Internal versus external blogging
There's an interesting article on the IT Managers Journal: Enterprise blogs: Business boost or timewaster?
The corporation forms a wall that encompasses the employees activities. The tradition is that what happens at work stays at work, and isn't discussed outside work. Except maybe with your wife/husband. There's some things you'll say within the corporate wall that you won't say outside the wall.
For example, if you disagree with the direction the company is taking, you might speak out about it within the corporate wall, but when speaking to the public you wouldn't say those things. At Sun we have both internal and external blog sites for just this reason.
The article describes "RSS as an important pillar of making any companies communication development and business development actionable" which has too much corporate-speak for my taste. I think the speaker meant that RSS is a means of distributing announcements of postings in a form that is easily digestible with software. Hence, RSS offers interesting possibilities for distributing and aggregating data and ideas and status.
Today the widest use of RSS is with tracking blog postings or articles published on news web sites. Several services and applications exist that handle aggregating large quantities of news feeds. For example I use the blogbridge news reader, and with it am able to quickly scan a whole bunch of news media sources.
Consider a common task inside corporations - the weekly status report to your manager (note to self: I still have to write my status report for this week). How is it done currently? Via email? Via postit left on the managers desk? In my team we use a wiki, I edit the wiki page and put my status at the top of the page.
But, it would be more convenient if it were a blog. In fact, I'm using that wiki page as if it were a blog, since a blog is simply a web site where the newest information is at the top.
Blog software publishes an RSS file. My manager could use blogbridge, and subscribe it to the blogs of all his employees and any other blogs he feels are important to watch. Once one of us posts something, he'd be quickly notified. He could click on the link and read it in his web browser, and make comments on the page. Likewise, so could any of the team members. I haven't tried this in practice, but doing status communications this way is likely to be more flexible and useful in the end. If nothing else the status communications and commentary are automatically archived by the blogging system, whereas in the current system we might comment on each others status via email rather than on the wiki page.
As the article suggests - blogging can take a role in "general groupware" and embed itself in business practices. They discuss this as informal collaboration in the context of information sharing.
The corporation forms a wall that encompasses the employees activities. The tradition is that what happens at work stays at work, and isn't discussed outside work. Except maybe with your wife/husband. There's some things you'll say within the corporate wall that you won't say outside the wall.
For example, if you disagree with the direction the company is taking, you might speak out about it within the corporate wall, but when speaking to the public you wouldn't say those things. At Sun we have both internal and external blog sites for just this reason.
The article describes "RSS as an important pillar of making any companies communication development and business development actionable" which has too much corporate-speak for my taste. I think the speaker meant that RSS is a means of distributing announcements of postings in a form that is easily digestible with software. Hence, RSS offers interesting possibilities for distributing and aggregating data and ideas and status.
Today the widest use of RSS is with tracking blog postings or articles published on news web sites. Several services and applications exist that handle aggregating large quantities of news feeds. For example I use the blogbridge news reader, and with it am able to quickly scan a whole bunch of news media sources.
Consider a common task inside corporations - the weekly status report to your manager (note to self: I still have to write my status report for this week). How is it done currently? Via email? Via postit left on the managers desk? In my team we use a wiki, I edit the wiki page and put my status at the top of the page.
But, it would be more convenient if it were a blog. In fact, I'm using that wiki page as if it were a blog, since a blog is simply a web site where the newest information is at the top.
Blog software publishes an RSS file. My manager could use blogbridge, and subscribe it to the blogs of all his employees and any other blogs he feels are important to watch. Once one of us posts something, he'd be quickly notified. He could click on the link and read it in his web browser, and make comments on the page. Likewise, so could any of the team members. I haven't tried this in practice, but doing status communications this way is likely to be more flexible and useful in the end. If nothing else the status communications and commentary are automatically archived by the blogging system, whereas in the current system we might comment on each others status via email rather than on the wiki page.
As the article suggests - blogging can take a role in "general groupware" and embed itself in business practices. They discuss this as informal collaboration in the context of information sharing.
posted by David at 7:36 AM
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