Everybody is talking about blogging. There’s no denying that blogging is a disruptive force in many areas—journalism, enterprise knowledge management, web marketing, content management, and many more. But, like any new paradigm, blogging is in for a period of growing pains. Blogging technology evolved to meet the needs of the grass roots bloggers—predominantly, individuals wishing to publish to the World with minimal friction. The unintended consequence of current blogging technology was demonstrating the power of blog-like technology for enterprises—organizations that don’t necessarily wish to publish (everything) to the World. I just read John Foley's excellent article on the state of blogging in InformationWeek. I found it interesting that while explaining the benefits of blogging for enterprises, this article also—inadvertently, I suspect—offers a great example, of why many enterprises will resist the use of today’s popular blogging tools. Specifically, John writes, “People may switch employers, but they'll take with them electronic journals of their best ideas.” More than a few enterprises would frown on this, to put it kindly, yet this is what today’s popular tools enable. (In fact, some actually mandate this by making each user’s own machine the content server). The needs of enterprises are very different from the needs of individuals. Enterprise blogging technology must (just for a start): - Provide granular access permissions—not all posts are for all eyes
- Easily aggregate postings of multiple authors
- Provide cross-author searching
- Discover semantic relationships between postings automatically
- Support behind-the-firewall deployment
- Support SSL connections for secure transmission of company confidential material
- Provide content agility—the ability to easily repurpose content for different use cases
MySmartChannels (and its underlying Web service platform) was built specifically to meet the emerging needs of enterprises while maintaining the individual benefits associated with personal blogging. A public version of MySmartChannels is available online for anyone to use for free at http://myst-technology.com. | 
