I started this blog with my colleague Heather Green after we did this big blog [BusinessWeek] cover and we used the cover to promote all of blogs.  About two weeks after that series came out, The New York Times ran a story on a Sunday talking about blogging and they mentioned our story, and I seriously thought they misinterpreted our story.  And so I blogged a response to what the Times said about our story. 

And several miles away, in an Upper West Side apartment, our editor-in-chief was reading the same newspaper and had the same thought.  So he called up other top editors at the magazine and asked how should we respond to this?  Should we write a letter to the Times?  The reply: “Didn’t you see that Baker has already blogged about it?”

That’s a sign of how blogs can be very disruptive because they move people into areas that they normally don’t inhabit.  They get us into new territory as bloggers begin crossing borders.  Bloggers get people into customer relations, into a form of public relations sometimes.  It gives them strategic information and, in that sense, it increases their value to the company because they have access to relationships outside the company.  It gives them enhanced stature within the company.

Again, at the same time, they step on other people’s toes.  I look at this from an employee perspective.  How does this help me?  And I think it really does. 

It’s a real management challenge because you’re going to have all kinds of people who are rising up creating new initiatives, coming up with new information and creating new relationships.  It’s a management challenge to figure out how to incorporate those people into structures that might not work any longer.

We have a challenge at BusinessWeek, because we have a highly edited process.  When we do stories, we may talk to 40 people but only quote 15 of them in the story.  Lots of interviews just are not used in our traditional process.  And so I was thinking I ought to make more use of this material. 

I started doing that.  I went through and I edited out anything I thought would be controversial.  I took out some of the typos I had committed when I was transcribing it.  But I began posting these things and people at BusinessWeek got very concerned about it because it opened up all kinds of new issues.

Blogging can open up entirely new business opportunities.  Many decades ago, Michelin was just trying to figure out how to encourage more people to drive around France.  And so it got into this tourist information to encourage people to take drives.  It got into restaurant reviews and that opened up an information business for Michelin.  I think as they blog, companies that you don’t associate with the information industry are going to become key players in information.

Just one example.  When you buy a Cannondale bike now and you go online to register your bike, you get a blog.  Maybe not a lot of people will take advantage of that blog, but Cannondale is hoping that some people will begin posting what are the best bike routes in this part of the state or how do you solve such and such a problem with such and such a bike.  And what they want to do, I think, is turn themselves into the information hub for bicycling, and they simply become an information business. I think that’s going to happen a lot. 

It’s really an exciting time.