Blogs and RSS "grew dramatically", according to Forrester's Social Computing Takes A Step Forward As Blogging And RSS Grow, Marketers Can Play A Role (by Charlene Li , December 14, 2005). Yes, from 5% to a whopping 10% of the population now reading blogs at least once a week. OK, maybe this isn't exactly what I'd call "dramatic", but it's a definite trend.

Are blogs just repeating the early history of the web? When I started writing HTML in the early 90's, websites gained attention in the press as more and more companies published their Internet sites. But they never saw the website I created - an employee information site hosted safely behind the firewall of a major government agency.  Yes, while the press followed each tidbit of public evidence of the web's growth, a huge population of private intranet sites was growing undetected.

A few innovative companies are already experimenting with blogs for internal communication, we just don't hear about them as much when they're behind firewalls.

Imagine an intranet of blogs, one for each individual in a consulting firm. Each person may work on many projects; each project may have many workers. How would you as a manager get the status of a project's workers: ask each worker to email it to you? Have fun creating that monthy status report! And on the other end, how many status reports would each worker have to email out? 

With a blog-based status reporting system, each worker would post to his or her blog at least weekly, categorizing or tagging the post according to project and any other topics that may fit. Want to find out how the project is doing? Pull the appropriately categorized posts into a consolidated blog. What to know what that person did this week? last week? last month? Just click through the project blog to the individual's blog.

But status reports are just one example of the benefits of blogging behind the firewall. Think of the benefits for mentoring junior staff, for capturing lessons learned and best practices, and for building a community among staff that are often distributed at various customer sites.

2:25:36 PM    
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