Blogging - Impact on Business

Blogging has taken the world by storm. Recently Business Week carried out an article on how blogging has influenced business models.

So we're going to take you into the world of blogs by delivering this story -- call it Blogs 101 for businesses -- in the style of a blog. We're even sprinkling it with links.

These are underlined words that, when clicked, carry readers of this story's online version to another Web page. This all may make for a strange experience, but it's the closest we can come to reaching outfrom the page, grabbing you by the collar, and shaking you into action.Blogs are different.

They evolve with every posting, each one tied to a moment. So if a company can track millions of blogs simultaneously, it gets a heat map of what a growing part of the world is thinking about, minute by minute. E-mail has carried on billions of conversations over the past decade. But those exchanges were private.

Most blogs are open to the world. As the bloggers read each other, comment, and link from one page to the next, they create a global conversation.Picture the blog world as the biggest coffeehouse on Earth.

Technorati, PubSub, and others provide the tools to listen. While the traditional Web catalogs what we have learned, the blogs track what's on our minds.

David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth share their views on Microsoft strategy on Blogs in the Fortune's latest edition.

Microsoft revealed that it planned to take over the world of blogs—the five-million-plus web journals that have exploded on the Internet in the past few years. The company's weapon would be a new service called MSN Spaces, online software that allows people to easily create and maintain blogs.

It didn't take long for the blogging world to do what it does best: swarm around a new piece of information; push, prod, and poke at it; and leave it either stronger or a bloody mess. The next day, at the widely read Boing Boing blog, co-editor Xeni Jardin opted to do the latter.