Two great articles on blogs worth noting:
(1) From Fortune.com, “It’s Hard to Manage if You Don’t Blog: Business embraces the new medium as executives read—and write—blogs.” Excerpt:
Jonathan Schwartz, president and COO of Sun Microsystems, has recently criticized statements by Intel executives, mused that IBM might buy Novell, and complained about a CNET.com article—all by writing a blog on a Sun website. Yep, blogs—which are a way to post text to a website—have found their way into business. Schwartz is the highest-ranking executive yet to embrace the new medium, which is burgeoning globally. About 35,000 people read his blog [http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan] in a typical month, including customers, employees, and competitors.
The article notes that Schwartz encourages all of Sun’s 32,000 employees to blog, though only about 100 are doing it so far. You can access their blogs here.
(2) From the Salt Lake Tribune: “Parker: ‘Rathergate’ illustrates the promise of blogs.” Some great writing, including this excerpt:
The implication that bloggers are slacker dust bunnies has delighted bloggers, the best of whom are lawyers, professors, scientists, renegade journalists and techies of various sorts . . . [T]he blogosphere isn’t just a challenge to journalism in its currently stagnant state, but a potential boon to problem-solving of a higher order. The beauty of the blogosphere is that it is self-igniting, self-propelling and self-selecting, a sort of intellectual ecosystem wherein the best specimens from various disciplines descend from the ethers, converge on an issue and apply their unique talents. Though virtually newborn, the blogosphere has blossomed exponentially in a matter of Earth-time seconds . . .