Helping companies communicate better
Our friend Michael Angeles at urlgreyhot discusses his frustration with current technology, and his switch to wikis for a personal knowledge inventory:
“After spending a little time yesterday trying to add links to my weblinks directory and then filing them under my Drupal book pages, I think it’s time to start using a wiki.”
You can read more from his weblog entry discussing his switch.
Many companies still view blogging as something only done for personal reasons or by people who wish to show pictures of their cat. For these companies I decided to give a short rundown of some of the benefits that a company (and an individual) would experience from having a weblog. Keep in mind that there are a large number of benefits that come with blogging, but I will only highlight some of the major ones.
I think it might be inevitable that in the not-so-distant future almost every company and every individual will have a weblog. We all have email addresses. We all have phone numbers. When this does happen many companies will think that there may be no use to have a weblog anymore. Every company has a website as well, but does that prevent your company from having one?
Having a blog does not mean you are like every other company. Not every website is treated equally and the same holds true with weblogs. If every weblog was the same you wouldn’t have blogging superstars or people making thousands a month from blog advertising. The advantage with companies though is that there aren’t many well-known company blogs. All the popular blogs are part of the independent web with a couple of exceptions here and there and therefore this is a great time for companies to make a name for themselves in this fast-moving medium.
I believe the old saying goes something like this:
If all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail
The ultimate goal of installing communication-oriented software is to improve an organization’s information exchange in some sense, but a weblog will not always be the most appropriate tool for the job.
A weblog is a monitored two-way communication device. A select few can post entries, but anyone can leave a comment. This type of architecture is good when there are privileged groups of people running the show, but what if the goal is to have a massively-collaborative website? Then you need to pull out the toolbox and fish around for something else (working the analogy for all that it’s worth!).