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Most people look at
me like I'm from a different planet when I advocate the use of multiple weblogs
for different purposes, especially inside corporate environments. Typically,
bloggers believe that weblogs are for one purpose - a personal journal; this is
extremely narrow-minded thinking. A few bright people are starting to realize
that they could be useful for customer-facing content, but they too carry
baggage concerning the assumed use of blogs on the Public Web. Some go so far as
to define what a blog must and must not have - rubbish - a blog doesn't need a
'voice'; it could have hard facts and science - it's simply a medium for
conveying information. Some of it may be subjective, some of it may be
objective.
Unfortunately very
few companies realize the potential of friction-free, personal publishing for
enterprise use, but Chad Dickerson get's it, and further recognizes that varying
types of content need to be streamed (or channeled) to different types of
users and with secure methodologies.
"Not everything
I deal with on a daily basis can be distributed publicly, but there is still
information that needs to be disseminated regularly and made available to a
group on an ongoing basis."
Chad correctly
points out that corporate weblogs have a different set of requirements that
revolve around security, permissions, and discovery. The blogging framework must
be designed to meet these requirements.
"I think one of
the biggest mistakes people in corporate IT make is wrongly assuming that
documentation is something that ends at some point. In reality, IT is an organic
beast, and documentation is never really complete. Fortunately, the Weblog
paradigm gives corporate IT the means to create documentation that works the way
people think -- in dates (When did this happen to the system?), incidents (What
happened, and how was it fixed?), and people (Who fixed it?). We've used the
Groove discussion to manage the IT logistics of office moves, server migrations,
and the RFP (request for proposal) process for Web hosting. This method of group
documentation works better in practice than anything I've ever
seen."
Chad also
recognizes the need for chrono-based content; something that blogs tend to
force. However, the architecture of the blog tool should allow other types of
displays and content reuse that may require other formats (ergo, XSLT, XML-based
persistence model, etc.). | 
