«Blogs were once the domain of angst-ridden teens and doomed presidential candidates. But the likes of Verizon, IBM, Microsoft, and Dr. Pepper are all climbing on the blogwagon. Turns out, Web logs are a nifty knowledge-management tool. And companies also see them as a promising medium for advertising.»

And so it goes (in a beautiful redesigned CSS-based layout) It's A Blog World After All article by Fast Company's Jena McGregor. If you are a business person and you are curious what's all this fuss about blogging, maybe you should have a look. It *is* Fast Company, after all.

«The burgeoning blog world--1.6 million keyboard tappers at last count--is making big inroads into corporate culture. From tech companies like Microsoft and IBM to decidedly nontech outfits like Dr. Pepper, companies are starting to use blogging both as a medium to market products and monitor brands and as an internal knowledge-management tool. To meet corporate demand, both UserLand and Six Apart, makers of popular blog software programs, are coming out with enterprise-level products later this year.

Corporate America is jumping onto the blogwagon for many of the same reasons all those journalists, brooding teenagers, and presidential campaigners are already on board. Unlike email and instant messaging, blogs let employees post comments that can be seen by many and mined for information at a later date, and internal blogs aren't overwhelmed by spam. And unlike most corporate intranets, they're a bottoms-up approach to communication. "With blogs, you gain more, you hear more, you understand where things are going more," says Halley Suitt, who wrote a fictional case study on corporations and blogging for the Harvard Business Review. "Even better, you understand them faster."»

And while you are there have a look at the sidebar -- Related Stories round-up:

• Professionals, Publishing for the People : David Weinberger on how conversations within companies can scale globally
• Post(er) Boy : Robert Scoble's starter set of corporate blogging guidelines
• Best Blog Ever : How VH-1 leverages the Web to produce a TV show
• A Little Help from Your Friends : The state of online business networking
• Between the Lines: Six Degrees of Competition : Alison Overholt on the complicity and competition among social network software makers
And -- last but not least -- the proof that they got the message:
• FC Now : Fast Company 's team blog