Blog!

Five years from now, blogging will be such a commonplace tool that people will marvel we ever had to analyse how we might use it. For now, though, this book is a useful mine of ideas.

The structure of Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture is a little unusual. Each of the three main sections -- policy, business, and media -- begins with an essay written by Kline pulling together the research and trends that he and Burstein have spotted. There follows a set of interviews with key figures in the blogging scene in that area. The politics section, for example, includes interviews with Howard Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi, Wonkette Ana Marie Cox and DailyKos blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. The business section includes Microsoft's Robert Scoble, Sun president Jonathan Schwartz and Japan's Joi Ito. Media includes child actor turned author Wil Wheaton, Colby Buzzell, an American GI formerly stationed in Iraq and Arianna Huffington. Finally, each main section concludes with guest commentaries written by journalists from such well-known American media outlets as Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Columbia Journalism Review.

For most ZDNet readers, the section that will be of the most interest is Business and Economics. In it, Kline and Burstein look at the challenges and opportunities that blogs pose for companies. Avoid, for example, the fake blog -- that is, the blog set up as a PR exercise. If the blog honestly admits its origins, no one will read it because it's too boring (and usually rarely updated). If the blog pretends to be that of an independent person, it will be scathingly deconstructed on other blogs all over the Net, and not only will no-one read it, but your company will also lose any goodwill it might have from its Net-savvy customers. Robert Scoble's blog, in which he critiques Microsoft's business practices and products when he thinks it's appropriate, is a better example of what to do. Kline and Burstein come up with others: you can, for example, use blogs -- both your own and other people's -- to understand where gaps in a particular market might be, or what's good or bad about a product you're in the process of designing. Blogs, Kline and Burstein argue, can also give companies a human face, as Jonathan Schwartz has done for Sun and Scoble for Microsoft.

Story URL: http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/productivity/0,1000001108,39226091,00.htm