Fortune magazine has issued its top 10 technology trends to watch, and blogs are at the top of the list. Writers David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth do a nice job of summarizing the impact of blogs on business:

a company’s worst PR nightmare, its best chance to talk with new and old customers, an ideal way to send out information, and the hardest way to control it. Blogs are challenging the media and changing how people in advertising, marketing, and public relations do their jobs. A few companies like Microsoft are finding ways to work with the blogging world???even as they’re getting hammered by it. So far, most others are simply ignoring it.

Jim Horton responds to the article—worth reading for its thorough coverage of blogging’s impact on business—by reasserting the idea that the profession needs to get up to speed in a hurry.

If PR’s job is to protect the reputation of organizations and their products and services, then Fortune is saying we had better be involved in blogging and with bloggers now, not later. Unfortunately, I don’t detect that strong an interest among PR practitioners. It seems as if the blogging crowd talks to itself more than to the PR marketplace.