Corporate Blogs/Wikis Article

The art­icle I wrote on some of the busi­ness uses for blogs and wikis has been pub­lished, under the title Blogs & Wikis: Tech­no­lo­gies for Enter­prise Applic­a­tions?.

I’d like to thank every­one acknow­ledged in the art­icle (Bob DuCh­arme, Lex­is­Nex­is; Chris­ti­an Wat­son, Seattle Children�s Hos­pit­al; Chris­toph­er Mahan, Health Net Inc.; Dave Pawson, RNIB; Derek Miller, Nav­arik; Jordan Franks, Trac­tion Soft­ware; Leigh Dodds, Ingenta; Mal­colm Tredin­nick, CommSe­cure; Norm Walsh, Sun Microsys­tems; Richard Tal­lent, Envir­on­ment­al Resources Man­age­ment; Robert Scoble, Microsoft; Ross May­field, Social­text; Tim Bray, Sun Microsys­tems; and Tony Coates, Lon­don Mar­ket Sys­tems). They all spent time writ­ing com­ments or emails in response to my request or talk­ing to me about what they, their com­pan­ies, or their cus­tom­ers are or aren’t doing with blogs and wikis. The tim­ing of the art­icle also meant I could put stuff in from the North­ern Voice conference.

Before doing my research for the art­icle I had­n’t real­ised just how wide­spread the use of blogs and wikis and hybrid sys­tems is in the busi­ness world. Even if wikis are only used for bursts of activ­ity, like organ­ising a one-off meet­ing, or used by one per­son for research notes, they’re still being used. Blog sys­tems are being used for sites, such as the Seattle Chil­dren’s Hos­pit­al web site which don’t look like blogs in any way; they’re a cheap, easy to use pub­lish­ing sys­tem. Blogs are being used for quick coordin­a­tion of tasks, such as at UBC’s Careers Online Pro­ject Web­log (this one did­n’t make it into the art­icle). There is a lot of blog- or wiki-based coordin­a­tion and col­lab­or­a­tion going on in the busi­ness world, much of it prob­ably unbe­knownst to people high­er up in these com­pan­ies, a bit like the way intranets star­ted. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see where this band­wag­on goes next.