Organizational Blogging

For the last week or so, I have been quite evangelical to my network of peers on the power of blogging. As is common in life, this discussion found its way into a discussion of how to deal with some knowledge management issues for a client.

When the notion was first raised, my first thought was to add blogging internally to the organization as a driving force for this series of activities. My opinions on that matter have not dampened, but the approach was made somewhat broader (read better) by one of my co-workers here.

Initial thoughts were to have a single blog for each working entity with multiple authors contributing. Of course, I'll probably never know why this didn't occur to me to start at the employee level, but someone reminded me. The proposed implementation now has each employee with their own blog. Simple RSS feeds and a dirty little aggregator will provide all members in the organization with an instantly customizable, and therefore digestable, entry to the content generated by the organization.

This is significant when you think about the nature of though development. A large number of iterations and background "noise" is required in the formulation of ideas, concepts, and other mental experiements. A difficult task to bestow on any individual is to collate a wild mass of data into usable information. This selective filtering process endowed by custom aggregration provides a method to remove as much noise as possible. In this case noise in the form of extra-departmental content in addition to works-in-progress can all be removed, hence providing a pre-publication distillation of the most usable information. It's quite empowering.

Apparently, I am one of many that are recognizing the potential of this system. Lee LeFever, of Common Craft has posted an interesting article titled "The Role of a Weblog Inside an Online Community". As he notes:

The combination of a weblog and normal community tools (discussions, member profiles, etc.) makes for an impressive set of resources for the members. The weblog can act as a filter for the various discussions occurring on the site and provide members an easy way to find the most interesting or provocative discussions. Plus, being recognized on the weblog could be a incentive for thoughtful participation.

Another way to look at this is making an online community’s weblog a public resource, but making the community private. In this way, the weblog pulls members into the community membership based on what they see on the weblog. I guess you could call it weblog-based PR for the community.

Source: Common Craft via Many 2 Many

There are some great commentaries and some new discussion born. I definitely recommend a quick pass.