Blogs will change your business, according to a Businessweek article by Stephen Baker and Heather Green.

Blogs … 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 caf� 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. 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.

Why does this matter? Think of the implications for businesses of

getting an up-to-the-minute read on what the world is thinking.

This is pretty cool.  The article actually concludes with the

authors’ announcement that BW is likewise getting into blogging with Blogspotting, among other blogs.  Locally, PCIJ has entered the blogging arena

last April.  I find the rift between mainstream media (MSM) and

bloggers quite interesting.  I foresee that sometime in the

future, either will be assimilated (how Star Trek-ish).  But some

form of convergence will always be welcome.  After all, we are all

here to inform.

Is blogging the new dot-com, waiting for the right time to burst? 

I would agree with the BW article that it will most likely not. 

Indeed, investment in blogging is not like the dot-com investments we

saw in the 1990’s: capital-intensive.  Investment in blogging is

more of being knowledge-intensive, and hence, what’s there to

burst?  Knowledge gained is definitely knowledge to be used and

shared.  And in this knowledge-based economy we are espousing,

knowledge is turning out to be the most important form of capital.

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