Check out "The Great Drupal Blogging Project, Part One."  I think it illustrates something important about how Plone's approachability and blogging features are criticall for building mindshare among opinion leaders. 

In this story, Linux-Watch.com editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols begins recounting his path towards installing his own CMS for a personal, blog-oriented website.

I decided that my first problem wasn't that I'm a klutz at Web design. No, my biggest problem was that I don't have the time to manually put up a decent-looking Web site.

So, it was that I decided to put up one using a blogging-oriented CMS (content management system). By that, I do not mean using an existing CMS like Blogger or Live Journal. I mean actually setting up my own instance of a CMS on one of my Linux servers.

After confessing his limited PHP/Perl technical skills, Vaughn-Nichols continues...

Thus, I ruled out the CMSs that require a good amount of technical expertise. The goal, after all, is to come up with a Web site that requires minimal time for yours truly.

I looked at some other CMSs, such as Plone/Zope and WordPress, but I wasn't sure where to go.

So, I asked some of my fellow tech journalist buddies at the Internet Press Guild what they used. Robin "Roblimo" Miller [...] suggested that Drupal might fill the bill.

He uses it himself for his personal site, and one of our comrades, Bob Young, founder of Red Hat, uses it for his current company, the publish-it-yourself powerhouse Lulu.

I then did a spot of research and decided that Drupal seemed liked it was the ideal combination of power and ease of use, with WordPress a close second.

Pay very close attention to the process here.  He first decides what qualities he needs.   He gets a bit intimidated by the apparently-steep learning curve of leading products.  Then, he asks his nerdy friends what they use. Then he does some research, and feels better about moving forward. 

It's not a techical, objective, rational process.  It's based on feeling, intuition, and recommendations from trusted friends.  Now you can criticize it as poor decision making, but it is how real human beings tend to make decisions, and there is a snowball effect from it.

Why do Vaughn-Nichols' nerdy friends use (and recommend) Drupal?  Apparently, because it has pretty decent blogging features out-of-the-box, and is in many other ways a moderately competent CMS for power-users.

And that is a lesson that I think Plone should take to heart.   Having a good blogging features that are front-and-center in a general-purpose open-source CMS platform is a critical marketing feature, because then technology opinion makers (who tend to write a lot, that's why they're opinion makers) will use it for small projects, get confidence in it, and recommend it to friends.  That builds mindshare and recognition for the product.

And actually, come to think of it, it's not just about blogging tools.  It's about all of the features that together make a product like Plone suitable for quick-and-dirty publishing/writing/community projects as well as complex, enterprise projects.  Things like a simple and clean install process, great entry-level documentation, awesome usability, easy skinning, and the "Web 2.0" features that many tech opinion leaders now expect (great blogging, great commenting & discussion tools, great RSS feeds, etc.)  Plone is world-class in some of these areas, and could use more attention in others. 

That's the connection between "grassroots" features and "enterprise" projects.  Mindshare and critical mass are built one small successful project at a time.