Corporations are increasingly putting up blogs, some are just trying to be hip but there is also an increasing recognition that weblogs can provide unique advantages, both in and out of the workplace. Decentralized publishing by employees has been encouraged by many major IT players for not only external but internal uses. We’ll explore some of the implications and applications of Distributed Content Management after giving a brief overview of some of the popular weblogging/CMS tools often used for such purposes (the functionality of which should be able to be replicated by the new UCLA portal project).

Blogging/CMS Overview

Blogs (Web logs) are widely known as inane personal journals, armchair pundits, and such, but they can be used for far more. Some of the more complex solutions like Textpattern can be used to power websites that don’t look like your typical blog.

Pyra Labs launched Blogger in August 1999. Blogger is widely recognized as being instrumental in creating the blogging phenomenon. By providing a simple web based publishing interface one no longer had to be a webmaster (for better or worse) to publish a site. While it is often derided as a beginners tool, it continues to add interesting funcionality such as simple photo integration, audio capture, and converting Word documents as entries. Six Apart’s Movabletype was (and may still be) the most popular CMS for those wanting more control than Blogger can offer. When they started charging for multi-user usage many people migrated to other solutions, notably Wordpress. There are many solutions out there, each with their particular strengths and weaknesses (easier collaboration, more control vs ease of use, portal features, etc).

Google for Blogs

With the launch of Google’s new Blog Search: http://blogsearch.google.com/ there is an increased interest (in the media at least) in blogs and their far reaching implications on the future. While it is lacking in some regards (rss feeds without titles aren’t archived, it relies on pings on weblog.com for blog recognition, and it as of now only has content from March 2005) it is a useful and possibly overdue addition to the google arsenal. Technorati is the only current blog-only search engine with any major standing (it has over 17 million blogs indexed) “In August, Technorati drew 545,000 unique visitors, less than 1 percent of the 73.1 million that visited Google’s main page, Nielsen/NetRatings.” cbc.ca If they can integrate tags from del.icio.us and flickr there will be a definite pull for power users, but the name brand recognition of Google will undoubtedly preclude most people from looking elsewhere. With the WashingtonPost approaching well known blog pundits to carry their latest posts on their site, there is a merging of mainstream “official” sources and the more independent bloggers out there.

Applications for UCLA

Many (admittedly the more tech savvy) corporations are encouraging blogging. IBM has a host of blogs (both internal and external), as does Microsoft. While MSDN definitely has it’s place, the weblog set up by the “IE team”: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/ provides a easy to follow setting for visitors to keep up with the progress being made on Internet Explorer 7. The blog often provides links to content hosted elsewhere by Microsoft – as well as some blogs maintained by members of the project.

Syndication of Blogged Content

Line 56, an e-business site, has an excellent article covering some of the more creative uses corporations and large organizations are using blogs both internally and externally. Blogs, and in particular the syndication of them, allow for more options than merely adding a personal marketing or branding touch.

“Creative uses of RSS are emerging behind the firewall for project team updates and other change notifications to cut down on email traffic. In a project-team scenario, individuals can post things like design data or status reports to a blog. Team members can either be granted access to one anothers’ blogs or an RSS aggregator can be used to automatically feed relevant updates to all who need them. Those updates can even be sent to specific email folders for viewing.”

“Blogs and aggregators are also easy to integrate with existing portals. Because blogs publish their content in XML as an RSS feed, components can be easily placed within a portal to display recent content from a selection of blogs. IBM offers a free RSS Portlet that is supported through IBM’s normal Software Support channels. A similar free component is available for SharePoint at the Microsoft SharePoint Customization Web site.”

Environmental Conditions

Furthermore purely internal documentation that is altered fairly often and needs to be accessed by various groups within an administration can benefit from use of a CMS. The “Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle has moved its policies and procedures manual to a blog to reduce administrative overhead for its intranet support team. Now content owners throughout the hospital have the ability to create and maintain content themselves. Because the blog is on the intranet, it’s easy for department content owners to list related forms, policies, or procedures within an individual department’s site. This provides a central repository for policies and related material while also giving departments flexibility in what they link to.”

Obviously there must be policies and security in place to make sure that inappropriate or confidential information or code is not distributed. “They are best suited for companies or institutions where innovation is a goal and the serendipitous discovery of information is desired. Blogs and aggregators can also work well in situations where information needs to be distributed, commented upon, searched, and made easily available for later use; email, instant messaging, and standard Web sites do not allow for this combination of capabilities. For businesses or divisions in which community building is an objective, such as developer networks, cross-functional collaboration teams, research groups, or customer user groups, blogging tools deliver ideal capabilities.”