Blog the Organization!

Dormant weblog

I've decided to neglect this weblog, in favor of maintaining a page on organizational weblogs at my Wigley and Associates weblog/web site.

Citizens League - The Pulse

The Citizens League, based in Minneapolis Minnesota, launched a weblog back in mid-May called The Pulse. Executive Director Lyle Wray is the main weblogger.

The League's mission is "promoting the public interest in Minnesota by involving citizens in identifying and framing critical public policy choices, forging recommendations and advocating their adoption."

An Open Offer to Utah State IT Employees

The State of Utah's CIO is using his weblog to issue a challenge to state IT employees to launch their own weblogs.

I believe that the 900 or so IT employees of the State of Utah would benefit from speaking and listening to each other more. I think we need groups of specialists inside various departments to communicate with others in their specialty and without. Consequently, I'd like to see more people writing blogs and communicating their ideas through an open forum like the one blogs engender. To that end, I'm willing to pay the licensing fee to Userland for the first 100 employees who start a blog.

The American Prospect

The American Prospect has a collaborative weblog called Tapped that it's been publishing since late March of 2002.

Citistates Group

The Citistates Group has launched a collaborative weblog on its homepage. Current contributors are Neal Peirce, author and syndicated columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group; and Curt Johnson, longtime civic activist and commentator.

h20boro lib blog

The Waterboro Public Library in Waterboro, Maine, maintains a weblog called h20boro lib blog.

The Marriage Movement

One of the sites hosted by The Institute for American Values is a weblog called The Marriage Movement. It's a collaborative blog, too.

State of Utah's weblog cluster

Doc Searls noted these "intra-gov" blogs this week and after I poked around a bit, it appears to be a weblog cluster - state government agency weblogs that got going in Utah in late May.

Phillip Windley is the state's Chief Information Officer (CIO) and runs Windley's Weblog on Enterprise Computing.
David Fletcher is Deputy Director of Utah's Department of Administrative Services and runs the Government and Technology Weblog.
Bob Woolley has a Technology Weblog. No info on his blog yet as to who he is and which department he works for, but his blog is linked to from Windley's and Fletcher's.

They're all using hosted versions of Radio Userland. Where have I seen those templates before?

Greenpeace: Banners and Us

I received this from Gilberto Cutrupi at Greenpeace:

Hi griff, just a note to say that here in Greenpeace we are also experimenting a collaborative weblog to show a different side of the organisation. We didn't promote it too much since we just wanted to see how the community picked it up.

Looks like the blog is called: Banners and Us: an open channel with Greenpeace folks. It's been up since the end May.

Subterranean Homepage News

Sheila Lennon is Features & Interactive Producer at The Providence Journal's projo.com, and maintains the weblog, Subterranean Homepage News.

She is indeed a journalist, and a long-time one at that. I mistakenly assumed otherwise when I noted her weblog back in April.

My apologies, Sheila.

Weblog Clusters; Google weblog cluster searches?

It's time to add "Clusters" to my categories of organization blogs, even though it's not quite a neat, logical fit with the others. For some reason, I like the word 'cluster' better than 'community.' Maybe it's because 'community' is so overused, but I tend to think that it's overstating it when there's no formal intentionality among the blogs in the cluster.

I think organizational Weblog clusters could prove to be an important development. I'm pitching the concept to a group of civic-oriented groups here in my hometown of Northfield, as well as to some organizations in the Twin Cities. I ran some ideas about it past Doc Searls yesterday, who was in town to give a speech. He seemed to see the potential, too.

Noodle this related issue around: how could Google be tweaked so that a weblog cluster could be searched? Or better yet (especially for civic/democracy-related purposes) how could Google return a result on a certain topic within a cluster of weblogs?

For example, if a cluster of organizational and personal weblogs in the Twin Cities all touch on the topic of urban sprawl over a six month period, would it be helpful to be able to do a Google search on the phrase "urban sprawl" and have it return a result that would indicate "cream rising to the top" somehow, i.e., whose thinking/writing on the issue within the cluster is most linked to?

Blogging Goes Corporate

This article in Wired profiles the use of weblogs by Macromedia product managers for customers that I wrote about last week.

Note the informal weblog cluster that includes a developer/customer: "Hall has his own blog, and he often links to the Macromedia blogs, and they link to him, and others link to all of them -- creating a community of Flash blogs that the company says addresses the needs of its customers."

And note the process by which cream rises to the top: "The important items -- the best Flash examples, the most interesting tips, the most pernicious bugs -- are passed through the developer community at blog-speed, which can be quite fast. The unimportant stuff isn't passed around as quickly -- which of course is just how it should be."

New York Times and Userland

This is month-old news and it's not the usual org blog, but it's important to have it listed in the media category. Any publishing company, especially magazines and newspapers, should consider doing something similar:

NEW YORK, April 10, 2002 - NYTimes.com announced today that it had reached an agreement with UserLand Software to distribute content from NYTimes.com to the network of Radio UserLand 8.0 desktop content management users. This new feature allows New York Times links to flow, with reader annotation, through the growing network of “Weblog” sites published with Radio 8.

National Review

A group weblog (at least 8 contributors), in operation since January.

Matt Brown's Dreamweaver Blog

Matt writes:

"This is not the only blog about Macromedia from the folks at Macromedia. All the Community Managers here have set up blogs for the products that we represent. There is also going to be a lot of cross linking since everyone is now so plugged into each other's products."

Note that these are external blogs, i.e., employee-run blogs for accessing by the general public.

I need to start making a distinction between external org blogs and internal org blogs which seem to be increasingly referred to as kblogs (or k-blogs - Knowledge Management Blogs).

7/16 note: I've added this to the cluster category because there are now several Macromedia product-related weblogs. See the blogroll on the right side of Matt's weblog

World Round USA

Three motorcycle clubs in the upper midwest (NMRA, UMTA, and WOTA) jointly sponsor this web site for the USA World Round of Observed Trials, held in Duluth, MN in June. They're using a team weblog to keep volunteers, spectators, fans and riders updated.

Northfield.org

My hometown of Northfield, MN has had a community net of one kind or another since 1993. We now have a weblog on our homepage.

The Gilbert Center

The Nonprofit Online News is a weblog of "... news, information, and opinion for the online nonprofit community."

It goes all the way back to April of 1997. Looks to be top-notch.

Invisible City Productions

This "group of collaborating artists, writers, zine editors and game designers" keeps a team weblog so readers can "Go where we go, eat who we eat, defile what we defile."

International Association for Analytical Psychology

The IAAP Weblog appears to be maintained by just one person, somewhat erratically.

North American Shortwave Association

The NASWebLog has been around since 1999. Last entry was in Feb, 2002.

Providence (R.I.) Journal

Two staffers at the Providence (R.I.) Journal maintain blogs:

Dave McPherson's Net Runner: http://www.projo.com/technology/netrunner/
Sheila Lennon's Subterranean Homepage News: http://www.projo.com/technology/shenews/

Lennon's a journalist and part of their web team. She evidently writes the blog in addition to her other duties.

Both blogs are technology focused, though Lennon pays closer attention to music-related technology news.

Redwood City Public Library (CA)

Liblog: A Library Weblog is in the heart of Silicon Valley but I wonder who they're trying to serve with it. Other librarians?

Welcome to Liblog - a weblog of current web sites and stories dealing with the interface between technology and libraries.

Also, I don't see a link to this blog from the library's home page or site index. Am I missing it?

Christianity Today

This media company's weblog is a roundup of religion-related news, with opinion interspersed. Looks top-notch.

Each weekday, Ted Olsen or other Christianity Today staff summarize (and often comment on) religion news and views appearing around the world, from major media, smaller newspapers, foreign sources, and other sites. Weblog is a compilation of articles, and therefore doesn't involve any original reporting, nor does it necessarily strive to separate hard news from opinion.