Last week, I got a message from Maria Breza, BusinessWeek’s Marketing Director, inviting me to try Business Exchange.

It’s a new site the magazine’s publishers are hoping will engage – and build – its audience by giving them the ability to read, save (bookmark a story someone else has already added), and add news items from around the web.

The fact that I can save relevant content – even if it’s not from BusinessWeek – is a good move for the long-term success of this site. Richard Pérez-Peña of the New York Times says:

This is hardly a revolutionary idea in the wiki era, but for a mainstream publication, it represents a significant loosening of control. (But not too loose — new topics require editorial approval, promised within 24 hours, and objectionable posts will be taken down.)

BusinessWeek has a number of features planned for the site:

Activities around stories (like saving, adding and soon commenting) will raise the most relevant information to the top of the results.

Users can also create their own personal profiles which will keep track of their activities allowing other users to see what information has been useful to them.

Bloggers can add RSS feeds of their postings to relevant topics and their content will appear in those topics when postings match relevant keywords for that topic.

For a while now, I’ve been unimpressed with the options for saving business-related articles I find useful and want to revisit or reuse. Digg is just too juvenile, del.icio.us has been stagnant as a product (to be fair it did get an upgrade recently, but it’s been so long that I haven’t gone back to see if anything has improved), and my web browser’s bookmarking feature just seems too dated – I’m afraid anything I put there will be out of mind.

But Business Exchange has kept me coming back. Since Thursday, I’ve created two topics (Enterprise Wiki Adoption, and Presentation Design & Delivery), participated in eight (by reading or saving stories), added 6 stories and saved 10. I’ve also added 10 people to my network, which allows me to see the stories they read, add, or save.

I like the idea that I can keep track of stories I find relevant & useful, in the context of a community of other businesspeople, and that shared interest in highly focused topics can reveal more stories I might not otherwise have found. Now if only they would release that feature that lets me add the RSS feed for Grow Your Wiki…

Business Exchange is slated to be released in September 2008.