Blogging: *Blogs are not a business elective

[Image] Blogs Will Change Your Business. Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up...or catch you later

Editor's note: The May, 2005, cover story, "Blogs Will Change Your Business," continues to receive lots of attention online. But many of the details in the story are out of date. So we've called many of the original sources and asked readers to help provide fixes and updates. For the version of the story with 2008 annotations, please visit www.businessweek.com/go/08/blog.

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they're simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they're going to shake up just about every business - including yours. It doesn't matter whether you're shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They're a prerequisite.

Source: Blogs Will Change Your Business by By Stephen Baker and Heather Green