Rise of the Blogs
Ed Cone lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, and is a journalist who writes an opinion column for the News & Record, the daily newspaper in his area. He’s also writing a blog for a very long time, EdCone.com and understood the power of blogs in politics almost two years before Howard Dean. He’s employed as a senior writer by Ziff Davis Media and wrote recently an excellent and very dense article for them, “Rise of the Blog,” in which he covers the use of blogs and wikis behind corporate firewalls.
As you absolutely must read Cone’s article, I will not even try to summarize it. But here are three real examples of the use — or not — of blogs and wikis in the corporate world.
Let’s start with Lucent Technologies.
At Lucent Technologies Inc., small workgroups have been using blogs and wikis since early 2004 for training and project management tasks, without the formal blessing of senior technology management. “People come to us with application needs, and weblogs allow them to publish and capture and record information in a useful way,” says Michael Angeles, an information specialist in the company’s library organization.
Here is another success story, this time from an hospital in Seattle.
At Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center, in Seattle, Movable Type blogging software from Six Apart Ltd. is used to manage an intranet that serves 3,000 employees. The software, which allows dozens of people to post news and updates to calendars, project pages, and policy documents without going through an administrator, or learning HTML, works better than an intranet built using Microsoft’s FrontPage, which it replaced, says Web services manager Christian Watson.
Even if these two short excerpts show that blogs and wikis can be successful inside a company, there are still some issues, mainly legal.
David Weinberger, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and a coauthor of the marketing book The Cluetrain Manifesto, says public-facing blogs with voices that sound recognizably human will kill the “pompous and inhuman” tone used in much corporate-speak. But companies that blog are still bound by legal and regulatory constraints, and some observers aren’t convinced that the looser language inherent in blogs will allow them to say much more than they do today.
Hats off to Ed Cone for his reporting!
