Business bloggers are no longer interested in finding out about blogging. Or at least so it seems. The lack of interest means that the latest Blog Business Summit has been cancelled. This follows three years where the Blog Business Summit was THE place to go to find out about the latest developments in business blogging.

According to the organisers, the reason is that business blogging has been subsumed into general social networking sites, like Facebook and MySpace, where you can do a host of other activities and write blogs. Indeed, so confident are the founders of the Blog Business Summit that this is the way to go, that they have set up Web Community Forum, a discussion and meeting site where the latest on the use of social media is written about.

However, the lack of interest in blogging for business is not because the technology has matured. Nor is it because businesses realise that social networking and blogging are now intertwined. Neither is this lack of interest in business blogging due to the fact that companies perceive it to be part of the marketing mix.

Instead, it’s because the vast majority of businesses still don’t understand what blogging is. Most people’s impression of blogging is a diary or online journal with some trivia in it. True there are lots of blogs like that. But blogging is simply a name given to a content management system. For example, this web site is made up of three separate blogs – spot the joins! Here is another web site that is technically a blog – click this link for a surprise.

Because most businesses have not yet worked out that blogging is about content management, they have given up the notion of adding a blog to their business because they can’t see the point of blogs generally. Neither can I when they only tell me that someone has fed their cat, or just been down to the shops. But a content management system – that’s a business essential.

So why has everyone deserted the Blog Business Summit? Well, social media, Facebook and so on, all seem so much more interesting. They appear to provide what blogging seemed to promise – more interaction with people. And true, they can help a business. But everyone online needs to manage their content and blogging tools provide the easiest and cheapest way of doing that, especially for small businesses. Rather than walking away from blogging, businesses need to embrace it. Giving up blogging is precisely the wrong thing to do.