of internal use of social nets, I just spoke to Cisco's employees. They asked how to use social media, office 2.0, collaborative stuff. I said, My first thought every morning would be, how do I get rid of the email? The crowd cheered. I thought, there's pain here. I touched a nerve."

"I left behind a gig and a half of email when I left NEC - I couldn't look at it, and they erased it. My former coworkers couldn't use that knowledge. A collaborative toolset helps to get information out of email into the shared social space. Sharepoint and others are working on that problem. You see productivity benefits. Now people can see where you are going, make suggestions on who to call there.

On managing a constellation of different social networks, each used for a different purpose: "I use an aggregator, Friend Feed. It all goes in there. People can talk about there without going back out to those pieces. Information can spread, person to person. Companies may not want to use an aggregator, but if I visit the General Motors site on FriendFeed, I'll probably click on a video they put up of the new Volt electric car, then on Bob Lutz's blog, and maybe a calendar on upcoming for events. Hoarding links has to stop."

"I haven't seen many companies yet on FriendFeed. Big companies, it takes them a while to justify doing things. Twitter has gotten there, blogging has gotten there. The approval process is slower with newer things."