Posts about blogging from a pedestrian like myself (as opposed to the top-shelf shakers who are enhancing the spec) reminds me of when I was a young buck with girlfriends who seemed to always want to talk about the relationship. Now I am happy to just BE in a relationship with my wife and enjoy all those things which a relationship brings.
But it was time I talked about blogging to my forward-thinking Company President. I put together a PDF position paper, of sorts, 4 pages long (mostly bullet lists, bibliography, and illustrations) with a brief description of blogging, a list of Corporate Benefits, and description of how weblogs are read and authored. (Yes, there are many ways of consuming and generating weblogs, but that would have detracted from the paper's objective.) To illustrate reading weblogs, I included a screenshot of my Outlook newsgator subscription list. I didn't include a screenshot of creating a post, but I did include a screenshot of my dotnetweblogs home page for him to observe the how I was blogging with a dotnet subject-specific focus.
There are potential downsides of corporate blogging, of course, which I touched on but didn't have to emphasize. I also made it clear that I wrote the paper on my own time, since he wasn't paying me for doing position papers on weblogging. I will post any company blogging developments here. For now, I wanted to provide the paper's bibliography. I want to give a personal plug to "We Blog. Chapter 8" listed below. I need to buy the book! Everyone should at least read the online chapter listed here.
If indeed "Blogging is the next big thing" as I keep reading, then we as IT Professionals who enjoy its benefits today should present the technology to the decision makers in our organizations for them to determine its benefits on their own. If it does explode as we anticipate, it also confirms that we IT guys are on top of technological trends as we should be.
Newsgator RSS News Aggregator for reading blogs in Outlook
http://www.newsgator.com/
Danbricklin.com article: Small Business Blogging. Good specific extranet examples.
http://danbricklin.com/log/businessblogging.htm
NY Times article on Business Blogging posted 3 days ago: The Corporate Blog is Catching on. An “okay” general overview. Touches on Corporate Policy and legal considerations
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/.../22EXLI.html
We Blog. Chapter 8: Using Blogs in Business. A thorough look at the uses of blogs in business.
http://www.blogroots.com/chapters.blog/id/4
DotNetWeblogs Home Page. Community website for developers which hosts my weblog.
http://weblogs.asp.net/
Dave Burke’s blog. What I’m blogging about in regards to .NET and development issues.
http://weblogs.asp.net/dburke
Robert Scoble’s Weblog. Extremely popular website from a software evangelist at Microsoft. (One of many Microsoft employees who blog.)
http://scoble.weblogs.com/
Ray Ozzie’s Weblog policy for Groove: Weblog guidelines for Groove employees.
http://www.ozzie.net/blog/2002/08/24.html