Back in the early days of the World Wide Web (circa 1995), I had a personal website that I used as an online diary. At the time, I had no idea that keeping an online diary (blog) would be the next BIG thing in ten years. To be honest, my online diary didn’t last very long. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything interesting to say – it’s just that it was such a pain to keep the site updated. Every update required me to take the content of the journal post that I had written in Word and wrap it with html, the language used to create websites, so that it had the same look and feel as the rest of the website. Once I had the html in place, I then had to upload it to its proper folder on the server via file transfer protocol. After the novelty wore off, I realized that I just wasn’t dedicated enough to keeping an online journal.

Well, here we are roughly ten years later and the developments in web technology are such that it is now extremely easy to keep an online journal. This ease of use has made it wildly popular. According to Technorati, a popular blog search engine, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months – it is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago. Moreover, on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day and 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. That’s a ton of blogging activity.

Unfortunately, this type of activity creates and fuels the kind of hype that we saw during the internet bubble of the late 90′s that brought with it a complete loss of business perspective and loads of questionable information spewed out by internet charlatans looking for a quick buck. It is because of all of this hype that I thought it was necessary to develop a white paper that does three simple things:

• define blogging
• address its importance as a business activity
• provide step by step instructions on how to set up a corporate blog

Enjoy!