Business Week 5/2/05: Blogs Will Change Your Business

Pointed out by HR via e-mail. An interesting article on the state of blogs. It covers corporate PR blogs like those from GM and also covers the potential impact of personal blogs to companies and brands. Wow, it looks like they get it. They really, really get it:

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. Hunched over their laptops at one table sit six or seven experts in nanotechnology. Right across from them are teenage goths dressed in black and thoroughly pierced. Not too many links between those two tables. But the café goes on and on. Saudi women here, Labradoodle lovers there, a huge table of people fooling around with cell phones. Those are the mobile-photo crowd, busily sending camera-phone pictures up to their blogs. The racket is deafening. But there's loads of valuable information floating around this cafe....

corporate blogging|business blogging

NYT: When the Blogger Blogs, Can the Employer Intervene?

Free reg req. If the free period has elapsed for this article, find it in your local library's electronic resources using this citation: Tom Zeller, Jr. "When the Blogger Blogs, Can the Employer Intervene?" New York Times Technology Section (April 18, 2005). First, the number of blogs is probably more like 54 million, not 10 million. But 10 million might describe active US blogs. Second, this article is more of the same. To quote: "don't be a damn fool." It does, however, mention a few laws that may apply to employee blogging. That's probably worth a quick browse.

Great use of a blog for SDI: BiodefenseEducation.org

Noted in the D-Lib Article: Donna M. D'Alessandro and Michael P. D'Alessandro. "Initial Experiences in Developing a Chronologically Organized Digital Library for Continuing Education in Biodefense." D-lib v11 n4 (April 2005).