The Future of Tech May 22, 2008, 5:00PM EST

Beyond Blogs

Three years ago our cover story showcased the phenomenon. A lot has changed since then

by Stephen Baker and Heather Green

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. Today, wikis are a common tool for young workers Patrick Fraser/Corbis Outline

Kerry Miller's blog, Passive Aggressive Notes, has become a sensation Mark Stanton

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. The social network is now partly owned by Microsoft Markham Johnson

In the frantic news biz, where stories go stale overnight, one of our old articles is behaving very strangely. Year after year it continues to draw swarms of online readers, more than holding its own against up-to-date fare. Oddly, while technology races ahead, our story remains frozen in time. It describes a world in which YouTube (GOOG) has yet to emerge from the garage and Twittering, today's microblogging rage, is left to the birds.

The year was 2005, and the story was "Blogs Will Change Your Business." It marked our plunge into the world of bottom-up media, of news as a "conversation." Many people at the time—including a good number at this magazine and throughout the business world—considered blogs to be a publishing tool for trivia, banality, venom, and baseless attacks. This was all true, the article conceded.

But in the helter-skelter of the blogosphere, we wrote, something important was taking place: In the 10 minutes it took to set up a blogging account, anyone with an Internet connection could become a global publisher. Some could become stars and gain power. That was already happening. In this new world, any business that hoped to "control" information—and that included just about everybody—was in for a wild ride. This promised a seismic shock in our own media world. No mystery there. But it also posed challenges for businesses in practically every realm. Every e-mail or memo could be blogged. Every employee, no matter what rank, could become a voice for the company, either publicly or cloaked, some gaining more power than the entire public relations department. "Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out," we warned, adding: "Catch up...or catch you later."

Following our own advice, we ended the story by linking to our new blog, Blogspotting.net. The conversation continued on the blog, as it does to this day. Who cared that the magazine piece grew a bit musty? Canaries don't read the yellowing articles lining their cages.

SERIOUS GOOGLE JUICE

Turned out it wasn't quite that simple. The magazine article, archived on our Web site, kept attracting readers and blog links. A few professors worked it into their curricula, sending class after class of students to the story. With all this activity, the piece gained high-octane Google juice. Type in "blogs business" on the search engine, and our story comes up first among the results, as of this writing. Hundreds of thousands of people are still searching "blogs business" because they're eager to learn the latest news about an industry that's changing at warp speed. Their attention maintains our outdated relic at the top of the list. It's self-perpetuating: They want new, we give them old.

What to do? Update the old beast, naturally. Early this year, we put out questions on Blogspotting. What needed fixing? Responses streamed in. We called the old sources and contacted some new ones. We annotated the original article, bolstering the online version with dozens of notes and clarifications. That approach works for the Net, with its pop-up windows and limitless space. But for the more cramped confines of the paper magazine, we have to cut to the chase.

So here goes. Three years ago, we wrote a big story—but missed a bigger one. We focused on blogs as a new form of printing press, one that turned Gutenberg's economics on its head, making everyone a potential publisher. This captured our attention, not least because this publishing revolution was already starting to rattle the skyscrapers in our media-heavy, Manhattan neighborhood. But despite the importance of blogs, only a minority of us participates. Chances are, you don't. According to a recent study from Forrester Research (FORR), only a quarter of the U.S. adult online population even bothers to read a blog once a month.

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