Fellow PSU Alum Alex Valentine writes:
Blogs are not a person2person tool. Posting on a blog is a person -> audience tool where the audience can choose to listen and chime back.
I believe this is the epitome of why there is such a buzz about blogs, and defines the direction in which they will continue to expand.
Push-Technology
Almost a decade ago there was a company that created quite a stir in the online arena by the name of PointCast. PointCast was a client application that you ran on your computer, selected your news sources, and the PointCast servers would “push”. This was the beginning of push-technology. You could get stock quotes, business news, magazine articles, from sources that joined up with PointCast. This all seemed to be a precursor to the dot-com boom, but PointCast fell victim to the boom as well.
When Push Comes To Shove, Push Loses
What does a burnt out dot-com like PointCast have to do with weblogs? It is proof that the free-market works.
Proprietary push technology has been replaced by good old fashioned pull-technology (HTTP GET) in the form of client syndication. The syndication formats themselves provide freedom of choice, RSS and atom each with different levels of features that content providers can choose to implement.
These formats are not mutually exclusive, there are no signed contracts restricting content providers from only providing one syndication feed, they can provide either or both.
Jamie Zawinski (of Netscape fame) once stated:
Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
This will soon be true for RSS and atom. We will see syndication integration into email clients, web browsers, text editors, coffee makers, etc.
Weblog tools such as WordPress and MovableType have made publishing not only web content, but have also made syndicated content instantly available. (See Rebecca Bloods’ weblog history for more background) Weblogs have become big business, with Google acquiring Blogger, Microsoft creating Spaces, and SixApart acquiring LiveJournal. All of the weblog tools continue to fight for marketshare.
Business Impact
How do weblogs fit into the corporate technology structure? As Alex stated, email covers person to person communication. Email can also extend to cover person to distribution list. However, this gray area may be better suited for a tool that has flexibility. Think about all the distribution lists you’re on. There’s one for your team, one for your project, one for your sub-project group, one for the system administrators, one for each of the functional teams, and so on. Now what if you send out an email to your team members, then later a person from another team needs that information? Someone has to dig through their archives and find the email thread and forward it along hoping that all the pertinent information is included.
Internal weblogs simplify this situation. Employees can post short blurbs, links, and articles for all other interested employees. Frequently asked questions can be answered with a simple link to an existing weblog post. In depth conversations can be retained with the original information, and links to new relevant information added as necessary. Information is only an intranet search away, solved by a rack server Google will gladly sell you.
Now we begin to see why companies like Microsoft, Sun, IBM, Yahoo, eBay, and Google are so interested in weblogs. They are all interested in spreading information faster and more effectively. Some have taken towards marketing, while others are targeting developers, and other have spread the spectrum. As we see how information can be spread throughout the world, we can imagine how it can be spread inside a corporate environment.
Microsoft has Scoble to spread all sorts of marketing information. They also have their MSDN blogs to spread developer info. Sun has their employee blogs available externally, and encourages other employees such as Tim Bray, co-inventor of XML. CIO Jonathan Schwartz has his space for spreading the Sun gospel. IBM isn’t about to miss out either with their developerWorks blogs, Mark Pilgrim, and Sam Ruby, although they don’t have as many externally available weblogs as Sun. Yahoo! has embraced RSS with their My Yahoo! customization. They also have a resident tech blogger in Jeremy Zawodny. The search team has its own place for all things search related. Google is almost lagging behind everyone else in the external blog game. They have the official Google blog which merely serves as a PR soapbox for their latest lab experiment, such as the amazing maps. Ebay has made an attempt to jump on the wagon with their founder Pierre Omidyar’s blog, but haven’t updated in forever. You might note one big tech company missing from this list, Apple. Their notorious secrecy may be one reason they have yet to really embrace the weblog world. The upcoming version of Mac OS X Server will come with Blojsom to provide a one click weblog server, and the next Safari browser will integrate RSS feeds. We’ll see if they continue to play catch-up to the rest of the weblog world.
These are only some of the externally available resources, there are no doubt many internal sources for each of these companies.