Re: A short course on the business value of weblogs and weblog communities (v. 1) by Bud Gibson.
As a BBA at University of Michigan, I'm currently in my second class taught by Bud. This one is BIT320, Databases & Information. Bud taught us about weblogs and their business value by going though all of these steps with us. He also brought in guest speakers from Menlo Inovations and Myst Technology. So after expereincing this short course myself as a student, I believe this is a great idea to do for undergraduate business majors.
I took this class because I wanted to be able to understand databases well enough so that I could organize University of Michigan Dance Marathon's finance database efficiently. I never expected to learn anything about weblogs and RSS, especially since I had never heard of them before. But now I know what they are and understand their value.
For example, I now recognize the value of implementing blogging into our Dance Marathon website. It would be a great way for each Central Planning Team member to communicate to committee members and dancers. Especially since Sage or an RSS feed on the website or into a my.yahoo page would allow members to see information when its blogged and refer back to those blogs when needed. Just as important, it could provide the same use to current and potential sponsors.
I beleive this understanding will benefit me in my career. Most likely because I want to start my own business some day and weblogs will offer me an effective way to get consumers to visit my site (via obtaining a good pagerank status on search engines).
