We're Off

Nice blog overview in the cover story. I've been blogging for just about a year and the experience is very exciting. Messy conversations, arguments, false starts, hitches, glitches and snits are all mixed in with some true gems. The mind-load is demanding but the work pays off. Your aggregator is you new best friend.

Keep blogging for a while and you'll notice it changes the way you write, think and go through your day. You'll find yourself thinking, "oh, I've got to blog that" many times over.

One technical suggestion: change the way your links show up in the body of your blog. They don't stand out clearly enough from the text.

I have been thinking of starting a blog myself. I started a webpage for MBA graduates http://www.mbaconcepts.com and other professionals and want more traffic. One of my first thoughts was to start a blog.

Your story was compelling and has swayed me in the directions of starting a blog or two.

Thank You:

Jim Adams

You don't have a in your HTML. Bad for a number of reasons, and easy to fix.

Welcome to the blogosphere. Enjoy the ride.

You may also be interested in 'spotting the blawgosphere where practicing lawyers, law professors, students and others post legally oriented items.

Thanks for the comment. We're looking into this!

It's exciting to see a publication such as Businessweek embrace blogging. I was pulled kicking and screaming into this new form of business communication and interaction and I'm totally glad I was! It's helped increase my business but more importantly, it's connected me to hundreds of people I never would have met otherwise. The authenticity of blogging -- especially when done at an old-world publication -- is more powerful than all the advertising in the world. Putting not only a face on the publication, but giving it a voice that the average reader can relate to. That's what blogging is all about and why transparency is what drives its success. As I say in my blog all the time, what's not to like about that??

Hey, great article!

... looks like we're heading for a tipping point/singularity sooner rather than later.

Craig

Heather,

Welcome to the blogosphere! While you're here, be sure to visit some of the Carnivals, which collect posts from many bloggers around a central theme (business, cats, dogs, recipes, religion, to name a few), and which are hosted by different blogs each week. It's a great way to sample the content that is available in the blogging community. Here is a pretty comprehensive list of the various Carnivals, with links to some of their more recent editions (Link: http://king-of-fools.com/blog/weblog/posts/carn/).

Given your focus on business, you might be most interested to drop in on the Carnival of the Capitalists (More Info: http://www.elhide.com/solo/cotc.htm), which revolves around business-related topics. Last week's edition is available here (Link: http://www.gongol.com/fft/2005/04/cotc/).

I definately look forward to reading your work - you're off to a good start.

Welcome to the new new thing, Businessweek!
I started mine, http://americansforfreedom.blogspot.com to focus on democracy trends and news in the middle east.
Business, politics, personal stories and news analysis, all available for free in the blogosphere.
Cheers
jp

Great story and one I've passed on to about a dozen others in marketing and business communications. The story made the implications of blogging to marketing very clear. It also made it clear there's lots more to learn about it.
FK

Congratulations! You have just been Instalanched!

It was refreshing to read that such an established mag such as businessweek sees and actually understands the future of blogging. Most people I know still have no idea what i'm talking about when I mentioned that i was blogging during the presidential campain. I started my blog http://www.vizzini38.blogspot.com to follow the election and rant my way through it all. Fun stuff. Keep up the good work. Look forward to seeing where we all go with this.

You guys need the Blogosphere's comic strip. Day by Day.

And, it's free.

www.daybydaycartoon.com

Excellent article. There is an interesting aspect to blogs that was not touched on in the article. I call it "Seeing how others live". Journalist report the facts. Bloggers report feelings and emotions. And each have their own personality.
I recently moved from PA to FL and I am amazed at the difference in culture between the two states in the same country. I use blog hopping to see what it is like out there.

Congratulations on launching your new blog. The cover story will do a great service to many corporations who've been late to realize the implications of the growing number of bloggers. There are still too many executives that take the position that bloggers are all radicals that just want to rant.

Instead they should be listening to the hundreds and thousands of intelligent, thoughtful voices that comment every day about how to improve their products, policies and services.

Even many of those that do rant, do so out of frustration as defined at dictionary.com as 'the condition that results when an impulse or an action is thwarted by an external or an internal force.' - something that often happens to consumers when their calls to support centers are put on hold time and again or they can only reach automated knowledge centers that have no knowledge of their problem.

Blogs are great for both consumers and corporations. Let's hope more companies realize that as they become familiar with blogging through blogspotting.net

Welcome aboard! The finance world is quickly putting these new tools to work. We started rocksandboulders.com to participate in this growing and surprisingly sophisticated community.

Welcome to the blogosphere! Can't wait to hear you describing how you're managing to get everything done AND blog.:>) That's the biggest challenge for business bloggers.

I'm wildly impressed that you responded to my post and made and added Dan Gillmor's last name to your post.

I've added you to my daily must-reads.
B.L. Ochman
What's Next Blog

It was good advice! Thanks.

Heather, Stephen,

Congrats. Your cover story is absolutely first-rate. Blogging is a topic at the top of many, many people's minds in the technology world; for example, I wrote a piece about bloggers at Sun Microsystems for the April issue of Technology Review (see http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/04/issue/brief_sun.asp). But the trend deserves broader coverage.

I really liked the blog-like writing style and graphic design of your piece. And it's only natural to start a blog to follow up on the themes you laid out there.

But I'm puzzled so far about your exact intentions for this blog. My favorite group blogs have a point of view: not an agenda, exactly, but a message. OxBlog.com, for example, consists of a bunch of sassy Rhodes Scholars complaining about the sorry state of international politics, while BoingBoing anoints technology trends as officially cool, and The Feature sings the praises of mobility.

I'd be happy to keep coming back to Blogspotting if you guys decided, for example, to make it into a blog about why businesses can't afford to ignore blogging, and how they can get started.

Wade,

Good pointers. Steve is back on Monday, and though I think it might be interesting to delve into some of the journalism issues, I think we'll need to focus more on business, as you suggest.

Regarding your domain blogspotting.net:

1. Someone else owns (and probably has the de facto trademark) blogspotting.com

2. Google's blogger runs off blogspot.com

Welcome to the blogosphere but be ready for more critics than contributors that have it out for MSM.

A great thing about blogs is that they can be very specific in their industry focus, more so than mainstream media which makes them ideal for covering specific business issues as the amount of media grows. I look forward to seeing your coverage.

Scott

Excellent, welcome to the blogosphere. May I point out that your RSS feed is in error - the image URLs are not full URLs. Unfortunately this works on the web but not in RSS, most feed readers require full URLs for images and other associated files like CSS. After you fix this you should validate the feed with the Feed Validator, it catches stuff like this for you.

Congratulations to a great start! I have subscribed to your RSS feed. I see that you already have 71 subscribers at Bloglines.

All the Best,

Martin Lindeskog - American in spirit. EGO blog.
Gothenburg, Sweden.

Welcome, welcome Heather and Steve. I saw you taking notes for this months ago and here we are. And thanks for the link, too.

One suggestion, along the lines of what Clay was saying. People who have studied it hard, like Shirky, understood a while ago that "blog," "blogging" and "blogger" were terms that would have only temporary life in the language.

As the invention succeeded, we would not longer identify strongly with it because it would be so... everywhere. We don't call ourselves e-mailers but we all use e-mail. Soon we won't be calling ourselves bloggers or our sites "blogs," but we'll remember the years fondly when we did.

All this by way of saying, Heather & Steve: keep your eye out and ear tuned for the successor discussions to the blogging discussion. I don't mean "the next new thing" in the tech industry's sense.

In the area I track, citizen journalism is the successor discussion to the blogging discussion, but only one such. Hyper-local news is another. Both incorporate blogging, but don't focus on it anymore. There are going to be many such successors to the blog discussion. Notice 'em first and you got a must read blog.

That was a hilariously bad article. Readers look to magazines to provide writing that's different from blogs. Big media is where you get to step back and explain in an interesting way what the blogs are reporting minute by minute. Blogs aren't an excuse for faux hip writing ("How big are blogs? Try Johannes Gutenberg out for size." Jesus. Does saying that you're writing in blog style mean that you no longer have an editor look at your piece.) This is truly an embarassing piece of journalism.

Come on in the water is fine. I have been blogging since August (which makes me pre-Rathergate vintage LOL),at BumperStickerPolitix.

I have been trying to work up the courage to write up a blog proposal for my day job corporation. Your article and blog provide more encouragement and support, thxs.

Also, you guys should be reading Matt Rosenbergs excellent BlogConsultingPro.com.

I will give him a heads up about your efforts and the piece in Business Week. -Spin

Put complete posts in RSS or have better abstracts or lead-ins to your posts! I make split-second decisions about whether or not I'm going to bother to click-through. See the NY Time's RSS abstracts for ideas on how to accomplish this.

Also, your header information in RSS is too slim. It has nothing to identify you, what you're trying to accomplish or who you work for. It only has the fairly generic name of your site. That's bad. An increasing number of people are reading content only through RSS readers. I have over 175 feeds, and I need to know who I'm reading.

Be kind and put some work into how your feed displays.

First, good article in BusinessWeek about the impact of blogging from a corporate and MSM perspective. I found the article both very well written and full of interesting insights. But ... (welcome to the blogosphere!)

You don't go far enough. While there are many advantages to having a corporate blog, there are many reasons companies don't have them. I work for a company that does lots of work for the US Department of Defense. In fact, I work at a client site in a highly secure facility. If I look at the question, 'Should my company establish a public blogging presence?' from their perspective, there is much to fear.

Seems to me the way to rationally address this decision is from a risk / opportunity perspective in the context of particular markets. Work through the likelihood of some negative events being triggered by blog entries and the associated consequences. What are we afraid of? What could we do to mitigate these adverse events (e.g., corporate policy, selection of seasoned, well qualified, and well informed voices, just accept it, etc.)

But we should also address the up side; the opportunities that will arise. I've got to tell you, my employer is very conservative - read 'risk adverse'. And when you generally are quite successful and have more work than you can handle, taking on the perceived risk presented by a corporate blog seems pretty unnecessary. This won't be an easy decision for my employer.

BusinessWeek doesn't go far enough in discussing the blogging opportunity in different contexts. To use your analogy, which market segments (i.e., types of industry) seem ripe for entering the coffee house? Which do not?

Now that you have your own blog, maybe you can explore these questions further. I'd like that; and my employer needs the push!

Thanks for an interesting new blog. For me one of the most exciting things about the blogosphere is the specialist blog - someone who tracks a particular subject and keeps you up to date on it. There's already at least one on almost any subject you can think of!

I think this is going to be a major feature of 'business blogging' - it's like any number of new technical or trade journals, without the deference, since we don't carry advertising from the people we are writing about. I hope you can keep track of this field and showcase the more interesting ones.

Heather and Stephen,

Great article. I've been hearing about blogs for some time and had no clear idea about them - or their potential.

The fact that BW had a cover article on them is a wake up call to get onboard.

Thanks.

Hello,

I just finished to read your article...and it was from Rabat,Morocco. As you wrote, there is no limit to this trend, from all over the world we will be able to communicate, distance is no longer an essential factor, efficiency will be!

The hard copy will be around for a while but cheaper means will have an impact on OUR future...from Albuquerque to Casablanca!

Have a nice day!

Excellent story and timely. It conveys the high risks and high rewards possible for businesses curious about blogging. I'm forwarding the article to executives within my company as well as clients.

Ole, Thanks for the pointer about the RSS Feed. We'll work on this.

Congratulations on your blog! I have been blogging for just about two years now on investments. My blog is Stock Picks Bob's Advice, which may be found at http://bobsadviceforstocks.tripod.com/bobsadviceforstocks/ and I discuss stocks from an amateur investor's viewpoint. I am not selling anything, I don't have any services to provide, and hopefully am unbiased because of this.

I would love to have you do a review of investing blogs and their impact!

Congratulations again!

Bob

These comments about the RSS feed are right on. Thanks for the suggestion and we'll hop on this.

Hi Heather!
I've been doing some planning facilitation with the Loudoun Habitat for Humanity affiliate where your Dad sits on the board. He pointed me to your blog article as I have been touting the merits of blogging to whoever will listen. Check our blog at http://askmerv.choice3realty.com. You'll find my stuff as well as a couple of articles on the local habitat.

Glad I found your blogs!
Regards,
Merv

Hey Merv,

That's hilarious! I will definitely check out your blog and see your update on the group.

You folks probably didn't write it, but the Cover Story description on page 6 is breathless hyperbole: "Web logs are the most explosive development in the information world since the Net itself."

Let's see. Arpanet started in 1969, and the term Internet came into usage in 1974. What could be a bigger deal than web logs? I think the personal computer, the graphical user interface, the packaged software industry, or the world-wide web certainly qualify. Maybe even the commercial relational database, the local-area network, ERP software, video games, USENET, GOPHER, peer-to-peer file sharing, and client-server computing.

While the teaser on page 6 isn't your fault, it reinforces a perception of the revloutionary importance of web logs that is present in the article. Yes, blogs are hot. Yes, they'll change the way people communicate. However, in 10 years, they may be as small a blip on people's radar as GOPHER is today, having been superseeded by something better.

Jim

Jim,

This is a great point and we agree with it. We should have been more precise with the language. We meant that this is the most explosive development in information world since the development of the "commercial" Internet. So since 1994. And we're talking specifically about information industries, not all of Internet technology.

Hi, there. I'm no blogger, but found no "Contact Us" tab, so am taking this means to respond to Tim Evans in his article saying that oil will drop to the $26-$30 range within the next 2 to 3 months. Please ask him if he would care to place a $100,000 wager to that effect where his mouth is?