Does your business need a blog?

A blog is a Web log, an online journal. Blogs started out as online diaries, a form of revelatory writing in which diarists shared their everyday lives with the world. From their beginnings as a weird web fad in 1998, blogs have moved on, and are well on the way to becoming a standard business tool, often as content management systems and instant publishing tools.

In February 2003 Google.com bought Pyra Labs, the company which owns the Blogger weblogging tool and blogging began to take off. Blogger.com, one of the main sites providing blog software and hosting, boasted a million hosted web logs in early 2003, and now has tens of millions.

Blogs are mainstream. Many businesses are starting to see the value of a blog: instant communication with their customers, and for new businesses, and better Internet visibility with faster indexing in the main search engines, like Google.

A blog help your business in many ways, depending on whether you create a private or a public blog. Blogs are so useful that you'll want to create both.

=> Your business's private, internal blog

These days, no one works alone. Even if you're a solo business operator, you have colleagues --- partners, contractors, and suppliers with whom you communicate daily. A private blog makes working with a group easier, because you can streamline your interactions, saving time and energy.

A private blog can contain notes to yourself, or to colleagues. It