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David Weinberger is the author of Small Things Loosely Changed: A Unified Theory of the Web, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and an all-around insightful thinker at the crux of business, society, and the Web. Other hats include strategic marketing consultant and most recently, Internet advisor for the Dean campaign (remember those days?). Back in January, on the afternoon of the New Hampshire primary, Fast Company pulled Weinberger in from the cold for a phone chat about blogs in business. Here's an excerpt of the conversation transcript.

Fast Company: What's your view on how much companies are and should be paying attention to what's being said in the blog world?

David Weinberger: Companies have wanted to be able to personalize their offerings, but they've been stuck with a broadcast model for marketing. They're trying to reach masses of people. So you can say, as [one of my co-authors] says in Cluetrain, that markets are conversations, which I thoroughly believe is true. But the immediate question is how do you scale conversations globally? Markets are way too big to have conversations with.

Blogs are part of the answer to that question, because they're built from the bottom up. They are people talking about what they care about in a public forum. They're not one-to-one, but they're also not one-to-many. They're generally small groups who are reading each other's blogs, but together, because the blogs are linked, they form a much wider conversation of the universe.