Knowledge Blogs

This is a copy of a post I made to a public mailing list about our use of blog tools at work for Knowledge Blogging, i.e. group Blogging as a means of documenting activities in a workgroup and building a knowledge base at the same time...

I work in a web development role in an IT services division at a University in New Zealand and we've been blogging in this very way for around two and half years now. We began using a couple of copies of Radio Userland with one machine syndicating the output of another and pushing the merged content out to our team Intranet site, but as more team members got the blog-bug we moved onto Movable-Type (MT) which we still run now.

Blogging is now an essential part of our team and project management culture. We create separate blogs for different projects, we setup, host and skin blogs for other teams and projects around campus, and still maintain a core blog for our own web team which we use as a kind of change-control notification point and issues register.

After a couple of years of use the corpus of blog posts and articles has become a knowledge-base for our teams and projects and a great resource to search against, kind of a common shared Inbox. No more searching through Outlook public-folders or file-systems for some obscure note you made a year ago.

We've recently begun using the XML-RPC interface to MT to make automated remote posts into various blogs from cron jobs or watcher scripts running on web or application servers to let us know when certain events have happened (e.g. performance issues, resource use, change control events/migrations).

Although we don't allow non-authenticated publishing into our blogs we do use category archiving in MT to render certain posts out to locations that are publicly available or less restrictive so other interested parties (e.g. pointy-haired types) can get a handle on project progress etc.

It used to take a little evangelising till people saw past a blog as being nothing more than a personal publishing tool, but the culture is now well established and ideas for other uses of the blog facility pop up regularly.

One feature that's hardly ever used tho (which kinda surprised me) is commenting. I'd say fewer that 5% of posts are ever commented on, the blog tends to be a snapshot in time on a specific subject and further discussion often goes on through email or in project meetings between interested parties following which someone will often make a follow-up (i.e. new) post. This sounds a little unstructured but it makes for easier reading than your classic heirachichal threaded discussion which tends to drift out of context.

Despite the articles mention of the issue 'blogorrhea' we've found exactly the opposite in that the volume of pesky emails in the Inbox is now a fraction of what it used to be. We're now disciplined enough to browse blogs of relevance to us for posts by others regarding projects we may be involved with.

I attended the O'Reilly open source convention in 2002 and sat in on a birds-of-a-feather session on blogging while I was there (company included Rael Dornfest and Ben and Mena Trott). At one point during the discussion I asked who else was using their blog for this project management purpose and noone was, pretty much everyone was publishing a personal blog only or developing a blogging mechanism.

See Also: Blogging | Blogging Issues | Online Writing | Notes Index

 Top Of Page     Home     Wiki Home     Contact     Author