Logging On the Web

If you're marketing to a niche or need an online forum for fresh ideas, Web logs could be the new killer app -- and the hottest thing since e-mail.

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If you're marketing to a niche or need an online forum for fresh ideas, Web logs could be the new killer app

Dave Pell has a split personality. By day he's the hard-driving managing partner of Arba Seed Investment Group of San Francisco, an angel-investment firm that funds Internet start-ups. But by night -- or whenever he's got a free hour or so -- he's posting new stuff on his Web site, acting as "chief dotconomist" and scribe of Davenetics, a daily E-mail newsletter that has become required reading for some 12,000 followers of the new economy. "I call Davenetics 'the official newsletter of the next five minutes,'" he jokes.

Pell's nether life as an online Mark Twain is just one example of a growing trend among Netheads called Web logging, or "blogging" for short. Web loggers use their Web sites to show off their insight and expertise; as a broadcast medium for customers, clients, and acquaintances; and even as a company intranet. And as entrepreneurs like Pell are discovering, Web logs can be invaluable for building their businesses and brands.

At its most fundamental level, a Web log is a Web site, or a section of a Web site, whose overriding characteristic is its ever-changing list of links. But Web logs are also Internet-age gardens. Bloggers add new links -- like so many new seeds -- to the top of their Web page, and older, staler items drop to the bottom and are later composted in archives. Web loggers can organize their sites in threaded topic areas, bulletin-board style, and visitors can use Web-logging tools -- such as those available at GrokSoup (www.groksoup.com) -- to easily add their own responses to articles and ideas posted on the site.

As a communications and loyalty-building tool, a Web log provides both a news filter and a freewheeling forum that can enhance a company's reputation and encourage customers to come back to the site. Web logs can also be used as a kind of company intranet to keep employees in the loop. And because Web-logging tools are free and require no programming knowledge to operate, they might just be the hottest thing since E-mail.

Fame in Internet Time
Of course, news digests predate Walter Cronkite. And surfers have passed around links to one another since the birth of the Internet. Plenty of Web sites, such as Slashdot.com and the Drudge Report, are fundamentally little more than Web logs. But thanks to a slew of relatively new, free, downloadable, and look-Ma-no-programming Web-logging tools, creating a Web log is easier than ever. (See "Blog Me, Baby," below.)

Web-logging tools have already turned thousands of Netheads into self-styled news filters and critics. The vast majority of Web loggers are cyberspace hobbyists and subversives, who publish their own daily stream-of-consciousness wanderings using the Internet's vanity press. They pick and choose articles of interest, respond to them, and invite others to contribute their own views on a continuously evolving basis.

Pell, for instance, surfs dozens of Web sites -- ranging from the New York Times online to a gossip site called Techdirt.com -- for the latest Web-related news of interest to entrepreneurs, investors, journalists, and the merely curious. Using a set of easy-to-use Web-logging tools, he creates pithy headlines and descriptions of the articles along with links to the full articles at their original sites.

Call Davenetics an electronic news service with attitude. The mix of news and views that Pell serves up shields his devoted readers from the informational tsunami of the hundreds of conventional news sources that threaten to engulf them. "In this fast-paced E-biz world, time's not merely money, it's survival," says Rik Myslewski, longtime Davenetics fan and editorial director of Productopia.com, a San Francisco-based consumer-information site. " Davenetics' timely updates save me and my troops the precious hours it would take to sift critical news from background noise."

Pell insists that blogging doesn't interfere with his work at Arba Seed Investment. In fact, he says, it's really a part of his job. His newsletter has attracted the interest of publications like Forbes, which now invite Pell (who previously hesitated to approach publications through the usual front door of pitch letters) to contribute articles on seed investments and the Net in general. The publicity "has added a lot of value to my brand," he says, squelching a smile. "I get invited to a lot of nice dinners with smart people offering new business opportunities."

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