Well, you should be. Yeah, you. We've told you so. Now BusinessWeek is telling you. In an article modeled after a blog, and going off in about as many directions, Stephen Baker and Heather Green make a convincing case for blogging. So convincing, that we don't need to repeat here. Instead we'll give you the "Readers' Digest" version. Blogs are the new word of mouth; marketing, messaging and customer relations, all happening at once. Or, as we put it in our one-pager The Blogging Advantage (PDF), blogs allow you to make high-trust impressions with a valuable demographic at a low cost. If you're not doing it yet, you should be. Yesterday. If you're convinced that you should be blogging, the next step is figuring out how you'll go about it, and who you want to reach. That's where we come in.

Anyone can start a blog these days. Got five minutes? Go to Blogger.Com, and you'll have a blog before you know what you want to do with it. But wait. Don't, just yet. Do a couple of things before you kick start your blogging career. First, grab our report, The Empowerment Age (PDF), to get a general lay of the land concerning how many blogs are out there, who's writing them, who's reading them, and why.

Read a few blogs. Has anyone in your field started a blog? Track them down. Read them. Daily. Check their blogrolls and read some of the blogs linked there. Read those blogs, and the ones on their blogrolls, and you'll get an idea of what people are talking about. Get yourself an RSS reader, or sign on to one of the online services (like Bloglines) and start gathering feeds of the blogs you're reading.

As long your browser and RSS reader are fired up, get over to del.icio.us. Surprise, it's not a blog. It's a social bookmarks manager, organized by tags created on the fly. You probably noticed the "Happening Now" box on our homepage.  Those are our del.icio.us links, with their own RSS feed. You can add our feed to your RSS reader, and always know what we think is the most interesting stuff online. It's another way of sharing information, but more direct.

So, you've been tracking the online buzz, and reading blogs. You're ready to join the conversation. Maybe you've even got your blogging service or software picked out (there's dozens to choose from). But how do you start? How do you blog and do it well from day one? Our best practices for blogging is a good place to start.

Blogging is quickly turning into a medium for reaching target audiences not just with text, but with audio and video as well. Podcasting --  creating, organizing, and distributing to audio  in MP3 format -- should probably be next on your list. We've been doing our own podcasts for a while now. Check them out to get an idea of what podcasts are like. There's also vlogging; that's blogging with video.

Do you see where this is going? Baker and Green rightly trace blogging all the way back to the printing press. In ways Gutenberg never imagined, the power to find and distribute information is in the hands of more people than ever; including you.

Blogging has arrived, podcasting is close on its heels, and vlogging is catching up to podcasting; all leading right to an ocean of potential readers, listeners and viewers. If you followed the suggestions in this post, you've at least walked up to edge of the  shore, stuck a toe in the water, and looked out over the vast expanse of possibility. You know the breadth and depth of that ocean of possibility.

So, are you ready to take the plunge?