Mitch Ratcliffe provides notes on Robert Scoble's presentation at the Blog Business Summit:

How to start a blog: Read 50 blogs for two weeks. Find blogs about topics you care about and read them. [This is analogous to the response to a young writer: "Read authors who speak to you."]

If you are a plumber in Seattle and you're the first to blog, you will benefit from Google's search placing you higher in its results. Robert found a plumber that way recently.

Two things that make a good blog: Passion [how often you post and go to information sources, like trade shows] and authority [knowledge level and clarity]. He knows a guy who blogs on his Prowler [note: Scoble said the guy blogs, but there's no evidence of a blog at the link he points to] and knows the rate of pay of the people who built it, the color of the factory floor and much more. "After a half hour of talking to this guy, I wanted to go buy one."

...via Tom Peters