Shameless Suggestion

The last couple of months there has been a lot of talk about blogging at my workplace. Our collaboration with Blogger is of course the main reason, but this has spurred a general interest in blogging. One great example is my colleague JAG, who has created a "normal" blog instead of a picture blog, which is the focus of the Blogger collaboration.

However, I'm somewhat surprised that all this blog talk hasn't resulted in more discussions about corporate blogging. I've actually been thinking about this for quite some time and believe that blogging would be a great way to communicate informally within a large organization.

Internal blogs

Since there is currently no official support for internal blogs, I've been thinking about running a blog on my desktop computer. This would mainly be used as a personal brain dump of the various tips-and-tricks one tends to come across over time. However, being a self-proclaimed expert within certain areas, others may be interested in this blog as well. On the other hand, if others do the same, all the blogs would be spread across the network, making them more or less impossible to find. What is needed is a centralized blog system with good search capabilities!

I see a couple of different types of blogs as being useful internally:

• Personal blogs — This is more or less what I've described above. A personal brain dump. This would be a great way to spread individual knowledge within the organization.


• Internal team blogs — Each team could have a blog used for internal discussions and progress reports within the team.


• External team blogs — Information relevant to other teams and even completely different parts of the organization could be posted to a external team blog.


• Project information blogs — Why send mails to everyone when this could be posted to a blog? The blog would also work as an archive.

Several of these types of blogs would probably decrease the amount of mails sent back and forth within the company. With these blogs, as well as RSS support in many of our internal systems (software release management, defect management, etc), could possibly make my inbox what it's supposed to be — a collection of mails sent to me personally!

External blogs

External corporate blogs are of course very different from internal blogs, since they communicate with the general public instead of colleagues. Not being a marketing guru, I can't proclaim this as the truth, but I believe that external blogs would benefit our company. There a many great examples of external corporate blogs. Robert Scoble, celebrity blogger at MSFT, sums it all up pretty well. It's a good read!

Why is this posted to an external blog when probably nobody except my colleagues and (hopefully) managers cares about it? Because we have no internal blogging!