BusinessWeek to launch Business Exchange

Now that the announcement has been made (in the NYTimes), I can finally write about BusinessWeek’s Business Exchange. It’s a big bid by our company to create communities around topics of interest, and to mine the smarts and connections of people who visit our sites. It’s still a work in progress. Comments, a crucial component, are not yet activated. I won’t spell out here the changes I want to see, but if you take a few minutes to visit a few of the sites, I’d love to hear your thoughts. (Portfolio’s Felix Salmon, for one, is skeptical.)

Why do this? The future of media features a bunch of companies that master algorithms. Big ones are Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Smaller ones include DayLife and Inform. As I see it (and I’m just a small participant in this effort) this is an attempt to take on algorithms with community (and to produce plenty of content that can be easily found by search engines). In that sense, Business Exchange is a distant cousin to Wikipedia, and a much closer one to Digg and LinkedIn (which has an online partnership with us).