I work in a web development role in an IT services division at a University in New Zealand and we've been plogging in this very way for around two and half years now. We began using a couple of copies of Radio Userland with one machine syndicating the output of another and pushing the merged content out to our team intranet site, but as more team members got the blog-bug we moved onto MovableType (MT) which we still run now.
Blogging is now an essential part of our team and project management culture. We create seperate blogs for different projects, we setup, host and skin blogs for other teams and projects around campus, and still maintain a core blog for our own webteam which we use as a kind of change-control notification point and issues register.
After a couple of years of use the corpus of blog posts and articles has become a knowledge-base for our teams and projects and a great resource to search against, kind of a common shared Inbox. No more searching through Outlook public-folders or file-systems for some obscure note you made a year ago.
We've recently begun using the XML-RPC interface to MT to make automated remote posts into various blogs from cron jobs or watcher scripts running on web or application servers to let us know when certain events have happened (e.g. performance issues, resource use, change control events/migrations).
Although we dont allow non-authenticated publishing into our blogs we do use category archiving in MT to render certain posts out to locations that are publically available or less restrictive so other interested parties (e.g. pointy-haired types) can get a handle on project progress etc.
It used to take a little evangelising till people saw past a blog as being nothing more than a personal publishing tool, but the culture is now well established and ideas for other uses of the blog facilty pop up regularly.
One feature that's hardly ever used tho (which kinda suprised me) is commenting. I'd say fewer that 5% of posts are ever commented on, the blog tends to be a snapshot in time on a specific subject and further discussion often goes on through email or in project meetings between interested parties following which someone will often make a followup (ie new) post. This sounds a little unstructured but it makes for easier reading than your classic heirachichal threaded discussion which tends to drift out of context.
Despite the articles mention of the issue 'blogorrhea' we've found exactly the opposite in that the volume of pesky emails in the Inbox is now a fraction of what it used to be. We're now disciplined enough to browse blogs of relevance to us for posts by others regarding projects we may be involved with.
I attended the O'Reilly OpenSource convention in 2002 and sat in on a birds-of-a-feather session on blogging while I was there (company included Rael Dornfest and Ben and Mena Trott). At one point during the discussion I asked who else was using their blog for this project management purpose and noone was, pretty much everyone was publishing a personal blog or building a blogging mechanism.
I worked in a draughting office for a few years, before the days of CAD, where people actually built careers around cleaning black ink off tracings, hands and clothing.
An essential piece of equipment when editing tracings (clear plastic sheets) was an electric drill with rubber cylinders as drill-pieces used to 'carefully' remove existing ink.
The rubber cylinders were about 6mm (1/4 inch) in diameter and about 25mm (1-inch) long and made ideal missiles when bent around a rubber-band stretched between thumb and the adjacent finger.
Whenever the Pointy-haired-boss draftsmen were out of the office, full scale warfare ensued between the 20 or so junior draftsman left behind in the office. The 1st sign of trouble was the terrifying sound of spinning rubber wobbling at high velocity past your head.
The impact wasn't quite enough to lose an eye, but the threat was considerable enough to take the battle serioulsy.
We also had a Hero, actually an anti-Hero, a new draughtsman from the big smoke. He devleoped a super-rubber by inserting a 'V' into one end to engage with the rubber band, and taped scalpel blades into the forward end for penetration. Fortunately an arms treaty outlawed use of this 'V2-rocket' of the rubber wars.
We never suffered from supply issues as there was always a handy supply of ammo on the carpet around ones drawing board.
Slashdot Mirror
I work in a web development role in an IT services division at a University in New Zealand and we've been plogging in this very way for around two and half years now. We began using a couple of copies of Radio Userland with one machine syndicating the output of another and pushing the merged content out to our team intranet site, but as more team members got the blog-bug we moved onto MovableType (MT) which we still run now.
Blogging is now an essential part of our team and project management culture. We create seperate blogs for different projects, we setup, host and skin blogs for other teams and projects around campus, and still maintain a core blog for our own webteam which we use as a kind of change-control notification point and issues register.
After a couple of years of use the corpus of blog posts and articles has become a knowledge-base for our teams and projects and a great resource to search against, kind of a common shared Inbox. No more searching through Outlook public-folders or file-systems for some obscure note you made a year ago.
We've recently begun using the XML-RPC interface to MT to make automated remote posts into various blogs from cron jobs or watcher scripts running on web or application servers to let us know when certain events have happened (e.g. performance issues, resource use, change control events/migrations).
Although we dont allow non-authenticated publishing into our blogs we do use category archiving in MT to render certain posts out to locations that are publically available or less restrictive so other interested parties (e.g. pointy-haired types) can get a handle on project progress etc.
It used to take a little evangelising till people saw past a blog as being nothing more than a personal publishing tool, but the culture is now well established and ideas for other uses of the blog facilty pop up regularly.
One feature that's hardly ever used tho (which kinda suprised me) is commenting. I'd say fewer that 5% of posts are ever commented on, the blog tends to be a snapshot in time on a specific subject and further discussion often goes on through email or in project meetings between interested parties following which someone will often make a followup (ie new) post. This sounds a little unstructured but it makes for easier reading than your classic heirachichal threaded discussion which tends to drift out of context.
Despite the articles mention of the issue 'blogorrhea' we've found exactly the opposite in that the volume of pesky emails in the Inbox is now a fraction of what it used to be. We're now disciplined enough to browse blogs of relevance to us for posts by others regarding projects we may be involved with.
I attended the O'Reilly OpenSource convention in 2002 and sat in on a birds-of-a-feather session on blogging while I was there (company included Rael Dornfest and Ben and Mena Trott). At one point during the discussion I asked who else was using their blog for this project management purpose and noone was, pretty much everyone was publishing a personal blog or building a blogging mechanism.
Rubber-bands, bah !!!!
I worked in a draughting office for a few years, before the days of CAD, where people actually built careers around cleaning black ink off tracings, hands and clothing.
An essential piece of equipment when editing tracings (clear plastic sheets) was an electric drill with rubber cylinders as drill-pieces used to 'carefully' remove existing ink.
The rubber cylinders were about 6mm (1/4 inch) in diameter and about 25mm (1-inch) long and made ideal missiles when bent around a rubber-band stretched between thumb and the adjacent finger.
Whenever the Pointy-haired-boss draftsmen were out of the office, full scale warfare ensued between the 20 or so junior draftsman left behind in the office. The 1st sign of trouble was the terrifying sound of spinning rubber wobbling at high velocity past your head.
The impact wasn't quite enough to lose an eye, but the threat was considerable enough to take the battle serioulsy.
We also had a Hero, actually an anti-Hero, a new draughtsman from the big smoke. He devleoped a super-rubber by inserting a 'V' into one end to engage with the rubber band, and taped scalpel blades into the forward end for penetration. Fortunately an arms treaty outlawed use of this 'V2-rocket' of the rubber wars.
We never suffered from supply issues as there was always a handy supply of ammo on the carpet around ones drawing board.