Blogs On The Stock Exchange?

Patrick Ruffini asks, “are we on the verge of a Dot Blog Boom”:

We may be on the verge of a dot blog boom — an echo of the dot com boom that gripped the markets in the late ’90s. In the next two years, you’ll see companies with the word “blog” in them go public on Wall Street. You’ll also see their share prices come crashing down, but not before the irreversible forces of creative destruction are set into motion, creating vastly enhanced blogging technologies crafted by profitable dot blog survivors that make the medium a force to be reckoned with in corporate America.

Fortune magazine seems to agree with him.

(All of which begs the question: when Samizdata goes public, will they register on the London Stock Exchange rather than the NYSE to avoid Sarbanes-Oxley?)

We’ve got a ways to go to reach that point, of course. Whenever I query a magazine on the subject, or request a book title to review for Blogcritics, I still feel compelled to explain to whoemever I’m emailing just what the heck a Blog is. (Often by using my 2002 SpinTech piece as a guide). There’s much less need for that (see my Tech Central Station piece for ten reasons why), but knowledge of Weblogs isn’t universal yet. Compare them to conventional Websites: 99 percent of the American public knows what a Website is even they’re not actually Web surfers. And of course, as James Lileks noted recently, nobody has to explain what AM and FM mean.

Weblogs haven’t reached that point. Yet.