THE WELL INK

The blog can be an incredibly effective marketing tool. Companies from GM to Microsoft are using them to connect better and more directly with their customers.

A few examples of some worthwhile blogs:

Sun Microsystems – More than 1,000 of Sun’s 32,000 employees blog about their work (most at blogs.sun.com).

General Motors – Written by Vice Chairman Bob Lutz.

Ad Rants by Steve Hall

David Hornik – venture capitalist

Kristen Osolind – a toolbox for women-led businesses

Gizmodo – Reviews and sneak-peeks at the newest electronic gadgets.

Boing Boing – A weblog of cultural curiosities and interesting technologies. It’s also Technorati’s highest rated blog.

To keep up with the latest in corporate blogging, as well as other emerging media, visit Microsite.com.

Changing our world

To understand truly the paradigm shift taking place, take a look at how blogs have affected the dissemination of news. Certainly everyone is aware of how blogs affected the 2004 presidential race and how they led to the ignominious end of CBS news anchorman Dan Rather's career.

Bloggers can often provide news more quickly and, in some cases, with less biased filtering than traditional news organizations.

Saddam Hussein’s Hanging

One of the most dramatic and watershed moments in recent history was captured not by reporter with a news crew, but by an amateur with a video cell phone. It’s only a matter of time before amateur cameras are a regular and vital source of our daily news. 

Hurricane Katrina

When the devastation occurred in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, the reader forum provided by the New Orleans Times-Picayune's web affiliate provided a more up to the minute and perhaps more harrowing accounting of the situation than traditional news coverage.