Smart people starting to recognize the value of business blogs

July 19, 2003

Smart people are starting to realize that business blogs can represent 'channels' of valuable information for different objectives. Most people look at me like I'm from a different planet when I advocate the use of multiple weblogs for different purposes, especially inside corporate environments.

Typically, bloggers believe that weblogs are for one purpose - a personal journal; this is extremely narrow-minded thinking.

A few bright people are starting to realize that they could be useful for customer-facing content, but they too carry baggage concerning the assumed use of blogs on the Public Web. Some go so far as to define what a blog must and must not have - rubbish - a blog doesn't need a 'voice'; it could have hard facts and science - it's simply a medium for conveying information. Some of it may be subjective, some of it may be objective.

Unfortunately very few companies realize the potential of friction-free, personal publishing for enterprise use, but Chad Dickerson get's it, and further recognizes that varying types of content need to be streamed (or channeled) to different types of users and with secure methodologies.

"Not everything I deal with on a daily basis can be distributed publicly, but there is still information that needs to be disseminated regularly and made available to a group on an ongoing basis."

Chad correctly points out that corporate weblogs have a different set of requirements that revolve around security, permissions, and discovery. The blogging framework must be designed to meet these requirements.

"I think one of the biggest mistakes people in corporate IT make is wrongly assuming that documentation is something that ends at some point. In reality, IT is an organic beast, and documentation is never really complete. Fortunately, the Weblog paradigm gives corporate IT the means to create documentation that works the way people think -- in dates (When did this happen to the system?), incidents (What happened, and how was it fixed?), and people (Who fixed it?).

We've used the Groove discussion to manage the IT logistics of office moves, server migrations, and the RFP (request for proposal) process for Web hosting. This method of group documentation works better in practice than anything I've ever seen."

Chad also recognizes the need for chrono-based content; something that blogs tend to force. However, the architecture of the blog tool should allow other types of displays and content reuse that may require other formats (ergo, XSLT, XML-based persistence model, etc).

Article by Bill French
Source: The MyST

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