A weblog, or blog for short, is a simple specified content management system onto which usually one person publishes periodic entries. Most weblogs permit a reader feedback in the form of comments to individual entries. The vast majority of blogs are individual personal journals, many of which represent some very specific interests about technology, politics or hobbies. Blogs have been around since the end of the 1990s, but have only come to prominence in the commercial world in the last two years. Most organizations have meanwhile taken note, and many are starting to exploit these technologies to support their business activities.

Text by Marcel Altherr, Metaversum AG

Weblog systems allow people with limited technological background to publish content on the Internet. No HTML knowledge is required; every person who is able to use a word processor and a browser can manage his or her own blog.
A major advantage of weblogs consists in the fact that the underlying technology is not intrusive. Weblogs can easily be integrated into existing environments. The German analyst company Berlecon Research sees a great potential for corporate weblogs in marketing and PR. “With weblogs companies can push their branding, support product and opinion campaigns, launch topics and ideas thereby flanking their traditional customer communication. Here the very characteristics of weblogs – asymmetric communication, chronological structure, easy publishing – show their full potential. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystem, was able to launch several public discussions about Sun and its competitors with his weblog. GM launched its FastLane blog, featuring informal entries by Bob Lutz and other GM executives creating grass-root dialogues about concepts or design issues of new cars.
No surprise. the power of blogging is a hot topic among event organizers. For some cases, participants report on their experiences, comment on speeches and point out special occasions during a conference or exhibition thereby creating a real-time communication space and enabling highly efficient networking among visitors. The Swiss computer fair ORBIT-IEX for example uses blogs. In this case neither the fair organizers nor visitors are blogging. A professional blogger was hired to report from the fair and is supposed to build up a dialogue with event visitors as well as with people outside the fair.
However, serious blogging takes time. It is definitely not something you can handle in few spare moments. In our time of information overload, moderately interesting contributions will simply not be perceived. Attention becomes a scarce resource and establishes a new communication barrier that only professional efforts can overcome.

Marcel Altherr, Metaversum AG
Metaversum – a sister company of Eveni - specialises in Social Software and applies blogging solutions in various environments.

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