the big blog company

It is worth mentioning here the Fortune article that list blogging among the top 10 trends of 2004/5 and says:

Freewheeling bloggers can boost your product—or destroy it. Either way, they’ve become a force business can’t afford to ignore.

Nice. These are the juiciest bits:

The blog—short for weblog—can indeed be, as Scoble and Gates say, fabulous for relationships. But it can also be much more: a company’s worst PR nightmare, its best chance to talk with new and old customers, an ideal way to send out information, and the hardest way to control it. Blogs are challenging the media and changing how people in advertising, marketing, and public relations do their jobs. A few companies like Microsoft are finding ways to work with the blogging world—even as they’re getting hammered by it. So far, most others are simply ignoring it.

That will get harder: According to blog search-engine and measurement firm Technorati, 23,000 new weblogs are created every day—or about one every three seconds. Each blog adds to an inescapable trend fueled by the Internet: the democratization of power and opinion. Blogs are just the latest tool that makes it harder for corporations and other institutions to control and dictate their message. An amateur media is springing up, and the smart are adapting.

And this bit made it to the quote to remember on tBBC blog:

Unlike earlier promises of self-publishing revolutions, the blog movement seems to be the real thing. A big reason for that is a tiny innovation called the permalink: a unique web address for each posting on every blog. Instead of linking to web pages, which can change, bloggers link to one another’s posts, which typically remain accessible indefinitely. This style of linking also gives blogs a viral quality, so a pertinent post can gain broad attention amazingly fast—and reputations can get taken down just as quickly.

Lots of examples of blogs doing some wonderous (or horrible) thing… Scoble and Microsoft, Dan Rather and fake memos, Kryptonite and Bic ballpoint pen, Mazda and faux blog, Jonathan Schwartz blog, Manolo’s Shoe Blog, GM Smallblock Engine Blog, Stoneyfield Farm blogs, Macromedia blog etc, etc.  Read the whole thing.