I am using @rgumente primarily just as a personal tool for archiving things I am interested in as well as writing down comments and structuring my thoughts about diverse topics. I am trying to be as objective as I can and luckily enough I have a handful of loyal readers whose constant feedback is great and obliges me at the same time to keep a standard. I am not making any money out of my blog and don't intend to, at least not in the near future.

While most of the people take blogging the same way as I do, others use blogs for more than that. As it is a relatively new product it still may be difficult to find commercial purposes and even more difficult to structure a definite business model. Some people use ads as a marginal revenue for covering up their hosting costs, some have become "professional bloggers" (see the below post). I believe that one of the niches that blogs can be used for are focus groups. For instance Yahoo (unofficially) and Audi (officially) are already doing it. Umair had a trial of creating such a platform for more companies by using the innomediation concept a while ago.

Another important purpose is corporate communication with all the stakeholders. And that represents double loop feedback in real time. And besides the PR representatives and/or evangelists more and more CEOs jumped in the blogging wagon and sometimes it is fascinating to see how they think and take hints about what exactly is behind the strategic decisions their organizations take on. This means a whole lot more transparency and it is a great add-on to the big context of the corporate social responsibility concept (most) companies have started to take very seriously since Enron.