Group blogs
I was thinking about my group at work and how a gang of otherwise brilliant people had such a lousy website on our intranet. We put stuff up in spurts, but there’s a huge pile of miscellaneous documents on an NT share and at least a dozen projects we’ve done but never put on the site. So it’s very likely somebody might be looking for somebody to do a job our group is good at and never find us.
So then I thought, why not do our whole website as a blog? I came up with a few reasons, and then I responded to a post on hsv.general with a few more ideas, and I polished it up a bit this morning. So here it is: reasons your group might want to build a weblog instead of a website.
- It lets people put up information on the net without their having to learn HTML or an HTML editor. Our people are, by and large, not master web site builders, and there’s no reason why they should have to be. They’ve got information in their heads, we want it to be on the web, and we’re looking for the shortest path from here to there.
- In our environment the two HTML tools that would fall most readily to hand are Word and FrontPage, both of which produce hideously bloated, unmaintainable HTML. Turning ourgroup’s site into a blog would keep Word and FP away from our site.
- A blog automatically generates a “What’s New” summary list, so we don’t have to.
- The appearance of the site is uniform and pretty good looking. Previously with 10 people putting data on our site, you’d have at least 10 different styles going on, and most of them looked pretty bad.
- We forsee a substantial benefit in knowledge capture and reuse from keeping our website in clean XHTML. Using a blog automates that.
- We’re all too busy to get our own work done, much less put stuff on the website. Making it a blog, with a simple user interface, makes it easy and fast enough that we might actually use it.
- Blogging software automatically keeps track of who wrote the article and when. Older articles fall off the bottom of the page into the archives, making the job of weeding out dead information much easier than it is now.
- You’ll have to take my word for this part, but having data in XML format inside a database is going to make it much easier to use down the road. That’s done automatically, as part of the way the blogging tool works.
- There’s some additional technical goodnesses that arise from using open technologies to make the blog work (perl, PHP, MySQL, XML-RPC, and RSS). RSS, in particular, you’re going to be hearing a lot about in the coming months. It could very easily replace email lists as the medium of choice for information broadcast. Right now the million or so active bloggers are building a huge inventory of content for RSS, and a few of us are using feed readers to read those feeds. Turns out, if you’re working in some rapidly changing areas like standards-based web development, you need a feed reader to keep up.
Blogs are even more attractive to individuals. If you want to put some pictures or text on the web and you’d be doing it now if it weren’t such a huge pain in the ass to learn HTML and run editors and FTP programs and all the rest, you might want to check into running a weblog. TypePad has a package that includes hosting. So does Blogspot and several others (google for “weblog hosting”).