My second addition to this weeks special at IAOCBlog.
Do European corporations view internal blogs as a way to make employees more effective or as a waste of time, are internal blogs in multi-national companies being written in English or in the local language.
Since we are talking about internal blogs, the situation on getting information on this terms is a little different from external blogs. We know of IBM, challenging it´s employees to blog (which about 3.600 already do!), we have heard of Sun’s approach to get their people into it, but this is mostly external blogging again (although both companies provde internal access/aggregation to these topics). Too much public information is not available on internal blogs, but I just discovered an interview with Alex Barnett about some insight into Microsoft’s internal blogging.
It seems as if it has been slow to take off, but „things have moved“ in the last two years.
What makes the internal blogs really useful is RSS – it isn’t like subscribing to an internal distribution email alias – the thoughts, links and comments become an archive of knowledge and conversations, captured in the blogs – filtered and distributed by the magic of RSS in a spam-free method. All potentially discoverable through search applications. Internal blogs can also an effective venting and ranting platform, pointing out the good and the bad of the internal workings of a business and the competition in a safe, behind-the-firewall, environment.Given their potential I’m quite sure internal blogs will soon become a default feature of the internal communication / KM landscape for businesses large and small.
So, talking about my perspective and experiences, I have recently setup an internal blogging plattform for my company. Goal of this blog is to gather and share creative ideas, files, documentations and to bring multinational teams together. At least virtually.
For other internal projects I would rather prefer wikis instead of blogs, since they offer much more collaboration features and give all readers the possibility to add content, not only as a comment, but inside the article. I have seen a presentation of Ross Mayfield on Les Blogs in Paris about his product socialtext, which could be a tool of choice for internal wikis.
