BusinessWeek on Blogs

BusinessWeek Cover Story on Blogs
It seems to be on Corporate Blogging

Blogs Will Change Your Business.

It deserves a deep review. Let me start with some excerpts, directly from the cover story:

"Any chance that a blog bubble could pop? The answer is really easy: no.

At least not an investment bubble. Venture firms financed only $60 million in blog startups last year, according VentureOne. Chump change compared to the $19.9 billion that poured into dot-coms in 1999. The difference is that while dot-coms promised to make loads of money, blogs flex their power mostly by disrupting the status quo.

The bigger point [...] is that the dot-com era was powered by companies [...] The masses of bloggers [...] are normal folks with computers: no budget, no business plan, no burn rate, and -- that's right -- no bubble.

[...]

If there's no clear business model, why are the Internet giants so bent on getting a foothold in blogs? Look at it from their point of view. A vibrant community that has doubled in size in the past eight months is teeming with potential customers and has a mother lode of data to mine.

The innovation that sends blogs zinging into the mainstream is RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. Five years ago, a blogger named Dave Winer, working with software originally developed by Netscape, created an easy-to-use system to turn blogs, or even specific postings, into Web feeds.

Winer also ushered in a second tech breakthrough, podcasting. A back-and-forth between Winer and Adam Curry, a blogger and former MTV host, led last year to a system that easily distributes audio files.

Content, whether it's news or a Hollywood movie, is going to travel in bite-size nuggets. The challenge, for bloggers and giants alike, is to brand those nuggets and devise ways to sell them or wrap them in advertising.

A prediction: Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like [...] blogs [...] blogs could end up providing the perfect response to mass media's core concern: the splintering of its audience.

The big companies have what the bloggers lack. Scale, relations with advertisers, and large sales forces. They can use these forces to sell across all media, from general audience to bloggy niches."

Within the report itself, you can find links to online extras, "Stonyfield Farm's Blog Culture", where
"The yogurt-maker's CEO Gary Hirshberg and Chief Blogger Christine Halverson" talk with BW "on how the Web journals connect them to customers"; "New York's Real Estate Know-It-All", an article devoted to Lockhart Steele's Curbed.com, a blog that is described as "a magnet for anyone looking for the lowdown on the industry's Gotham gossip"; and "Six Tips for Corporate Bloggers" some little begginer's guide for the Blog Universe. In "Blogging: A Primer", you can find a little set of basic terminology, where you can find a widely accepted meaning for terms like vlogging, moblogging, podcasting, flog, (to be) dooced or micro-news.

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