In the past 24 hours we have heard Microsoft may launch an audacious bid for exclusive access to NewsCorp content, potentially gaining untold advantage over Google. In the same session, BNET broke the story about iRascible iPhone developers defecting to other platforms.

Taken independently these revelations mean little to the web user. In conjunction, they represent a seismic shift in the way web content and services could be dished out, at first uniquely and latterly, omnidirectionally.

It’s an exceptional news day; but these are exceptional times.

• In SuperTweets (viz Robert Scoble), Twitter may finally have discovered a way to monetise its content aside from loaning its firehose to titans such as Bing and Google.
• Facebook has broken even, for the first time in its history.
• Both Google and Firefox, in Wave and Raindrop respectively, may have developed a successor to email.

What’s next for your business?

Are you ready for the Next Big Thing? Or will you be like the newspaper industry, finally pondering how to wake from its self-induced coma?

Like it or not, change is inevitable. And you need to be ahead of the curve if you are to survive and succeed, big or small.

And if you too read Naked Conversations I’m adamant it’ll change your life.

I learned about Naked Conversations after listening to a podcast interview with co-author Israel (definitely recommend you subscribe to the Six Pixels of Separation ‘cast by the way – and you’ll find this particular episode numbered 170). He sounded a clued-up boy and as you know I’m fascinated about anything that might help me further my understanding of one-to-one customer communications.

So I picked it up with Florida in mind. I find the best way to soak up info is to take yourself away from your usual zone so you’re totally exposed to new ideas.

Naked Conversations isn’t so much a guide to doing blogging right, more a guide on how not to go wrong.

Simply, it discusses the history of conversational marketing; this relatively new form of one-to-one communication, its practitioners, why you need to start working on it now, and how to avoid the pitfalls.

Conversational marketing in its purest form is business blogging. Naked Conversations rightly explains that it’s not a magic bullet, but a point on the communications continuum. But you should be launching your own blog right now because your competitors have either cut a dash and are already sapping your client base, or if you’re lucky enough to be the first to business blog in your market segment, you could be reaping huge rewards.

The genius of Naked Conversations is that it leaves enough out to make you want to do more research so you can master the art for yourself. From this book we discover the experiences of a huge gamut of business bloggers, from those that do it right a la Microsoft with its free-for-all policy on employee blogging, to those that patently failed (and some that did, and then turned it around, such as French cosmetics company Vichy that began its blogging life with a fictitious character – a big no no).

There’s quite a lot of ego in this sideshow but it’s often set aside for the greater good. The two writers undeniably deserve acclaim: Robert Scoble was a Microsoft evangelist and co-launched Channel 9, a vlog responsible for garnering a mighty turnaround in public opinion about the Redmond empire; Shel Israel is a quarter-century veteran of PR with numberless successes under his belt.

What shocked me most about this book was that it was published more than three years ago. Before Twitter and the indomitable rise in popularity of social networking. Before podcasting really took hold. And yet the world of business blogging has barely changed. Now…

• Go read and learn why business blogging should be on your customer communications strategy
• Be inspired by the authors’ blogs: Scobelizer, and Global Neighbourhoods (respect to Israel for the unAmericanization of that spelling!)