(June 26, 2003) - The real power of blogs is not in industry or trend watching. Something like 2% of the people who are online currently have a blog that they've updated in the past 30 days. The roughly 2.5 million active bloggers  write about their lives, their divorces, their hobbies, their reading, their jobs and their work hunting experiences. Someone you know (or at the very minimum, someone known by someone you know) is publishing a blog.

Like the 20 Million or so personal websites scattered around Yahoo, AOL and other services, these blogs can be understood as complex resumes. Pretty soon you'll see the 'search the internet for candidates' course offering to search all of blogdom. In part, that's a legitimate way to understand the phenomenon.

From another perspective, it's something larger. Transparency, a term straight out of the Enron mess, is becoming a way of life. When 2% of the world is writing a public journal, your time in the sun is just moments away. Company transgressions, abusive bosses, impossible conditions or outrageous assignments all make great fodder for the churning machine of blog journalism.