Blogs, blogging, bloggerific, blogtastic

Okay, so maybe this post is trite, redundant, or worse, but I am getting weird looks when I tell people that we “don’t build websites anymore” and I am being studiously ignored in my suggestions and recommendations to create blogs and wikis. I am not sure people know what a blog is (or what I mean by is — Bill Clinton moment), so here goes…

Blogs are important to organizations in terms of public relations and connecting up with customers and partners who are external to the organization. This much is obvious. However, the use of blogs, wikis, folksonomy, and other collaborative technologies within organizations is not so evident, but can and usually do have an even greater impact.

That’s me, quoting myself from last year some time (I think Septemberish). Yep, since then “enterprise blogging” has actually become a software category. Now how about this from notes at an IBM meeting well over a year ago…

As of November, 2005, there were 20,000 internal blogs inside IBM, but only a few hundred external bloggers. In addition, IBM makes extensive use of bookmarking and folksonomy tagging: Within IBM, there are almost 17,000 bookmarks (generated in 2-3 months), with only 10% of them private.

Another interesting comment that was made at that meeting (though tagged as an exaggeration), and this is the point:

Email replaced memos and meetings, to some extent. Wikis will replace reports to some extent. Blogs will replace home pages.

Ok, this still sounds over-the-top, but have people seen what a “blog” can be? And not just a blog, but the appropriate interleaving of blog, wiki, and forum? WordPress 2.1 is freaking amazatron. Ok, if maybe the technology either doesn’t make sense or appropriately dazzle, then what about what a blog actually is… That’s right, a conversation. A website is, well, you muttering to yourself in a corner somewhere, editing and updating with Dreamweaver, or some other oh-so-last-five-years-ago technology. No one can speak back, there is no conversation. It’s, well… ahem… Even my obscure little blog gets a little action once a week…

Then we come to the impact of the bloggers, on our guardians from the fourth estate… (Dang, they pulled the Daily Show segment from YouTube, I am going to have to rip the stream myself… give me a few days…)

Look, if Moveable Type is the (16th Century) Moveable Type of the 21st Century, then journalists are the priestly caste who will be swept from power in the incipient reformation, baby!

Related posts:

  1. Some blogs for the n00b reader…
  2. Folksonomy Jamboree Draft 01
  3. Distance Education and Virtual Worlds — Some Issues
  4. "We don’t build websites anymore…"
  5. Personal Branding in 140 Characters – Twitter Resume

No Responses to “Blogs, blogging, bloggerific, blogtastic”

  1. veridicus - February 6, 2007

    I think a successful blog is partly one that grows big enough to become a two-way conversation. Most blogs get too little traffic and are only one-way conversations.

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