Blogging has become an emerging phenomenon in the business world. New blogs are launched every second and it should come as no surprise that 22 percent of the most popular web sites from last year were blogs. This revolutionary medium is transforming the way business and customers communicate with each other, and large corporations (Fortune 500), aware of the importance of this new communication tool, have started creating their own blogs.
The term blog - short for “web log” - refers to an online journal where an individual, group, or corporation presents a record of activities, thoughts, or beliefs. Many of them provide a forum to allow visitors to leave comments and interact with the publisher.
As the blogosphere, often referred to as today’s “Wild West,” is increasingly decentralized and ungoverned, it is becoming ever more difficult to sift through the sheer volume of blogs to find those of most value or interest.
In response, the IESE Library has decided to offer you a guide to some of the best sites of the business & economics blogosphere:

Undercover Economist
Hosted by FT.com, Undercover Economist presents interesting explanations about economics in everyday life. The blog is written and edited by Tim Harford, a journalist who writes leaders for the FT and two columns for the FT Magazine. He also answers readers’ questions on the Dear Economist blog.

Free Exchange
Hosted by Economist.com, the Free Exchange blog debates real-life economics. It is maintained by several journalists from The Economist Newspaper, Economist.com and the Economist Intelligence Unit. Readers are allowed to intervene and their comments are answered.

Dealbook
This site won the 2007 Webby Award in the category of “blog-business.” DealBook is a financial news service produced by The New York Times and edited by Andrew Ross Sorkin, who claims the blog “brings together all of the most important and relevant news in one place, with the sensibility of a busy executive in mind.”

Marginal Revolution
One of the most popular economics blogs in the blogosphere, this site is written and edited by Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and the Center for the Study of Public Choice. His aim is to contribute, through his ideas, to the achievement of “small steps toward a much better world”.

Freakonomics
A popular blog hosted by the New York Times and maintained by Steven Levitt (professor of economics at the University of Chicago) and Stephen J. Dubner (NYT journalist), authors of the best-selling book of the same name. They try to “explore the hidden side of everything” through their blog.

How to Change the World
Guy Kawasaki's “practical blog for impractical people” is one of the most popular venture capital blogs. As well as boasting a BA from Stanford and MBA from UCLA, Kawasaki also has an honorary doctorate from Babson College. He has experience as an evangelist, entrepreneur, investment banker, and venture capitalist. He is the managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc.

Other interesting tools:

Blogger Code of Ethics
CyberJournalist.net has created a model Bloggers' Code of Ethics, by modifying the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics for the weblog world. Admittedly, these are just guidelines; ultimately, it is up to individual bloggers to choose their own best practices.

Blogging Tips, Hints & Tricks You Need to Know to Be a Top Blogger
This is an interesting webpage in About.com devoted to web logs. You will find a host of useful information about how to start a blog and other blogging tips, hints and tricks to make your blog stand out and have an impact in the blogosphere.

If you want to measure blog popularity:

Technorati
Rating and ranking the popularity and influence of blogs by various criteria. It is a useful tool for identifying the most important sites and trends in the blogosphere. It shows the crosslinks between blogs and is an Internet search engine for blogs. As of December 2007, Technorati had indexed over 112 million weblogs.

The EconDirectory
Brian Gongol uses traffic logs to rank business and economics websites. These rankings are based solely upon the websites' publicly-available traffic logs; sites without these logs are not included in the rankings.

Google Reader
Google reader reveals the number of subscribers to any given feed. Though not always easy to find, it does serve as a useful measure.

To know more about blogs, search on the IESE Library collections. We recommend Business Source Complete for articles and Forrester for trends, business impact and statistics.

New resource: Thomson One Banker contents expanded

The IESE Library has substantially expanded its subscription to Thomson One Banker.

Produced by Thomson Financial, it provides integrated access to several financial databases providing a wide range of data on internationally quoted companies, international stock exchange indices, private equity and financial deals. It is an excellent resource for conducting in-depth financial research.

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Hints and Tips: Comparing a Company to Its Industry

Evaluating the performance of an individual company by comparing it with that of its industry as a whole is quick and easy, using the right sources. Several databases available at IESE Library have this functionality: Orbis, Amadeus, Sabi, Thomson One Banker and Factiva. Select the database you want to use from the E-resources list and follow the instructions below:

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We recommend

Sometimes statistics are not always easy to find on the net. The reason is simply that some people do not know where to start looking. Here we list three interesting official statistics portals that provide access to a broad range of free and updated data. Your statistics starting point!

OECD Stat

OECD.Stat enables users to search for and extract data from across OECD’s many databases included in SourceOECD. It will be freely available as a beta release - via OECD’s iLibrary - for the first half of 2008.

Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Communities, publishes official harmonized statistics of the European Union, the Euro area and EFTA countries. All Eurostat statistical data and publications are available free of charge. You can register to receive alerts on publications or other updates on the site, and to have access to a high number of data cells and more sophisticated extraction tools.

The Spanish National Statistics Institute maintains a useful page with links to many of the most important statistical offices around the world, classified by zones:

• Spain: Autonomous communities, departments and Bank of Spain and other institutions.
• Around the World: European Union, rest of Europe, America, Asia, Oceania and Africa.
• International Organizations: European and rest of the world.

News & Happenings

Training Sessions
Information sessions scheduled for this term, designed to introduce users to information research topics and related online resources.

E-Resources on Trial
See a list of trial e-resources currently being evaluated at IESE Library.