Many of you had trouble accessing Gmail for a couple of hours this afternoon, and we're really sorry. The issue was caused by a temporary outage in our contacts system that was preventing Gmail from loading properly. Everything should be back to normal by the time you read this.

We heard loud and clear today how much people care about their Gmail accounts. We followed all the emails to our support team and user group, we fielded phone calls from Google Apps customers and friends, and we saw the many Twitter posts. (We also heard from plenty of Googlers, who use Gmail for company email.) We never take for granted the commitment we've made to running an email service that you can count on.

We've identified the source of this issue and fixed it. In addition, as with all issues that affect Gmail and our other services, we're conducting a full review of what went wrong and moving quickly to update our internal systems and procedures accordingly. We don't usually post about problems like this on our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted. In general, though, if you spot a problem with your Gmail account, please visit the Gmail Help Center and user group, where the Gmail Guides are your fastest source of updates.

Unlike eBay's existing blogs and forums, which focus on more traditional (and sanitized) corporate communications, eBay Ink aims to give readers a peek inside eBay's internal operations. Brewer-Hay has pledged to write unbiased entries about what he observes as an all-access employee of the $7.7 billion dollar company.

Though eBay Ink is not a direct response to the recent seller boycott and frustration over ongoing changes, eBay's communications team says that a forum for frank discussions is long overdue. "There hasn't been one place where investors, industry analysts, employees, [eBay] buyers and sellers, and PayPal and Skype users can talk to someone from the company, or listen to someone from the company discuss what changes mean from a high level," said company spokesman Jose Mallabo.

Brewer-Hay was hired in January and has spent the past two months learning the ins-and-outs of the corporation. Fortune Small Business got first crack at him; below are edited excepts of our conversation about his ambitious mission and why he believes eBay Ink, launching in April, will change the dynamic between eBay's top executives and its user community.

eBay will launch a new blog in April that it told Fortune Small Business would be an unfiltered link between users and the company. Two things just jump out at me. First, the newly hired blogger has never sold anything on eBay. And secondly, while he says the first thing he did when he got to eBay was to meet with industry bloggers to find out "how we can work together," he has never reached out to AuctionBytes.

Other industry bloggers who linked to the FSB article do not mention having heard from him either: Randy Smythe, PowerSellers Unite and Tamebay, for example.

FSB: Your blog will be linked from eBay's PR webpage. How much influence will eBay have on what you write?

RBH: My words go straight up onto the blog, unedited.

It's got to be transparent. There's got to be an authenticity to it, an honesty to it, otherwise there's no point in doing it in the first place. I'm going to open up my e-mail to questions from folks. People can comment, too, and comments are going to be open. You're going to get the good, the bad, and the ugly.

It kind of goes back to what I was saying at the beginning. They hired from outside the organization. I have no prior agenda with any of the execs or people in the company. I'm still in the process of getting to know them. I haven't met a lot of them yet. That's a big, important thing.

The other thing is, this is my job. There are no other jobs that I'm doing. Some corporate blogs are just side gigs for existing employees, but I'm doing this 100%, day-to-day.

Toth dresses like Elvis, sings an employment law rock 'n' roll anthem and asks interactive questions in what he claims is an effort to encourage companies to pay more attention to employment law.

"Don't get me wrong. I like attorneys. I am an attorney," Toth said. "It's just that I'd like to help companies avoid paying lots of money to attorneys unnecessarily."

The blog is designed to "make employment law fun and engaging, but educational at the same time," Toth said.

Mr. Nakagawa's simple Web site has become the center of the "LOLcats" phenomenon, a booming online subculture built around digital images and deliberately bad grammar. There's not much to it: Take a digital photo -- often one of household pets, particularly cats -- and purposefully place misspelled text on top. Anyone with elementary skills in Adobe's Photoshop or Microsoft's Paint software can make their own.

Nearly nine months after launching icanhascheezburger.com, Mr. Nakagawa's site receives around 200,000 unique visitors and a half-million page views each day, according to Mr. Nakagawa.

Visitors can browse a sprawling gallery of lolcats, vote for their favorites and post comments. Mr. Nakagawa says he receives up to 500 submissions a day, thanks in no small part to his site's tool that helps people build their own. He says every entry is screened for merit and originality before earning inclusion.

Only 12 or so submissions make the gallery a day. "It's ridiculous," Mr. Nakagawa admits, "but we do go through all of them." He certainly has the time. Revenue from ads on the site is "more than enough to pay my bills."

Stealing some of his material from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman on the matter, Nye said people will build one profile for their personal life and another for their professional life. The argument, self serving as it is, makes a certain amount of sense. Not good to have a prospective employer stumble on to those photos of you freshman year in Delta Kappa Epsilon.

After the inevitable social net shakeout, Nye says, Facebook and MySpace will remain standing and will compete to supply an outlet for personal self-expression and community. Meanwhile, in the Nye/Hoffman scenario, LinkedIn will dominate the business of business networking - serving as a "productivity tool," used for professional reference checking, recruiting, and to get expert advice.

Granted, LinkedIn's current growth does look promising. With upwards of 11 million members already signed up, the site is now adding 180,000 new members each week, and fully half of these live outside the United States. Thus, Nye professes little fear of would be competitors like the European front-runner Xing.com. "We are clearly going to win the English speaking world and adjacent economies," he said. "And that already is pretty meaningful." In Silicon Valley, he added, "LinkedIn is now so prevalent that you sort of have to join it."

Welcome to the Google "geo" blog. As web mapping (dare I say "the geoweb"?) matures, we're finding that we have a lot more to communicate about new developments in Earth, Maps, Local, and our APIs. The tools are becoming more powerful, more accessible, and more interrelated -- not only to each other, but also to the web at large and to things like search. Things are changing so fast we thought a blog focused on this topic would be the best way to communicate with you, both about our products and about the overall development of geo on the web.

So... what is the "geoweb"? Some people will scratch their heads and call it buzzword proliferation. Others, including Mike Liebhold, who has a long history of thinking and writing about this area, have a very well defined notion of what they believe it is (or should be). I don't think that there is agreement on what the geoweb is, but I think there is a lot of enthusiasm and energy across many fronts to make it happen. I expect the "it" will evolve substantially over the next few months and years as we (the geo ecosystem on the web) collectively figure out how "earth browsers," embedded maps, local search, geo-tagged photos, blogs, the traditional GIS world, wikis, and other user-generated geo content all interrelate. Those of us who work on geo products and services at Google believe we have an opportunity to make the web more useful -- and ultimately, to improve people's lives through better information and understanding.

In one blog entry, Heald tells of a passenger who was upset that the shops in Naples, Italy, refused to take U.S. dollars. "I explained that in Europe the euro was the accepted currency, but this lady was adamant that the dollar is accepted all over the world," Heald writes.

In another entry, Heald recounts a passenger's anger that John would encourage tours of Istanbul's mosques. "The passenger felt that for various reasons it was wrong and that I was promoting terrorism -- he left by calling me "the Sperm of the Devil." Heald says he's seen a lot of things over the years, but was unprepared for both this man's wrath and his reasoning.

It turns out Heald is a multi-media guy, and some of his best blog entries recount stories from his daily TV show, which is broadcast each morning to all the staterooms aboard ship. In addition to shipboard news, the show features passenger requests and questions. One such request came from a passenger whose luggage had been lost by her airline. The woman, who was quite large, was able to find some clothes that fit, but she couldn't find a comfortable pair of plus-sized underwear. She begged John to help, so he put out a panty call to everyone watching the show. Result: seven pairs of underwear from sympathetic fellow passengers. Heald sent each of the kind ladies champagne with a thank-you note.

The weather was fine today but the smell was not. No, you do not need glasses, I did say smell. There are natural gas reserves in this area of Greece and today those reserves were being...well...less than reserved. The sea smelled like it had eaten 1 million eggs for breakfast and was giving our guests the resulting good news.

James Paone, a partner at Lomurro, Davison, Eastman and Munoz in Freehold, N.J., said that the firm's insurer - The Chubb Corp. - said several weeks ago that it would not add the blog to the existing policy. "We were in the process of beginning to set up a blog, having internal discussions about what areas of law would be the subjects," he said. "We wanted to cover the first base, which is [Chubb's] coverage. Our insurance carrier said [a blog] is not a risk they were interested in insuring. The entire discussion stopped."

Paone said his firm contacted Chubb to ask about insurance coverage in case someone tried to sue it over content in the blog. Now, the law firm is in the process of setting up a meeting with Chubb "so we can understand what their rationale is for saying they weren't interested in covering that kind of risk," Paone said.

The new blog will be led by Mergers&Acquisitions reporter Dennis Berman and former Bloomberg reporter Dana Cimilluca. It will also incorporate reporting from Wall Street journal correspondents in New York, London and Hong Kong, as well as WSJ.com editors and Dow Jones Newswires private equity reporters.

The site is free for both journal subscribers and non-subscribers. In a press release, the paper billed the blog as "the centerpiece to an expanded arena of deals coverage by the Journal, with additional community tools, graphics and video to launch in coming months."

"Deal news itself is quickly commoditized on the Web," said Berman in a statement. "Where the Journal provides value is our insight, experience and intellect. Our collective observations on a given situation are what make all the difference -- and we hope to deliver a bit of humor and entertainment, too."

The Rugs Done Right Blog focuses on area rugs, highlighting new styles and trends, care and cleaning tips, purchasing advice and decorating ideas. Blog posts are written by Jamie Carney, an area rug proprietor and the BuyRugsDirect.com site owner. The move to RugsDoneRight.com offers Carney the opportunity to provide additional services to her Buy Rugs Direct customers, and the blog is the first of these new features.

Blog topics vary, but the central theme is always area rugs. Posts are short and succinct, quickly making a point or offering advice before directing readers to a link with more information. Recent posts have discussed: what to look for when choosing an area rug for your home; the proper care and cleaning of rugs; the pros and cons of different materials; and how to install and protect area rugs throughout your home.

We were not surprised, then, when many Slashdot users either derided or hammered our idea collection effort after a news item about it was posted on the site's homepage on Sunday morning. Some suggested we'd be better off drinking lots of Jamaican beer. Another commenter wrote: "This is the most stupid idea I have ever heard out of [The Economist]. They actually will compensate you, with a rocking 6-mo web-subscription to economist.com (street value: roughly $50)... Perhaps the Economist should actually talk to their economists, and ask them what 'Incentive Compatibility' means. If I were the Economist, I'd be terribly embarrassed about this."

As often with such debates on Slashdot, however, they raise an important point, which is then only superficially discussed before moving on to other more fundamental things (the debate quickly digressed to talking about democracy, Hitler, the Soviet Union and, of course, Ayn Rand). Yet the underlying issue is indeed a crucial one – and one we probably need to resolve somehow if we want to make this project a success: How can we cleverly combine – to mutual benefit - ultimately for-profit efforts such as Project Red Stripe and "commons-based peer production", in the words of Yochai Benkler, a professor at Yale Law School.

And if our terms and conditions really keep you from submitting your great idea, you can always do what Jeff Jarvis, the creator of the popular blog BuzzMachine, has suggested - and some have already done: post them on you own blog. But don't forget to send us a link.

It is a curious pairing. Cisco, with 55,000 employees, makes networking equipment for telecommunications providers and other big companies. Tribe.net, run by a company with eight employees, has been trampled by newer social sites like MySpace and Facebook.

But along with the recent purchase of a social network design firm, Five Across, the deal will give Cisco the technology to help large corporate clients create services resembling MySpace or YouTube to bring their customers together online. And that ambition highlights a significant shift in the way companies and entrepreneurs are thinking about social networks.

They look at MySpace and Facebook, with their tens of millions of users, as walled-off destinations, similar to first-generation online services like America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. These big Web sites attract masses of people who have dissimilar interests and, ultimately, little in common.

Utah Street Networks was founded in 2003 and has seven employees based in San Francisco, Calif. The Utah Street Networks technology and certain members of team will join CMSG led by Dan Scheinman, Senior Vice President and General Manager. The deal does not include the Tribe.net site, which will remain completely independent of Cisco.

While chief executives of many US giants - such as GM and Sun - blog regularly, it remains unusual for a British company to have a blog. Recent research found only two FTSE 100 companies running blogs. This reluctance is backed-up by a survey published in September 2006 by web hosting company Fasthosts, which found only 3 per cent of UK SMEs intending to start blogs. This is despite there being 54 million blogs on the web, with another 75,000 created daily.

GRS Sign Company - which produces commercial signs - is therefore unusual. It started its blog in June. "It allows us to talk among ourselves, about our business," says Richard Dows, a signwriter at GRS with responsibility for its web, having previously been a web designer. The target audience is "anyone who reads blogs," he says.

As a new blog, it is still building its hits and responses from customers, suppliers and the public. But - unlike some blogs - it seeks comments. Recent blogs have included a discussion on alcohol-related accidents at work, the challenge of disposing of old computers, conducting fire risk assessments, the design of braille signs and, of course, the growing demand for no smoking signs.

A major advance came Jan. 22 with IBM's announcement of a new product called Lotus Connections. It wraps five social networking technologies up into one integrated package—similar to what Microsoft's Office does for traditional desktop productivity software such as Word and Excel. And, if IBM handles this right, its package could rapidly spread the use of so-called Web 2.0 applications in the business world. "While social computing software is perceived as being at the fringe of most large businesses, it's actually moving to the center fast—because it's about how the next generation of employees communicate, and create and share ideas," says Franks Gens, senior vice-president for research at tech market research IDC.

The IBM package includes five applications: profiles, where employees post information about their expertise and interests; communities, which are formed and managed by people with common interests; activities, which are used to manage group projects; bookmarks, where people share documents and Web sites with others; and blogs, where people post ongoing commentaries. "The business market is showing a lot of interest in using social networking tools to improve productivity. It's about helping people find experts and the information they need to get their jobs done," says Steve Mills, the general manager of the software group at IBM (IBM). The commercial version of the package is to be delivered in the second quarter.

Is it any coincidence that IBM announced new social networking software and Getafirstlife, a Second Life parody, debuted within a few hours of each other?

Of course not, IBM getting into social networking is the equivalent of the cab driver touting stocks and the dunce down the street trying to flip real estate. The appropriate response to those aforementioned signals: Sell! The top of the market is here.

IBM launching social networking software (just for those corporate types that just can't wait to produce MySpace-ish pages) is the same as the cabby and the real estate flipper down the street. Translation: The social networking run is over. Goodbye. It's kaput.

I'm venturing into uncharted territory as I launch this blog. A year ago, I didn't even know what a blog was -- until my Communications team began telling me about all the blog traffic on travel and tourism. Now I know this is where the action is if you want to talk to your customers directly -- and hear back from them. Soon we'll add an audio version of the blog. That's how I'm most comfortable: telling stories and listening.

I've checked out Jonathan Schwartz's blog at Sun Microsystems and "Randy's Journal" at Boeing. I've listened to Senator Barack Obama's blog podcasts. I know blogs will be a hot communications tool in the 2008 Presidential campaign.

Truth be told, I'm not very good with computers, although I couldn't do business in today's fast-paced economy without my cell phone, and my grandchildren have gotten me hooked on my iPod. I know our guests expect the very latest technology when they check-in to our hotel rooms and we're moving quickly to provide that. I've also hired the most talented and innovative team of leaders in the lodging business, and they're helping me move into this brave new world of communications technology. Ten years ago when my people first started talking about selling room reservations over the internet, I was a skeptic. Today Marriott.com is not only the biggest website in the hotel industry, it's also our fastest growing reservations channel. I'm a convert!

Defamation Claims. Defamation claims represent a growing threat to employers as a result of the increased popularity of employee maintained blogs. To the same extent that an employer may be liable for defamatory publications of its employees, an employer may also be liable for an employee's defamatory private blog on topics that fall within the scope of the employee's employment or within the employee's actual or apparent authority. Even if an employee's statements are outside the scope of employment, an employer may find itself named as a defendant in a defamation suit if the blogging employee is the supervisor of the defamed individual or the employee's blog references the employer. The chance that an innocent employer may be a defendant in the latter situation is increased because bloggers often blog anonymously, leaving the employer as the only readily identifiable potential source of the defamatory blog.

Harassment Claims. An employer may also be subject to liability for sexual harassment and hostile work environment claims based on an employee's private blogging activities, if a supervisor authors inappropriate comments about an employee or if the employer had knowledge that an employee authored harassing blogs about a co-employee. For example, in Blakey v. Continental Airlines, a pilot filed a hostile work environment claim against Continental Airlines arising out of derogatory comments posted about her on a pilots' electronic bulletin board operated by a third-party service provider. The court held that Continental Airlines has a duty to take effective measures to stop co-employee harassment when it knows or has reason to know that such harassment is part of a pattern of harassment taking place in settings related to the workplace. The Blakey decision confirms that employer liability may extend beyond mere employer-provided blogs.

Economic Damages to Employers. An employer's business itself may be harmed by defamatory comments on employee blogs. Employees may use blogs as a means to anonymously defame employers, supervisors, or other employees which may harm employee morale, result in a loss of good will with patrons, or damage the employer's public image. In the late 1990s, for example, Southern Pacific Funding Corporation filed for bankruptcy after its stock prices fell from a high of $17 to $1 - a spiral triggered by blog postings claiming that company executives were covering up multi-million dollar embezzlement, exaggerating economic forecasts and putting the company up for sale.

Disclosure of Confidential Information. Blogging activities may also result in the unauthorized release of company information and data into the public domain. Whether published by a disgruntled employee or a loyal yet naive worker, a blog that discusses an employer's confidential, business or financial information may have far-reaching and harmful consequences for the employer, such as the dissemination of trade secrets. Similarly, the unwanted release of business or financial information may result in securities law violations, such as unlawful release of inappropriate information in advance of an initial public offering.

Every Wal-Mart employee that Laura and Jim run into, from store clerks to photogenic executives, absolutely loves to work at the store. Sound like a great Wal-Mart publicity campaign? Anyone familiar with Wal-Mart and its reputation for being quite stingy with wages and benefits will roll their eyes at such a rosy picture. In fact, some critics are so skeptical that they wonder whether Jim and Laura are real or whether they were concocted at the company's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.

"Wal-Mart has hired fake people," says Jonathan Rees, a labor historian and associate professor at Colorado State University at Pueblo, who has also worked as a staff researcher at the AFL-CIO. In a blog posting for the Web site The Writing On the Wal, Reese published an open letter to Laura and Jim challenging them to reveal themselves and asking who paid for their RV and gas.

In spite of the ever growing echochamber the blogosphere lives in, it never astounds me what gets missed from time to time; in particular, there's a leading story in Businessweek about how a travel blog about Wal-mart (that is unabashedly positive about Wal-Mart), has in fact been sponsored by Working Families for Wal-Mart. What's wrong with that? Well, it turns out that WFWM is an organization that was launched by Edelman about 10 months ago, as a PR move to counter negative press about Wal-Mart.

Even these personal attacks won't sour my feelings about Wal-Mart. I've met too many great people in Wal-Marts across the county. I've met too many people - real people, not imaginary Internet people - who've told me about all the good Wal-Mart has done. I've camped in Wal-Mart parking lots. I've met these people and heard their stories firsthand. Which is something the people who attacked Jim and me haven't done and don't care to do.

So I've made the trip. I had a great time. I loved meeting the people we met, listening to the stories we heard. After everything that's happened, I even loved blogging about it all. And if I had the chance, I'd do it again.

In the end, that's all that really matters.

With a growing number of major companies now publishing corporate blogs, or online diaries, and an SEC chairman with a penchant for technological innovation, Schwartz is making the case for blogs - including his on the Sun Miscrosystems Web site - as a way to expand investors' access to information.

The SEC position is that current regulations do allow for blogs, such as news releases, regulatory filings, Web sites and Webcasts, to be used to disseminate companies' financial information, provided a particular blog reaches a broad audience.

A 2000 rule known as Regulation FD, or Fair Disclosure, ended a long-standing practice by forbidding companies from providing significant information to stock analysts and other Wall Street insiders ahead of the public.

The rule requires the method or methods used to be "reasonably designed to provide broad, non-exclusionary distribution of the information to the public."

No stain or spill is too challenging for Dr. Laundry to tackle; he's claimed victory over numerous stain challenges. Baker is even a hero to little ballerinas in Berkeley, Calif. Leveraging his expertise, a costume designer with the Berkeley Ballet Theater was able to remove red lipstick from a handmade costume the night before a big Nutcracker performance.

From his base at Clorox's technical lab in Pleasanton, Calif., Baker frequently conducts Bleach 101 orientation sessions and demos on stain removal for new Clorox employees, presents scientific study results to outside industry groups and educates key Clorox customers on new Clorox products.

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin found itself the subject of a video on YouTube, a site that lets users post amateur videos. One of its engineers, Michael De Kort, posted a video in which he claimed some patrol boats the company had delivered were defective.

He says he posted the video after getting no response to his concerns from the company. After the video went up, De Kort, of Monument, Colo., says, he was let go. He is now seeking to create a new online website where employee whistle-blowers can post similar videos.

"Now, today, everyone can have a James Bond camera. Like blogging before it, online photo and video sites beg for corporations to produce new standards and rules that are clearly communicated to all employees," says David Carpe, founder of Boston-based consulting firm Clew. "It's a risk."

Employees also run a personal risk if they post untrue information that could leave them vulnerable to defamation lawsuits. Videos can also give information to competitors or create a public relations crisis.

The concern is mounting with the growing popularity of image-ready phones, Web cameras and online sites that allow users to post video.

We want to share insights into our company, our people, our culture, and the things that occupy our cluttered minds. We’ll cover emerging trends, provide some behind-the-scenes commentary, profile interesting Yahoos, spotlight our beloved users, reveal some of our quirks, tap into guest bloggers, sprinkle in some videos and photo essays, and generally think out loud (lucky you… you get to listen). You’ll hear from interns to executives. Some days we’ll be light and airy, others we’ll get serious.

Sure, we’ll touch on some Yahoo! news now and again, but we’ll try to put a new twist on things and make every visit worth the mouse-clicks. And of course the whole point of a blog is the conversation loop. So comment away — this place is an echo chamber without you.

The bloggerati just need to get over every blog coming out the gate reading like a conversation at the local pub and not rehashing the past trials and tribulations of bloggers. It takes time for a corporate blog to find its collective voice.

By the way, I agree with Andy Lark that we should be nicer to new companies that try the bloggy Web. At least give them a couple of weeks to get settled into their new homes before we start lobbing rocks through their front windows. Of course, I doubt anyone will listen to me because these companies came into the bloggy Web so late that the mob isn't gonna automatically be nice the way they were to me three years ago.

Give Dell some breathing room, let them find their voice, offer them advice. If they still suck in a couple of months, then have at them. In the meantime, think back to when you first started blogging and how nice it felt when people cut you some slack.

Yup, there are more corporate blogs on the way. I'm sure there are more personal ones on the way too. Wasn't there a statistic that said a new blog is born something like every minute? At any rate, JupiterResearch finds that 35 percent of large companies plan to start corporate blogs this year. When combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006. That's according to a new Jup report, "Corporate Weblogs: Deployment, Promotion, and Measurement," that also finds 64 percent of executives spend less than $500,000 to deploy and manage corporate Weblogs.

Rumors have been flying lately about the demise of PubSub.com. While I've seen quite a bit of exaggeration in various forums, I can't deny that things are not going well for us. Our days are numbered. A recent attempt to execute a merger has been blocked and we've been blocked from raising equity financing that would allow us to continue to pay salaries and pay off our $3 million in debt. Thus, our "doors" will close soon if we can't find someone to pull us out of the current situation. Persons with fast access to cash and a desire for some of the industry's best technology are advised to contact us rapidly...

For Mr. McDonald, the Web log he created, "I'm a Comedy Central Intern," was merely a way to keep his friends apprised of his activities and to practice his humor writing. For Comedy Central, it was a corporate no-no — especially after it was mentioned on Gawker.com, the gossip Web site, attracting thousands of new readers.

"Not even a newborn puppy on a pink cloud is as cute as a secret work blog!" chirped Gawker, giddily providing the link to its audience.

But Comedy Central disagreed, asking him to change the name (He did, to "I'm an Intern in New York") and to stop revealing how its brand of comedic sausage is stuffed.

"They said they figured something like this would happen eventually because blogs had become so popular," said Mr. McDonald, now 23, who kept his internship. "It caught them off guard. They didn't really like that."

This is a new blog dedicated to all things energy. I am just getting started and this is my first post so be patient with me. My goal is to create a place where people interested in energy can go for information, news and fun. I plan to link to interesting tidbits about energy and help find answers to questions about how we can all save energy. For example, here is a link to something about saving energy in the Summer. This post may be a humble beginning but at least it gets my energy blog launched. There is more news coming later this week but I can't tell you about it now so stay tuned. If you have questions, please let me know. Otherwise, enjoy and keep coming back!

Oddly, Owen Corning chose the very unfreindly URL saveenergy.owenscorningblog.com for the blog when, it seems, the more appropriate thepinkpantherblog.com and pinkpantherblog.com appear to be readily available. The Pink One will take on the persona of Chief Energy Officer on the blog and spout snarky witticisms about how to save energy....by using Owen Corning products, of course.

This number includes blog readers who applied through JobsBlog and were later hired ... Their JobsBlog application is not necessarily the reason they were hired. (The successful attempt could have been, again, a Monster.com posting, a friend who is an employee, a cold call from a recruiter, etc.) It also only includes people who applied through the blog, so if you read and loved the blog and got hired - but didn't apply through us, you wouldn't be included in this total.

What I do know is this ... Each of these 137 did, at some point in their candidate lifecycle, apply through the blog, and therefore, we can assume they also read our posts and utilized our tips!

What is different about Wal-Mart's approach to blogging is that rather than promoting a product - something it does quite well, given its $300 billion in annual sales - it is trying to improve its battered image.

Wal-Mart, long criticized for low wages and its health benefits, began working with bloggers in late 2005 "as part of our overall effort to tell our story," said Mona Williams, a company spokeswoman.

"As more and more Americans go to the Internet to get information from varied, credible, trusted sources, Wal-Mart is committed to participating in that online conversation," she said.

Copies of e-mail messages that a Wal-Mart representative sent to bloggers were made available to The New York Times by Bob Beller, who runs a blog called Crazy Politico's Rantings. Mr. Beller, a regular Wal-Mart shopper who frequently defends the retailer on his blog, said the company never asked that the messages be kept private.

The author of the e-mail messages is a blogger named Marshall Manson, a senior account supervisor at Edelman who writes for conservative Web sites like Human Events Online, which advocates limited government, and Confirm Them, which has pushed for the confirmation of President Bush's judicial nominees.

"But Mr. Manson has not encouraged bloggers to reveal that they communicate with Wal-Mart or to attribute information to either the retailer or Edelman, Ms. Williams of Wal-Mart said."

In a sign of how eager Wal-Mart is to develop ties to bloggers, the company has invited them to a media conference to be held at its headquarters in April. In e-mail messages, Wal-Mart has polled several bloggers about whether they would make the trip, which the bloggers would have to pay for themselves.

Mr. Reynolds of Instapundit.com said he recently was invited to Wal-Mart's offices but declined. "Bentonville, Arkansas," he said, "is not my idea of a fun destination."

Along comes modern day Tom Sawyer, aka Marshall Manson, a sr account supervisor at Edelman, who enlists right wing bloggers to whitewash the tarnished image of WalMart. Many conservative bloggers regurgitated emails and press releases Manson fed them right into their blogs.

Employers are unprepared for blogging's impact, according to the Employment Law Alliance, a network of labor- and employment-law firms. It conducted a telephone poll of 1,000 adults in January that found about 5 percent of American workers maintain personal blogs, but only 15 percent of employers have a policy that directly addresses blogging.

That concerns Stephen Hirschfeld, a labor lawyer and the chief executive of the alliance, because companies could find themselves in sticky litigation if they fire someone for what he wrote on his blog.

"Both in respect to blogging or other nonblogging activities, you have to put employees on notice of do's and don'ts," he said.

The poll also found that 59 percent of employees believe that employers should be allowed to discipline or terminate workers who post confidential or proprietary information concerning the employers.

I feel their pain.
I get in trouble, and blogging is my work.
But I believe this problem will take care of itself in time.
Soon everyone will have their own blog and be too busy to read anybody else.

A few people have asked me why I'm not using the AOL Journals product for this blog. I love AOL Journals, and there are several of them that I check regularly, but the simple answer is that my tech guys told me that we needed to use a different platform in order to do the things I want to do with this blog. Beyond RSS feeds, we're kicking around a few other ideas that will be rolling out in the next few weeks and months. Stay tuned!

We were pleased five days ago, when we came across this posting five days ago on a nicely named new McDonald's corporate blog called Open for Discussion. We decided not to blog about it, because there were a few flaws that we thought would soon clean themselves up. For example the blog runs about a paragraph, then you have to click on "More" to read it in its entirety, kind of newsletterish for a blog and making us think of RSS partial feeds. Open for Discussion also has six categories that are, well supposed open for discussion.

But it's nearly a week now, and there's just this one post and the poor thing has only one comment and I'm growing earful the poor darling will soon die from loneliness.

Blogging – The increased use of collaboration tools, such as blogging, also increases the possibility of leaking confidential business data.

Burnham's Beat today reported record results for its fourth quarter ended December 31, 2005. Revenues for Q4 2005 were $168.64 up 176% compared to $61.08 in Q4 2004 and up 27.3% sequentially vs. Q3 2005. Earnings before expenses, which management believes are the most cynical results we can think of, were also up 176%.

Commenting on the results, Bill Burnham, Chief Blogger of Burnham’s Beat explains "This quarter's results continue to demonstrate that blogging is a complete waste time. While we did not achieve our previously forecasted results of 100 billion page views and 'Google-style cash, Baby!', we remain hopeful that people forgot about those projections. There are several reasons for missing our projections including an outage of our hosting provider in late Q4 which cost us a least $1.00, the continued poor quality of the writing on the site, high oil prices, several deals that slipped to next quarter, and uncertainty created by the war in Iraq."

Seeking Alpha founder David Jackson, a former Morgan Stanley telecommunications analyst, said he has hired a team to transcribe the calls, which often contain useful nuggets of information from corporate management teams but also take a long time to listen to. Mr. Jackson says he expects to have a transcript available on his Web site within six hours after the conference call is completed.

An Internet search for full-time business travelers who write Web logs produces astonishingly low numbers, considering the eight million Americans whom the Pew Internet and American Life Project say publish a blog.

But that appears to be changing. "Just wait," said Steve Broback, a business traveler in Woodinville, Wash., who edits the new blog Inflighthq (www.inflighthq.com) and is an organizer of a blog conference called the Blog Business Summit. "The rush is starting."

Mr. Broback, whose Web journal is sponsored by Connexion, Boeing's wireless division, writes about the plight of the road warrior and offers links to news for business travelers. And he expects a lot of company soon. "In a year or two we'll probably even have blogs focusing on vintage airport vending machines," he predicted.

One business travel blogger noted that after her colleagues began reading her posts about being homeless after Hurricane Katrina, she felt she lost her anonymity. Her quote: "When your boss is reading your blog, you say to yourself, 'Well, maybe I shouldn't be writing about staying at the Ritz-Carlton.'" Another reason business travelers should be wary to blog: competitive intelligence. A blogging specialist in the article noted that business travelers who mention cities they're staying in or about to visit could reveal "enough information for a competitor to surmise what's going on."

83% of the respondents said their blogs were written or drafted by someone else, although they approved the text before it was published. Of the 17%, who said they wrote their own blogs, most said they first asked for advice from HR and communications colleagues.

Asked why they did not write their own blogs, nearly half replied that they found it too time consuming while 39% said that they had difficulty in expressing themselves in writing.

When it comes to blogging in your office, lawyer Mike Oliver has a basic premise: Don't point and click too fast.

"If you're the employee and you're upset because you didn't get a raise or you're not getting along with your boss, the inclination now is to post your unhappiness on a blog," said Oliver, who has taught cyberspace law at the University of Maryland and is formulating a blogging policy for his nearly 40 technology-based clients. "But I find this highly dangerous for the employee."

When the Internet came of age in the mid-1990s, the first problem employees encountered was with e-mail, when some workers who circulated messages with incriminating information were fired.

Now blogging is a new source of employer-employee trouble. Typically blogs, short for "Web logs," are opinionated and personal posts on the Internet. They can take on a diary-type form and often feature frequent updates.

But just like any new fad, interest wanes and less people blog until the blogging becomes almost nonexistent. Now marketing is left scratching their heads because they have a built an infrastructure and spent a good deal of money and now they are in desperate need of content. This is where I introduce to you the ghost blogger and the ghost blogger service -- passionate writing and informed content for hire.

The ghost blogger headhunter may get involved or a specific ghost blogger will get hired at this point. The writer's job will be to post eight to 12 blogs per week on the company's corporate Web site. These writers can get paid $1,000 to $5,000 a month, depending on the traffic they generate.

For example, if a blogger is paid a base of $2,400 per month, she could receive an additional amount of money based on the amount of traffic she brings to the site. If the average traffic is 100,000 page views, she could get a bonus if it goes up to 110,000, 120,000, 150,000 or 200,000 page views and so on. The more buzz produced, the more money earned.

General Motors Corp., credited as one of the first corporate podcasters when it dipped its toe into the waters in February, records talk-radio-style episodes about its vehicles that were downloaded 75,000 times in August. Disneyland celebrated its 50th anniversary in May with a series recorded inside the park. Verizon Wireless issued one a few days ago to promote a cell phone that will, among other features, let you listen to podcasts.

International Business Machines Corp., which produces podcasts for investors about the future of trends, also set up a podcast-recording system for employee communication. And many media companies, from the BBC to ESPN to The Sun, have jumped on board for simple self-preservation.

"Companies are completely losing control of their messages, and the one way to get into the game is by blogging and podcasting," said Michael Wiley, GM's director of new media. "The companies that are early adopters stand tremendous opportunity to be the winners in the long run."

With a disclosure that Alexander was indeed a fictional character, the blog launched last March. But the response was not what the women had hoped for.

Robert French, a communications instructor at Auburn University who blogs about marketing on a site called Blogthenticity, was the first to notice. Delicious Destinations, he wrote, was a prime example of so-called character blogging, something that has become increasingly popular on business blogs. "What value do you find in this tactic?" he asked his readers. "Is it authentic?" The blogosphere responded. Hugh MacLeod, who runs Gapingvoid, a highly regarded and often scathingly critical site for marketing professionals, decided that GourmetStation's new blog merited special recognition -- the Beyond Lame Award. Soon, GourmetStation was the talk of all the marketing blogs. "Horrible. Stupid. Insane. Worthless. Ineffective," wrote one person. "The ultimate in false advertising."

Lynes-Miller has no regrets. For one thing, traffic at her site almost doubled as a result of the controversy. Besides, blogging is just one part of the company's marketing plan. In May, for example, GourmetStation was touted on Good Morning America as a great place to shop for Mother's Day gifts, which helped send second-quarter sales up 158%.

Meanwhile, T. Alexander's culinary adventures continue uninterrupted. "I didn't expect the negative feedback we initially received," Lynes-Miller says. "Though there was no negative feedback from customers -- and that's the feedback I'm most concerned about."

In a bid to lower the barrier to entry that keep many corporations from beginning to blog, marketing services firm ElectricArtists has come up with an option for the commitment-phobic -- the "pop-up" blog.

Unrelated to the loathsome pop-up ad but akin to the pop-up store, the pop-up blog is created with a clear lifespan set before it is launched. It pops up and fades away, and its brief life span corresponds with an event, product launch, or other time-sensitive cause, Marc Schiller, CEO and founder of ElectricArtists, told ClickZ News. It's a concept that others have employed occasionally in the past, but Schiller is the first to give a moniker to the phenomenon.

"The number one reason not to start a Weblog is the commitment involved. You can hire an agency to launch it, and put a team together to run it, but adding a new project that needs annual focus -- not just budget -- is difficult," Schiller said.

Mostly, though, it's my intent to use this as a channel through which to reply and converse with you in a manner that scales. Not on all topics; it's clear that the nature of my role at this large, public company dictates that I should and will stay silent on certain matters. At times there will be controversies I just can't or won't engage in. Many years ago at Groove we developed an early blogging policy. Things may have evolved quite a bit since then, but this policy continues to give reasonable guidance that I'll continue to apply to my own comments here.

Neil Hunt, the company's chief product officer, had awfully nice things to say about HackingNetflix when he appeared with Kaltschnee on a CNBC show last month.

"He's extremely well-informed. In fact, we find that the comments posted on Mike's blog and other similar blogs are extremely useful for us to help keep a pulse on what people are saying and thinking out there," Hunt said, according to a transcript of the show posted online.

"Other companies have fired people for blogging, but IBM is encouraging it," Christopher Barger, IBM's unofficial "blogger in chief," said in the report.

According to AdAge.com, IBM employees who blog are advised to follow the company's business of code conduct, respect copyright laws and to not reveal proprietary information.

"Other companies have fired people for blogging, but IBM is encouraging it," said Christopher Barger, Big Blue's unofficial "blogger in chief."

The list offers simple, almost common-sense pointers, such as follow the IBM business code of conduct; respect copyright laws; and don't reveal proprietary information. The company now has 15,000 registrants on its internal blog, with more than 2,200 of those employees maintaining external blogs. Wikis and RSS feeds are used internally for collaboration and automated information feeds.

1. Fine Print.
Blogging can lead to legal issues. Companies should have real concerns about liability, exclusions and limitations, and indemnity. Although there are laws that protect against libel, misappropriations and other injuries suffered as a result of posts on the Web, companies can still be held "vicariously" responsible for statements made by employees that are harmful to others. Since there are so many legal issues surrounding blogs, it is imperative that the site has some sort of disclaimer and limitation of liability.

2. Know What You're Doing.
Senior management should be educated by the corporate communications and legal department about what blogs are and how they might affect business. That way, they can be contributing members of the blog, further improving employee relations. Their support and participation is often what makes a blog more effective.

3. Create blogging policies.
In any medium where an employee is sharing information, there is the possibility of leaking trade secrets or financial information. Blogging also has a tendency to become personal. A company should have a list of policies regarding blogging to ensure that trade secrets are kept secret and personal lives do not become public. Policies may include keeping financial information from being posted, as well as severe consequences for anyone using the blog for negative publicity.

4. Avoid the Marketing Blog.
Making your blog into a blatant marketing campaign is a bad idea. Customers are looking for real answers and honest opinions. They will pick up on insincerity instantly. Use the blog for what it's for, transparency. This is an opportunity to make a real connection with your customers. Don't ruin it by filling it with empty advertising.

5. Keep It Fresh.
Blogs are usually judged by their amount of new content. Easy to add on to, they are designed to be updated constantly. To keep your readers coming back, make your content relevant and timely. Don't forget, content can include anything from product releases to job openings, recent news to thoughts from the CEO. It's practically impossible to run out of material.

6. Reinforce the Company's Core Values.
Use your blog to reflect your company's inner soul: its mission, goals and direction. A blog is just another medium by which you interact with your customers and employees. It's another part of the brand experience. It should be consistent with the impression the company wants to make.

7. Encourage Employees to Use It.
Create an atmosphere where they are comfortable asserting their opinions and concerns. You'll be surprised how the quietest employees will speak up when given such an opportunity. With all communication, blogging can become negative, so remind employees of the public nature of the blogs and the ramifications for their actions.

A lot of clients would be impressed with an attorney who has an advanced level of computer literacy, and who is comfortable enough with his or herself to step out into the public arena.

But other clients wouldn't go near a lawyer who blogs. Part of the hesitation, said Ann Althouse, a law professor at University of Wisconsin - Madison, is that while blogs are perfect tools for networking and community building, some would see them as carelessness. Althouse created a blawg in January 2004, althouse.blogspot.com. She said that her "moving average" was 9,000 a day over the last 30 days.

"There are some special problems that working lawyers have," Althouse said. "It can be a way to get clients and that's something that could worry clients. They might think you're someone who could do something unpredictable."

"Most of the time people want a lawyer who's conventional and won't go to a lawyer who seems goofy," she said.

While many traditional businesses can afford to take a wait-and-see attitude toward blogs, it's a different story for buzz-hungry startups in technology and marketing. The universe of self-published Web logs is the most active and fastest-growing part of the Net. The blogosphere brims with contacts, potential customers, and fresh ideas. Done right, blogging is like setting up a booth in the biggest trade show on earth -- every single day.

Juicy Fruit had lowered the bar on blogging so that anything could slither over with its blog, that David Weinberger, and BusinessWeek's Heather Green were among many to considered just about the worst ever -- myself included. I just had the pleasure of inserting a paragraph about it into the final draft of Naked Conversations and this morning discovered it was gone... GONE and in its place was a button that would allow me to watch TV Spots of the Juicy Fruit Lame ads. I just wish I chewed gum so I could boycot the stuff.

Yet, perhaps the single most important explanation for the refusal of CEOs to blog can be summed up in four words: CEOs have a life. If a CEO is doing his job properly, he doesn't have time to spend preparing the type of glorified online diary that is associated most intimately with gas bags, blowhards, navel-gazers, crackpots, conspiracy theorists and lonely guys. CEOs are expected to make important decisions about products and policy, not to ramble, rhapsodize, rant, blue sky, build castles in the air, muse out loud or bloviate. That's what bloggers are for.

But as Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Donald Trump and even Matt Drudge will tell you, if you're not getting paid for it, it's probably not worth a whole lot. In this sense, encouraging CEOs to blog is like encouraging them to clean up the local lake or remove graffiti from public transportation. It's a nice thought, but CEOs have better things to do. If you're running a company and you have time to write a blog, maybe it's time to find someone less chatty to run the company.

You know how it works. You're sitting at your terminal, minding your own business, when the Powers That Be rush in shouting some new term. "Blogs!" they yell, "Blooooggggsss! We must have a blog!" while wildly waving some business magazine article in your face. Erk.

While you don't have much of a choice in the matter, the fact is that many hot new technologies aren't always appropriate for everyone. While they may seem hip and get written about with breathless abandon by business magazines, not all new trends are worthwhile.

They can often turn into giant time-sucks or, worse yet, end up mouldering on the server, starved for the content they need to keep going, making the company look worse by the day as the "last updated" date ages ungracefully.

Our staff editors will contribute to the blog, but it won't be as "journalistic" as the stories that publish in our News section. Blog entries won't be third-party edited or fact-checked, as all our news stories are. They won't be subject to the thumbs-up or -down scrutiny of the daily news meeting. The blog won't necessarily be subject to the outside verification rule we hold our news stories to. We may write up something on the blog directly from a press release, for example. Doing that in a news story without first speaking with outside sources is a big no-no. The blog's a place where inverted-pyramid reporting isn't the rule, and a wee bit of opinion or bias may sneak into the text.

Does that undermine our blog's credibility? We doubt that very much. ClickZ editors' coverage of interactive marketing and advertising issues is, after all, a far cry from your Aunt Selma blogging the same topics. We're professional journalists with deep and highly specialized industry knowledge.

We're also using the blog to update, expand upon, or annotate existing news stories.

"Let me just explain it this way: Every webpage will become a television station," he said. "Think of the webpage as a video magazine. ... In a few years, if people open the page and see words and data, they might change the channel on you."

I think that blogging is going more and more mainstream, and in 10 years I doubt it will be called "blogging." It may not even look like what we're doing today. But the whole idea [of being] able to quickly express what you want to say online is going to be still a big part of what we do.

Another big part is going to be mobile computing and devices. I use my cell phone right now to post to my Web log. I post something every day to that one with pictures of me. It's mindless, it's just something I can do really quickly and it doesn't interfere with my life at all. ...

Being able to record your life is something that I can imagine everyone [doing]. [Everyone will] have terabyte after terabyte of all these instances of their lives. And certain information is going to be available to certain groups and other will be available only to like family and other stuff will be available only to you. So in 10 years, I can fully imagine every moment of my life is documented. And the privacy will be there to prevent it from being used in a malicious way. But that I think is the biggest thing. We're going into a recording of life.

While that might seem hyperbolic in some spheres, in the blogosphere the Trump stamp of approval shouldn't be taken lightly, one analyst said. "If Donald Trump is blogging, then blogging is about as mainstream as it gets," said Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director at Jupitermedia. "What would make it really interesting is if Trump were truly embracing the media and posting every day and giving us some insight into what makes him tick."

Gartenberg pointed to the example of Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks who's also a persistent media presence. Cuban regularly weighs in on the mass media, the music industry and blogging itself on his Blog Maverick site.

"This shows that technology trends are compressing," Gartenberg added. "You didn't see 'Trump the Web site' right way. But now he's recognizing that here's a medium he can embrace to extend his message. That's a pretty strong statement from a guy who already reaches millions with his TV show. He's not someone who needs more of an audience, so there's probably a message in this for other CEOs."

Thanks to the blogosphere, on relatively short order, I went from writing twice a week to 10-15 times a week and sometimes more. There are plenty more where I came from that are feeling and responding in-kind to that same pressure. But, as the established media community picks up the pace, there are those of us in it who would prefer to keep constant the number of chances we're taking. But if the PR community doesn't also reinvent itself to keep pace with the media revolution by responding to the fact checkers on blogopshere time, it will leave those writers with no choice but to take more chances. I don't know about you, but if I were a PR professional, I sure wouldn't want to be the guy that blew that one opportunity to contain the story that snow-balled into a disaster for the company I represent.

And wouldn't you know it? That's when his blog took off. As bloggers spread the word about the drama at iFulfill.com, Purdue's blog at last began to generate buzz -- though hardly the kind he had envisioned. No, it became an online exhibit of a company's demise, in real time. As Purdue explained why he was shutting the doors, customers weighed in with comments, many of them expressing fury. Competing shippers in the fulfillment industry popped up on the blog, offering their services.

Of course, most blogs are mind-numbingly dull. You need to dig deep to find the gems and that is exactly what Best of The Web has done for you. We identify 100 of the best blogs in 20 categories ranging from Art and Literary blogs, to Small Business, Marketing, Shopping and Music blogs.

Paul Rosenfeld, the general manager of QuickBooks Online Edition, couldn't agree more.

"The customer is already talking about the corporation and its products online. Just Google the name of your product plus 'sucks' and you'll see what I mean," Rosenberg said. "You can be a part of the conversation or you can ignore it.

"We started a blog in July 2004. We believed a more authentic and uncontrived marketing message with customers would get more of their confidence," he said.

David Sifry, Technorati's chief executive officer, said three-quarters of the 9,000 corporate blogs Technorati has tracked are high-tech companies and most of the rest are related to high-tech.

"Of the non-tech blogs, they are mostly public-relations companies, marketing consultancies and real estate," he said.