Are You Blogging Yet?
This is an excellent article at InformationWeek about the blogging trend and how blogs can be useful inside a company for things like project and knowledge management.
Interestingly, UserLand popped up again:
“John Robb, president and chief operating officer of UserLand Software Inc., which develops blogging technology, envisions individual workers using blogging tools to jot down their thoughts during the course of the day and as a platform for collaboration among colleagues. A doctor might make note of a new symptom that’s begun to appear in patients during the summer months, or an insurance agent may observe that a series of accidents involved a certain vehicle model. ‘The basic organizational structure of a weblog—they’re time-stamped and archived—provides a record of what people are doing and thinking,’ Robb says.”
Robb has apparently coined the term “klogs” for knowledge management blogs and has a Yahoo! group on the subject.
What Links Here
Blogs and KM
Companies get into weblog act: The article is so-so, but it includes this great paragraph on the value of blogs to knowledge management: Consider: Every business needs to know what its employees know. Companies are crammed with experts on various topics whose knowledge goes to waste — because nobody knows what…
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There’s no denying that blogging is a disruptive force in many areas—journalism, enterprise knowledge management, web marketing, content management, and many more. But, like any new paradigm, blogging is in for a period of growing pains.
Blogging technology evolved to meet the needs of the grass roots bloggers—predominantly, individuals wishing to publish to the World with minimal friction. The unintended consequence of current blogging technology was demonstrating the power of blog-like technology for enterprises—organizations that don’t necessarily wish to publish (everything) to the World.
I just read John Foley's excellent article on the state of blogging in InformationWeek. I found it interesting that while explaining the benefits of blogging for enterprises, this article also—inadvertently, I suspect—offers a great example, of why many enterprises will resist the use of today’s popular blogging tools. Specifically, John writes, “People may switch employers, but they'll take with them electronic journals of their best ideas.” More than a few enterprises would frown on this, to put it kindly, yet this is what today’s popular tools enable. (In fact, some actually mandate this by making each user’s own machine the content server).
The needs of enterprises are very different from the needs of individuals. Enterprise blogging technology must (just for a start):
- Provide granular access permissions—not all posts are for all eyes
- Easily aggregate postings of multiple authors
- Provide cross-author searching
- Discover semantic relationships between postings automatically
- Support behind-the-firewall deployment
- Support SSL connections for secure transmission of company confidential material
- Provide content agility—the ability to easily repurpose content for different use cases
MySmartChannels (and its underlying Web service platform) was built specifically to meet the emerging needs of enterprises while maintaining the individual benefits associated with personal blogging. A public version of MySmartChannels is available online for anyone to use for free at http://myst-technology.com.
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