I spoke Wed in NYC at Alan Brody's iBreakfast. I got to see some familiar faces (Greg Narain (Get Real and elsewhere), Henry Copeland (Blogads), Salim Ismail (PubSub Concepts)), and meet some new people as well.

Here's some fragmentary notes from my 10 minutes of fame:

As I was walking to the meeting this morning, I noticed an ad on the bus stops promoting a new TV show. The message was "The rules have changed; but the game's the same." I maintain that the rules in media are changing so much, that game is not the same.

But I am very close to the world of blogging, having grown up in it over the past four years. I an highly biased, subjective, and therefore I have a very close to the ground perspective.

Like blogging itself, I am going to offer a series of observations, perhaps uneven and fragmentary, and there is no conclusion, per se. Always beginning, never finished.

Gregory Bateson noted in 1964 that "a business [or a market] is best considered as a network of conversations.' This is perhaps more relevant today, when we have seen the emergence of an new infrastructure (Internet) and the various social tools that engender participatory media. Blogging is one element of that new matrix.

This is a profound revolution, which will ultimately upset a wide variety of applecarts. Established media companies, the basic premises of marketing, and the dynamic of companies (and governments) broadcasting propaganda to their market -- all these things will change. This disruption offers the opportunity to various upstarts to come in and grab market share in all these segments.

A few words about the medium and its message:

• Blogging is all about dialog among the members of a community, whether implicit or explicit.
  
• Blogging is democratic -- the good stuff is picked up through the wisdom of crowds (as Surowiecki called it), and the bad stuff gathers dust on some forgotten server.
  
• Blogging is interactive -- readers are not passive tubers on a couch, they are writing as they read, they are deciding what is the lead news story of their day, they decide how front page inches should go to what topics, subjects, and issues.
  
• Blogging is unmediated -- in general, it is the author writing directly, in the first person, for the readership.

So now, we can approach "the business of blogging" on two sides: how to make money out of the blogging phenomenon (like Corante is trying to do), and how can established businesses exploit the blogging medium in their established (non-media) markets.

How to Make Money form The Blogging Phenomenon

• Lee Bryant's (Headshift) observation is that Blogging works from the bottom-up, so the organization of people around blog-based communication networks has to reflect that dynamic. Large organizations that simply try to take blog technology and use it as a broadcast publishing medium will fail, ultimately.
  
• The world is really made up of millions of relatively small networks of people, not two dozen enormous markets. Markets are better served by tightly focused, extremely rich social media, rather than today's norms.
  
• Blogging is driven by personal brand: authority and trust. This cannot be manufactured, and cannot be imparted to newbies just by affixing a media brand to them.
  
• Blogging will change everything it touches: classified, the blurring of oped and so-called factual journalism, and the duality between advertisers as content and context.
  
• Blogging is technology driven, and we are not done yet. There are serious fortunes to be made by brining together the right tech mix into new products. In particular, the integration of social tools -- instant messaging, streaming content, and the like -- with blogging.
  
• The media companies are losing their control of the media markets, and knowledgeable and erudite bloggers are being able to directly influence market behavior. This transition will accelerate, and then the media business will reformulate itself around the new paradigm.
  
  How Business can apply Blogging
  
• Open an authentic dialog with the marketplace
  
• Burn all the brochureware, and let your product people openly discuss plans and goals. Engender a community of involved and smart users -- they will provide better customer support than you can, and they will do it for free.
  
• Your markets are smarter than you: create a forum where you can listen instead of talking.
  
• Build blog networks to support the actual lines of communication on the company: forget the org chart. Let teams build and manage themselves from the bottom up.
  
• In today's economy a brand is no longer a promise, it is an invitation.