Blogs -- ignorable ?

BW Uncut

Come on, crib about blogs. But you cannot afford to shut your eyes to them, as they've been the most explosive outbreak in the Internet industry ever since the internet boom. There's a blog for almost anything happening on earth. And today, this overnight sensation is shaking up just about any business on earth. It doesn't matter if you are shipping paper clips or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs ar a phenomenon you cannot ignore.

A few stats about blogs -
1. There are around 9 million blogs out in the net today
2. 40,000 new ones keep popping up everyday
3. Fine, we must agree that 99.9% of those blogs are off point, but that still gives us 40 new blogs every day to talk about our businesses.

You make one miscalculated step, and they have you in. Blogs even get the most tech-savvy companies also involved - Google for example. Lets see what happened there.
In January, when a young programmer named Mark Jen started blogging about his primitive days at Googleplex, it in inturn started attracting many links. Jen certainly wasn't revealing the inside dirt or something. But he griped that Google's health plan was less generous than than his former employer's -- Microsoft., and he used to argue that Google's free food was an enticement to work past dinner.

2 weeks later, Google fired Jen. And thats when the 22 year old became a big story. Google was blogbusted for over-reacting, and Jen was wooed by top firms like A9, Microsoft, Yahoo! etc. A month later, Jen landed at Plaxo, an Internet contact management company. So what got him fired turned out to be his trump card.

Blogs have put the media folks into a critical juncture who seemed to be shadowed with the popularity of blogs giving out the latest headlines, be it the Pope election or Michael Jackson's trial. And blog advertising is the new buzzword. So, you start a business, make sure you start a blog alongside, thats going to make your business do wonders!