Blogs are buzzing - but do they work?

I've noticed recently that outdoor organizations are hitting web 2.0 like it's going out of style.

This probably was inevitable given the number of unofficial groups, blogs, sites and videos from our alumni. At some point a communication director somewhere woke up and said, hey - we'd better get on board with this otherwise we'll loose control of our message.

What I'm wondering is does this work and if so what are the strategies to help make it work well? Or more fundamentally what metrics can we use to even begin to ask and measure that question?

Here's a short list of some official and unofficial web 2.0 sites for big outdoor organizations.
Official NOLS blog
Official (?) NOLS YouTube channel
Big unofficial Facebook NOLS group (sorry must have Facebook account to see this)
Official Thompson Island MySpace profile
Unofficial Outward Bound instructor group on Facebook
Official North Carolina Outward Bound YouTube channel
Boy Scouts of America "Cub Cast"

I know there are many more, but that's just a sample to get started with. I'm not the first person to ask this question, Li and Bernoff asked about the ROI of blogging, and Hallett has posted about best practices for blogging events.

Alpine Towers to launch blog and e-newsletter

Alpine Towers International, the fantastic North Carolina based company who built our ropes course just announced in their spring paper newsletter that they are soon to be launching a blog and e-newsletter.

Exciting to see a great company embrace this new medium to tell their story. As I find out more I'll pass it along.

Nice Canadian Blog

I found this nice Canadian blog on Outdoor Education tonight - check it out!

I've been looking around for blogs similar to ours but I haven't had much luck - many of the once I have found either don't enable comments or haven't been updated in a while. What's going on - am I just clueless? Maybe I'm missing some sweet sites out there?

Are we slow to engage in this new technology as outdoors people? Or maybe it's just hard to find each other with so many names for what we do - are we outdoor, adventure, experiential or what?