Dark Blogs (Internal Blogging)

Suw Charman (bio
| blog

-- she uses a funky spelling of Sue) just finished leading an

interesting discussion on companies using blogs (and other social
media

tools, like wikis) as internal communications tools. 
("Knowledge

management" is the associated buzzword, and apparently "KM" is the

acronym. I had not heard of it until yesterday.)

(As
an aside,

I'm not cut out to do liveblogging -- I blog at a more deliberate
pace.

I'm editing what I typed earlier, since we've moved on, so please

excuse any verb tense mismatches.)

First
off, while the

talk was geared to companies, a lot of the lessons can be extended to

any group, like a club, hobby group or team -- any kind of persistant

gathering that uses shared knowledge.

"Dark Blogs"
is Suw's term

(internal blogs is more commonly used) -- it refers to blogs that are

hidden from the blogosphere at large because they're private or

password-protected, because they're meant for a specific
audience.

The primary advantage to sharing
information with a blog, group blog, or wiki, is the
persistance of information:

The new stuff (or the latest edit, in the case of a wiki) is on top,

but all the older stuff is archived, accessible and directly

linkable.  It's stuff you can do if you save all your e-mails
and

documents, for example, only it's accessible to the entire group and

easy to update, annotate and search.



This is important to companies and their
institutional knowledge.

Companies like shared knowledge, so things don't grind to a halt when

someone goes on vacation. (The worst-case variation of this is usually

goes "God forbid, if so-and-so got hit by a
bus.")

To use Suw's words, this preserves
the chain of communications -- you can see how ideas
originate and develop.  You get context.





Plus, you get to learn from your past mistakes (or at least see them),
and see what worked or didn't work in the
past.

Other

advantages to internal blogs are that you can have multiple authors

doing their thing without worrying that people are stepping on each

other's toes; people can provide feedback by adding comments; you can

use feedreaders or other tools to view the data; and generally
speaking, ease of publishing.

The other advantages are
less clear-cut

to me since they involve behaviors that grow out specific different

delivery mechanisms (e.g. reading an e-mail that's pushed to your

mailbox vs. filtering out blog posts to get to the relevant stuff) and

access controls and stuff like that. But it's easy to see the primary

win -- extending and preserving a group
conversation.

Anyway, if you're interested, here's a
case
study of internal blogging at a European pharmaceutical
company, referenced in the talk (I haven't had a chance to read it
yet.)

(Oddly

enough, we don't do an incredible amount of internal blogging at AOL;

there are some wikis out there, but we could be doing
more.)

Thanks --
Joe.





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