by Stacy Conradt

Created on: April 04, 2007

Because technology is changing rapidly, this means that the way people communicate - both personally and professionally - is changing rapidly as well. Corporations that used to rely on pen and paper and the U.S. post office have advanced to voicemail, e-mail, and even instant messaging to make sure that employees are connected to volumes of information at any given second. Some companies are even looking even beyond e-mail and instant messaging to other new ways of communicating electronically: through blogs (Web logs), podcasts, wikis, discussion boards and streaming video, among other means. Indeed new ways of communicating digitally are being developed at a fast pace and with greater speed.

But are these new technologies useful or just distracting? Just because a medium is available does not necessarily mean that a need exists for it. While having a blog or a podcast may be important to a technology-based company such as Apple or Microsoft, does it have the same importance in other companies that do not concern themselves primarily with new media technologies?

The advent of these new technologies poses several problems. Many technologies, such as the discussion forum and the blog, allow for a high level of interactivity from users. When used in an adult manner, feedback and discussion ican be very beneficial. But when the first user writes something slanderous or replies in an unprofessional manner, the usefulness of the tool decays as responses get edited and feedback gets diluted.

This study focuses on one such mode of communicating electronically, through blogs. Although reports now indicate that people use them more frequently, do they take blogs seriously? Do they feel a blog is an appropriate forum to stay in touch with his or her workforce, or do they consider it too informal? Because people differ in the extent to which they use blogs, will a knowledge gap accrue among the usually technologically-savvy bloggers versus those who do not?

What are blogs?
The Webster's dictionary defines a Web log as "a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page."
That the use of Web logs is exploding can be exemplified on Technorati.com, a Web site that tracks blogs and the topics that are being discussed within them. It first began tracking blogs in November 2002, when it was tracking a mere 13,000 blogs.Just three years later it reports that more than 20 million blogs went through its system. Only six months prior to that, the site hit the 10 million

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