I’m actually out of town on a little extended holiday break, which explains the paucity of postings here, though the poor people who work back in our office get no such break as I’ve been pelting them with emails ever since I left.

But had to stop in here to point out the new Fortune cover story on "Top 10 Tech Trends" for 2005 — and of course, one of them is blogging. Money quote:

"Of course, it’s difficult to take the phenomenon seriously when most blogs involve kids talking about their dates, people posting pictures of their cats, or lefties raging about the right (and vice versa). But whatever the topic, the discussion of business isn’t usually too far behind: from bad experiences with a product to good customer service somewhere else. Suddenly everyone’s a publisher and everyone’s a critic. Says Jeff Jarvis, author of the blog BuzzMachine, and president and creative director of newspaper publisher Advance Publications’ Internet division: ‘There should be someone at every company whose job is to put into Google and blog search engines the name of the company or the brand, followed by the word ’sucks,’ just to see what customers are saying.’

"It all used to be so easy; the adage went ‘never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.’ But now everyone can get ink for free, launch a diatribe, and—if what they have to say is interesting to enough people—expect web-enabled word of mouth to carry it around the world. Unlike earlier promises of self-publishing revolutions, the blog movement seems to be the real thing. A big reason for that is a tiny innovation called the permalink: a unique web address for each posting on every blog. Instead of linking to web pages, which can change, bloggers link to one another’s posts, which typically remain accessible indefinitely. This style of linking also gives blogs a viral quality, so a pertinent post can gain broad attention amazingly fast—and reputations can get taken down just as quickly."

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