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Thursday Jan 15, 2004

Thoughts on Blogging The Market.

Comments[1] by Dave in Blogging

I finished reading George Dafermos' paper Blogging The Market: How Weblogs are turning corporate machines into real conversations. The paper is well written and well organized and it captures all of the breathless cluetrain-meets-weblogs hype that the k-loggers know and love (and I mean that in a good way). It also includes a section on behind-the-firewall corporate weblogging or k-logging, which is my main area of interest right now.

The section on behind-the-firewall corporate weblogging is called Re-inventing Knowledge Management behind the firewall. I read this section with requirements in mind. What are the weblog software features that would be most useful to corporate webloggers? Here is what I came up with:

  • Newsfeed Syndication: Newsfeed reader software allows users to do their own filtering and subscribe only to the weblogs, or aggregations of weblogs, that they are interested in. Newsreaders also "enable users to keep up with a large number of news sources in less than half the time it would take using a web browser."

  • E-mail to weblog gateway: Dafermos says "The differential factor hinges on how easy it is for employees to post their emails to the weblog". I've written about this before in a previous post titled Mailing-list weblog integration

  • Notification of comments: Dafermos sees weblogs as knowledge bases that serve as a dynamic replacement for FAQ files. Weblog comments are a key ingredient here. He writes "if each weblog entry had a corresponding comments section, and had a consistent location (a URI), then any question would only be answered once." Most weblogs already support what Dafermos wants here. I added notification of comments because without it, the weblog owner will not know that a comment has been made and will not know to respond. Notification could be done via email or by having an RSS feed for comments on each weblog entry.

  • Full text search: search is the user's entry point to the weblog knowlege base. If all of your corporate weblogs are indexed, "the only thing one would need to do is enter the question, or a keyword, into the weblog search engine field, and find out the answer to the question without having to email anyone, and most importantly, without having to wait for the reply."

  • Archive browser: Dafermos suggests that new employees will be told to "read the weblog archives before resorting to email." Reading the archives can help a new employee to understand the history of an issue, so browsing, skimming, and reading weblog archives should be easy. The Roller big-weblog-calendar is an example of a simple archive browser, but a more sophisticated interface would be helpful here.

  • Weblog aggregator: I don't think that Dafermos mentioned this, but I think web-based weblog aggregation software like the software that drives java.blogs or ApachePlanet, would be very useful in a corporate setting. Each workgroup or department could have it's own aggregated "community" weblog, a weblog made up of the posts from each member of the department.

  • Wiki integration: OK, Dafermos did not mention this at all, but from my limited experience with weblogs at work, I think that wiki integration is going to be key. Weblogs and wikis are a perfect combination. Wikis provide a space for collaboration, documentation, and information sharing and weblogs provide a space for timely news and status information. They go together like peanut butter and chocolate.

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Copyright 2002-2007, David M Johnson (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org)

This is a personal weblog, I do not speak for my employer.