Blogging for Fun and Profit

This article isn't really about what you might think it is from the title. It's about the benefit of intranet weblogs, with the example given the IT department being the producers.

I was weblogging at work back in April 1998, when I was in charge of redesigning CEISS' web site. We didn't call weblogging then, just "running a news page". I set up a website using Frontier 5 that contained our meeting notes, project plan, ideas I and others thought of along the way, updates on our status, links to mockups and in-progress test pages for comments, etc. It didn't have all the features of a modern blog, but it was a reverse-chronological journal of events and thoughts from an individual (really, an individual speaking for a team). It was a very useful tool. The rest of the organization might not have got as much out of it as our team did, but it was incredibly important for the team to keep ourselves organized. I tried to convince the organization to run these sites for all projects, but the idea never took off. The tools weren't there at the time to make it easy enough. They are now.

It's not surprising that Pyra, makers of Blogger, started out by developing a web-based project management system...