Experiment in Blogging.
Wednesday, September 18, 2002
Rebecca Blood's History and Perspective on WeBLOGs.
While online this evening, I began reading Rebecca Blood's weblogs: a history and perspective this evening.
Herb 9:58 PM
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
I just saw a reference in a posting on Radio Free Blogspot voicing a contrarian view of corporate blogging.
Will "blogging" on an IntraNet degenerate into the noise often found on unmoderated Usenet groups?
Anonymous postings are the problem, I think.
Standard management practice is to judge people's work by what they produce, whether hard copy memos or electronic documents, publicly posted or privately conveyed. Just as a manager must read his staff's memos, e-mail, and reports of all kinds, so he must read their "blogs". The motto must be "Own your own words".
Blogs are less intrusive than e-mail, for several reasons. Continuous scrolling makes blogs quicker to skim and they don't bury other messages of higher priority because they can be read at leisure, etc.
It's certainly true that corporate e-mail exchanges rate much higher than what's seen on most web bulletin boards, forums, and Usenet groups. Why would blogs pose more of a problem? Does anyone really think that giving up e-mail would improve the efficiency of staff members? No, no one wants to go back to the pre-Internet e-mail days. Blogs may eventually prove themselves the better choice for all non private e-mail messages.
By the way, for many government agencies, blogs by staff members will not be confined to the IntraNet. Under government in the sunshine laws (as in Florida), a reason would be needed to keep the public from reading agency blogs (limited computer resources no longer proving a sufficient barrier to support arguments against full public access).
Of course, it's probably true that teenagers are a main source of Internet "noise", rudeness, and all that's wrong with cyberspace "dialogue". Thankfully, younger teens are not in corporate or government work environments.
The biggest barrier to obtaining the benefits to be derived from corporate blogging will likely be getting people to feel safe enough to venture forth in such a carefully scrutinized public forum. Most people are not comfortable speaking before a group, even if it's only a small group of friends. Also, many may underrate the value to others of their web log contributions or they may fear being stigmatized as egotistical self promoters.
Herb 5:38 PM
Monday, September 16, 2002
I've just shown Tom how easy it is to create a blog on BlogSpot using the web interface at www.blogger.com.
Herb 9:40 AM
This is a test post from Tom Goodson testing Herb's blog.
Herb 9:25 AM
Sunday, September 15, 2002
Because I rode over to my brother's house with my parents, I had to return with them when they came back early to prepare for supper. Yet I did have time to show off my neophyte blogging effort to my brother before leaving.
Now I sit at my parents' PC pondering what else to write today. Should I include a few more links which I've found recently? Or, should I wait until I can create commentary of greater length than just saying "look here, see this"? I opt for the latter.
Last night I downloaded Sentences 2.2 Personal Edition DB, a free desktop demo, so I could experiment with this singular implementation of what's called the Associative Model of Data (AMD).
Herb 4:12 PM
I'm now at my brother's house and on his computer while he shows my parents his new landscaping outside. It's a sunny, hot day here in Florida, but it's cool in the downstairs den where I'm presently working on this weblog post.
My next technical book purchase will probably be Essential Blogging, which explains much of the nuts & bolts of how to run blogs. A review is published on Slashdot. In an IntraNet environment, 'blogging' has great potential for unlocking the distributed knowledge base of staff, enabling them to share information easily through their blogs and thereby build interlinked people resource networks.
Herb 2:32 PM
So far, so good. Blogger.com works fine! And yes, I do like the instant gratification of easily updating my online log through a web page interface. I'll leave this 'blog' up for now, and consider adding some content later. Mostly, I'll concentrate on logging results of web research -- giving hyperlinks to items of interest.
Herb 1:15 PM
Now let me see if I can include an embedded hyperlink to the salon.com/blogs/ home page, which I'll place in this sentence. ;-)
Herb 1:04 PM
This is my first weblog posting and is only a test as to whether or not I can use the software interface properly.
Herb 11:18 AM