Weblogs meet the enterprise

Last week, I wrote about RSS, veering around the recent discussion of changes and politics, and focusing purely on the utility of RSS as it now exists in my day-to-day life. The flow of RSS content into my newsreader each day has become as important to my personal information flow as e-mail. Whether it’s information bubbling up from folks working on developing standards or just the opinion of an individual or media organization I respect, RSS helps me get my job done. While RSS might be underhyped as the little engine that could behind the Weblog explosion, it’s tempting to characterize the Weblog phenomenon as severely overhyped. Judging from my conversations with skeptical CTOs, there is still a sense that Weblogs are produced largely by teenage girls who write about what cereal they ate for breakfast. I used to agree, but now Weblogs have become so useful for me that I now have three of my own, each for distinct but highly useful purposes.

My first Weblog is the public one (you can read it at www.infoworld.com/ 93). In this space, I use Radio Userland to post my thoughts on a number of issues, knowing that anyone can read what I write and offer comments, either via e-mail or personal Weblogs. Anyone can subscribe to the RSS feed, which means I get useful feedback from people I have never met. At worst, it gives me a means to organize my thoughts on a number of subjects. At best, I connect with people who think about the same issues and help me solve real problems. You don’t have to work for a traditional publishing company to be a part of this, hence useful Weblogs from software company CEOs, key developers at Microsoft, venture capitalists, and attorneys.

Not everything I deal with on a daily basis can be distributed publicly, but there is still information that needs to be disseminated regularly and made available to a group on an ongoing basis. This leads to my second Weblog, which isn’t actually a Weblog per se — it’s a Groove discussion for members of InfoWorld’s technology department. It functions essentially as a group Weblog (in fact, Tim Knip’s Groove Interop Tool for Radio can make it officially a Weblog). I think one of the biggest mistakes people in corporate IT make is wrongly assuming that documentation is something that ends at some point. In reality, IT is an organic beast, and documentation is never really complete. Fortunately, the Weblog paradigm gives corporate IT the means to create documentation that works the way people think — in dates (When did this happen to the system?), incidents (What happened, and how was it fixed?), and people (Who fixed it?). We’ve used the Groove discussion to manage the IT logistics of office moves, server migrations, and the RFP (request for proposal) process for Web hosting. This method of group documentation works better in practice than anything I’ve ever seen.

My third and final Weblog functions more as a private information manager used and read only by me, a series of not-ready-for-prime-time “notes to self” about personal and professional interests. It’s a scratch pad for ideas that I don’t want others to comment on, if only because I don’t want to be constrained by having to write sentences that make sense to the larger world. Some of the more finished thoughts bubble up to the InfoWorld group Weblog, my public Weblog, and sometimes this column. In the process, Weblog tools help me maximize my and others’ ideas, something that can never be overhyped.