Carphone Warehouse boss shuffles off the net

Blog off Charlie

By Chris Williams • Get more from this author

Posted in Mobile, 1st February 2008 14:09 GMT

Free webcast: Service level monitoring and management

Dough-faced Carphone Warehouse chief and Daily Mail director Charles Dunstone has decided to keep his thoughts to himself from now on - he's deleted his blog from the TalkTalk website.

Blogging got marketing wonks very excited a couple of years ago, when the strategy boutique convinced them it heralded a new paradigm of "conversations" with customers.

Dunstone keenly jumped on the corporate blogging bandwagon when TalkTalk launched its "free" broadband offer in 2006, posting his musings initially on how awesome it was, and later on how he was very sorry for having mucked it up. It was so good it bagged the highly-coveted number 44 spot in The Times' list of the 50 best business blogs in early 2007.

But like most bloggers, Dunstone seemed to become disillusioned as it emerged nobody cared what he thought, they just wanted their broadband connection to work. His postings soon became more irregular. Now he's totally given up, and taken his ball home too; the page just returns an error.

We asked TalkTalk what had happened and why this great body of work has been taken from us. A spokeswoman explained that "he's stopped doing it" and that it was "probably just a personal decision". ®

Free webcast: Service level monitoring and management