I really enjoy reading Paul Kedrosky's articles on The National Post and his blog, Infectious Greed.  The issue is that for the wider Internet audience, some of his great articles get lost behind the NP's "Subscriber Exclusive" policy.  Case in point: Paul's great article on this weekend (the Saturday edition), entitled "Is There a Business Case for Blogging?". 

Unfortunately, I cannot repost it here, because despite enjoying the article, being a subscriber and wanting to share it with you, I have to respect the author's and the newspaper's copyrights.  But perhaps I can just make a few comments on the main points that Paul brings up, while staying within the bounds of copyright laws.

The main inspiration for the story comes from the news headline that Six Apart announced it was going to receive a $10 million VC cash infusion.  So the leit motif is: will other VCs follow August Capital's lead and invest in the blogging industry?  Apart from Google's acquisition of Pyra Labs (the company that runs Blogger) back in February of 2003, this was the first time a VC invested on the idea of there being a business case for blogging.

So besides advertising (since blogs target specific audiences that could be of interest to some advertisers), are there other business uses for blogging?  Well, the article suggests that enterprises might become interested in blogging as a way to share information across several groups. 

My own take is that this sort of application is perhaps a morph between blogs and wikis - a major information depository for a firm, except that with wikis, anyone can collaborate, and in a blog, only a few people with access control the site.  But those lines can easily get blurred (for instance, with Blogware, the software that I use to run this site, the blog author can have a few trusted friends contribute with their own articles and in that fashion it sort of becomes a mini-wiki for those authors; similarly, some wikis can restrict the contributors and control who can post and who cannot).  When does a blog become a wiki or vice versa?  Obviously, wikis are of interest to firms, and this has been previously discussed here at Technology Futurist.

This past Thursday, Dell (Nasdaq:DELL) unveiled its consumer electronic products, just in time for the holiday shopping season. The lineup includes plasma televisions, new printers and a sleek personal digital music player targeting the same consumer segment as the iPod mini.

Obviously, the recent foray into consumer electronics is definitely indicative of Dell's strategy to continue to leverage its direct-sales model to sell a wider range of products.  But what about the $199 Dell Pocket DJ?  Can it take away some market share from Apple's iPod?  The new Pocket DJ has a nicer design than the older model, weighing 4.4 ounces and having a capacity of about 5 GB (good enough for about 2,500 songs).  Apple owns the digital music player market (using HDs as storage), with about 90 percent of the share.

What are the experts saying?  Om Malik had an interesting insight on his blog post, from Steve Milunovich (the Merrill Lynch strategy czar, whose opinion is definitely one of the most respected in Wall Street):

Here are a couple of more interesting reviews at Gizmodo, my favorite gizmo review site:

• DigitalLife: Dell DJ 20GB and Dell Pocket DJ 5
• Two New Dell Music Players