Blogs for Business

Electronic Business magazine weighs in:

Blogs for business?

Strip away the hype, and find a newly useful tool for communication

Forget about all the hype you've heard about blogs (a.k.a. Web logs) as the latest outlet for personal journalism. It turns out they also have a remarkable ability to aid communication in business, whether within internal workgroups or among external chains of suppliers and partners. For an industry such as electronics—where relationships are far-flung and time-to-market pressures require fast communications—blogs can bring a new agility to the workforce... ...

... ...

For Sun's Lark, this two-way communication is a key advantage for engineers, working on something as focused as running Java on medical devices, who want to talk to other developers and designers. "You get a lot of insight into how real people think about what we're doing, but it also gives engineers a voice in the market they didn't have before." For instance, with the release of Solaris 10—essentially Sun's open source version of its operating system—Sun's OS developers have been able to respond to concerns from application developers with swift and unfiltered access. Lark adds, "It gives our people a chance to participate in the tribes and communities that are part of our business."