Technorati: blogs now break news

Technorati, a site that tracks blogs, says one new blog is created every second. Most, admittedly, are not worth reading. Some, however, have become indispensable.

In the technology sector, blogs now break news. Techcrunch, for instance, was the first outlet to report Google’s $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition last year.

They have also threatened to break companies. Famously, an angry post from Jeff Jarvis, the blogger behind Buzzmachine, triggered a wider backlash against Dell’s shoddy customer service.

The PC maker eventually replied in kind, launching its own blogs to harvest customer and employee feedback. Not to stretch the point, but its financial performance has pleased Wall Street just a touch better since.

The brightest blogging bosses hail from the same territory. Jonathan Schwartz, the chief executive of Sun Microsystems, ticks all the boxes: he is readable and prolific. An avowed convert, he argues that a blog is as valid a platform to release corporate information as a conference call with analysts or a newspaper ad. Fittingly, his was the first site to attract an official comment from the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Wall Street watchdog.

His UK-based peers have some catching up to do. Tom most popular blog.

Glocer of Reuters and Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse both make it on to our list, but chiefly through a paucity of competition.

Both their sites look a little unloved, though each chief executive has had a lot on his plate recently, in the way of takeovers and botched product launches respectively.

Robert Scoble, a former Microsoft employee, was allowed to run a site during his time at the company that was often critical of the software giant, a policy that won both parties credibility.

Apple, meanwhile, may present itself as an easygoing alternative to Microsoft, but it forbids unvetted blogging on work matters, lest the practise sully the brand.

Blogs can be particularly dangerous in the hands of an overzealous marketing executive. Wal-Mart, the world’s largest grocer, was recently criticised when it turned out to be behind a “flog”, a misleading fake blog.

But increasingly, if you do not blog about your company, somebody else will. Last year Adrian Melrose, a disgruntled Land Rover owner, founded haveyoursay.com to record the carmaker’s ineptitude. Soon after, if you tapped “Land Rover Discovery” into Google, his was the first site you saw.

Finally, in the finest Reithian tradition, blogs can entertain. Witness the anonymous Going Private site, the Belle de Jour of private equity. Meanwhile, the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs is a parody – but one so good the real Steve Jobs reads it.