The business blogosphere is a busy place. A sneak peek into it reveals the genre, business sense and the tactics of using different types of blogs to enhance their business. This article is an attempt to eavesdrop on the business blogosphere to understand the pulse of the conversations.Blogs will make or break your business. They have the power to disseminate information and host global conversations on any topic. Every publication from BusinessWeek, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal to online white papers from Marqui warns businesses that blogging is not an optional endeavor. Those that don't will not survive. With over 40 million conversations going on 24 hours a day, the question becomes, how does a business enter and thrive in the blogosphere?

Robert Scoble was an employee at NEC Mobile solutions (a Japanese tech company in Silicon Valley) where he was a sales support manager. He used blogs to assist users of products that he was selling. His authentically honest style appealed to Lenn Pryor, Microsoft's "director of platform evangelism", who was discovering that his one-to-one approach was not scalable. He employed Scoble to blog comments on "Scobleizer" (Robert Scoble's Blog) about Microsoft in his personal, inimical style. But Robert Scoble criticizes his employer and praises competitors like Google and Apple when they come out with a good product. As Seth Godin puts it, "Robert has a following of more that 5,000 readers counting Bill Gates and Steve Jobs", which accounts for the kind of impact he is making. Following Scoble, are 1,800 employees of Microsoft bloggers who have achieved a marginal "humanization" of Microsoft. Robert Scoble and the Microsoft bloggers are not the only ones crowding the "Blogosphere"². Sun Microsystems is also known for aggressively promoting employee blogs. "Sun's employees are our most passionate evangelists", says Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's President and CEO. Jonathan Schwartz authors the company blog that is read by hundreds of people and is reckoned as one of the popular CEO bloggers. "From where I sit, the more our investors and customers know about us, the better", says Schwartz.

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