Companies get into weblog act

Fun article on Boston.com :

t was bound to happen: Corporate America has discovered the blog. The proof was at hand during last week's ClickZ Weblog Business Strategies 2003 Conference & Expo. The sponsors had set aside a smallish conference room at the Sheraton Boston, and ended up having to knock out the collapsible rear wall and lug in more tables and chairs.

Too bad they couldn't also have called in an electrician to install more power outlets. A goodly percentage of the guests were toting laptops equipped with WiFi ethernet cards. The organizers had the good judgment to set up a wireless broadband router, so these well-equipped guests spent pretty much the entire conference updating their own blogs. At least until the batteries ran out.

In any case, there's plenty of juice left in the blogging boom. That's the practice of using simple software that allows you to easily create a running commentary on your life or anybody else's, published instantly to the Internet. Blogs are an elaboration of the old personal Web page concept. But the blog, thank heaven, quickly transcended the original paradigm, with its photos of the family dog and discussions of Junior's potty training accident. Come to think of it, though, most blogs still aren't much better.

But the best of them feature sophisticated social and political commentary, philosophical debate, art criticism, or summaries of the latest news in every field. Sometimes the bloggers request voluntary contributions of money from their readers -- former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan is supposed to take
in a pretty penny this way at www.andrewsullivan.com -- but most bloggers do it just for fun. Webloggers tend to focus on topics they know and love.