In the Business of Blogging

In an article published in Bloomberg Businessweek in 2005, Stephen Baker and Heather Green delved into a new crazy sweeping the internet:

Blogging.

In 2005, when "Twittering was an activity dominated by small birds" and "Facebook was still an Ivy League sensation", this article was one of the first to address the potential of blogging; the opportunity for consumers to write in cyber stone what they think about you, your brand, your business. The writers realized that this communication outlet was a springboard to things to come. With 9 million blogs out there and a some 40,000 new ones published every day, blogs were and continue to be a force to be reconed with. Businessweek used online article as a wake up call to white collar Americans that blogs and online forums are not something to be ignored, but something to be utilized and appreciated.
The article dove into the gossip-y, scandal train stigma that blogging and online messaging was seen as.

The overwhelming majority of the information the world spews out every day is digital—photos from camera phones, PowerPoint presentations, government filings, billions and billions of e-mails, even digital phone messages. With a couple of clicks, every one of these items can be broadcast into the blogosphere by anyone with an Internet hookup—or even a cell phone. If it's scandalous, a poisonous e-mail from a CEO, for example, or torture pictures from a prison camp, others link to it in a flash. And here's the killer: Blog posts linger on the Web forever.

BUT

Ideas circulate as fast as scandal.

Potential customers are out there, sniffing around for deals and partners. While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to.

Something interesting happened with this particular 2005 article. Bloggers linked to the article, creating traffic from business men to blogs and vice versa. It became somewhat of a middle ground between the tech savvy and the stiff-fingered CEO's.

Read the UPDATED article at http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/feb2008/db20080219_908252.htm