An essay I wrote on the popularity of blogs and its role in business, has been published on the (now defunct) AlwaysOn Network !

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What started off as a personal publishing platform has rapidly grown into a worldwide phenomenon; there’s no denying the popularity of blogs. But what do blogs actually offer individuals and corporations? Why are they so popular?

Dave Winer, who reportedly publishes the longest-running weblog on the Internet, has this to say about weblogs: “A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there’s also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc.”

A search on the “history of blogs” reveals that at the beginning of 1999, there were only 23 blogs in existence. But by 2002, Blogger.com alone claimed over 750,000 users! This exponential rise is probably attributable to the proliferation of the free weblog creation programs that surfaced around 1999. Before then, weblogs could only be created by people who already knew how to make a Web site. But the new programs made it easy for anyone to create their own weblog and start publishing in minutes. So everyone who was anyone started voicing their opinion on the Internet.

Many posts followed the popular link-and-comment model. When you found something you wanted to share with others, or opine on, you blogged about it. But soon people started finding newer and more innovative uses for their blogs.

Some started blogging to keep in touch with their friends and family: it offered an easy way to share their thoughts and invite participation in the form of comments. Others viewed it as an online archiving system: if you came across something you wanted to save for later use, you could simply blog about it and then be able to access it from your own weblog whenever you wanted. Still others used it as an aid to express their thoughts and refine their writing abilities, rarely posting links and mostly writing short essays.

One popular author has remarked that blogs have finally given the individual a voice. At no other point in history have we had the technology to publish exactly what we want, as regularly as we want—and have people access it with the click of a mouse.

But is there a case for blogs in the corporate world?

According to online resources, enterprises are now beginning to tap into the power of blogs to complement their traditional content and knowledge management processes. Enterprise-specific blogs often end up using the same user-friendly Web publishing tools available on the Net, combining them with enhanced access controls and features like search to improve their functionality.

Using software like Traction, employees can now update their company blog as easily as sending out an e-mail, making it a breeze for organizations to collect and publish information on the Web. The result is a highly-searchable online archive that serves as an enterprise-wide repository of shared knowledge. A quick look at Traction’s solutions page yields multiple ways to use enterprise blogging software to manage anything from medical research and corporate communications to operations management and competitive intelligence.

Many organizations are also seeing the merit of using weblogs as a tool for project management. If you are managing a project, running a project weblog is a great way to collect, organize, and publish the documents and discussions involved. The chronological view offered by blogs makes it easy for every participant to be informed on a day-to-day basis. And features like category archives and XML feeds only add to their utility. Besides, it’s really easy to upload relevant scraps of information—whether documents or spreadsheets or images—to each blog post. For organizations, not only do blogs offer obvious advantages over e-mail, but compared to intranets and Web sites, they are very resource friendly and easy to use.

The blogosphere is clearly here to stay.

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