"Markets are conversations," announced the famous New Economy screed The Cluetrain Manifesto, published in 2000. The manifesto's theme is that the Internet allows many more such conversations -- but that they are only valuable if they are conducted in an authentic human voice. "In just a few more years," the mani-festo warns, "the current homogenized 'voice' of business -- the sound of mission statements and brochures -- will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th-century French court."

Many dot-com nostrums are best forgotten, but the idea that honest, unfiltered conversation between companies and customers might actually be good for business lives on -- and, in fact, is being embraced by dozens of large firms, from Microsoft to Maytag. To the degree that open conversation does happen, it's happening largely through weblogs, or blogs. In their first incarnation in the late 1990s, blogs were mainly personal online diaries, repositories of their authors' daily experiences, passions, and frustrations. But over the past year or two, a new kind of web-log has emerged: the employee blog. Maintained on company servers and open to the public, these blogs are used by many high-tech workers for debate, free association, and collecting input about projects.