BusinessWeek Blogs About Blogs

Posted on April 23, 2005

BusinessWeek has a new article about blogging and why it is important for companies to get involved. BusinessWeek has also launched a blog about blogs called Blogspotting, which they say they did not name after the Transpotting movie about drug usage.

Some highlights from the article:
1) The article says 99.9% of blogs are off point. They could even be a blog written by a Mom or Dad from their toddlers' point of view. However, it says with 40,000 blogs created each day there could be 40 or more related to your business or discussing your industry. A teen blog would have been better example than the parents blog. Most blogs are written by tweens, teens and college students. Parents are relatively new on the scene by comparison.

2) Mark Jen (fired Google blogger) is now blogging for Plaxo.

3) The article talked about a lot of marketing and PR blogs as well as leading blog-related tools like Technorati, Flickr and PubSub.com. However, nothing was mentioned about people running blogs listed on the top of Technorati like Boing Boing, Instapundit or Davenetics. None of the blogs mentioned in the article were even in the Technorati 100 and most were not even close to the Top 100. Either this is a big miss in the BusinessWeek article or BusinessWeek just thinks the top blogs are irrelevant.

4) The article says blogs are the beginning of the end of media's domination over publishing:

This is just the beginning. Many of the same folks who developed blogs are busy adding features so that bloggers can start up music and video channels and team up on editorial projects. The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.
How does business change when everyone is a potential publisher? A vast new stretch of the information world opens up. For now, it's a digital hinterland. The laws and norms covering fairness, advertising, and libel? They don't exist, not yet anyway. But one thing is clear: Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they're losing control of it.

5) But then the article says the media will gain control of a large portion of the commercial blogosphere:

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 -- you guessed it -- blogs.

Update: Correction to #3 -- The article does include Gawker which is currently ranked 33rd on the Technorati 100.