After banning analysts from running independent blogs. Forrester launches its own blog platform.

Forrester Research finally announced the launch of its official analyst blog and social platform.

It has been about a month since Forrester sparked controversy with its decision to disallow their analysts to operate independent blogs (decision does not involve purely personal interest blogs).

There were many well known blogs affected by this decision, some examples being The Heretic by Tom Grant, Mobile Strategy by Julie Ask, and other Forrester employed individuals that maintained and cultivated their blogs outside of the official Forrester web property. While Forrester’s logic was well explained by Josh Bernoff, the issue at the center of the conflict seems to be personal exposure vs. benefit to the employer.

The new platform is being positioned as a customer focused improvement over the previous unregulated collection of blogs. From a customer perspective the consolidation does seem to be an improvement, but it remains to be seen if the analysts themselves have suffered any loss of motivation from this experience.