When CERN research scientist Tim Berners-Lee first came up with the idea of the WorldWide Web in 1990, it was so that he and his fellow-scientists could give each other access to the research they were currently working on.
Ten years later, the world has suddenly caught on to what he really had in mind. For most of the past decade, Web publishing has fallen short of his original ideal. Creating and publishing Web content has been a long-winded process for all except those who had the time to learn to use page design tools, or the money to invest in sophisticated enterprise publishing platforms.
Suddenly, a new concept has begun to fire the imagination of Web users. In the past year, hundreds of thousands have started keeping weblogs — personal journals in which they publish their current thoughts, discoveries and insights directly to the Web. (Last month, I added my contribution to the torrent, at www.LooselyCoupled.com).
Initially dismissed as yet another online fad, blogging is now starting to be taken seriously in the professional world. Weblogs have already proven their worth in surfacing news stories that had been overlooked by the mainstream media. Now they look set to invade the enterprise, used as a platform for more effective collaboration and knowledge management within the organisation.
Success ingredients
As a professional tool, blogging remains in its infancy, but all of the ingredients that have made it a success among Web enthusiasts are relevant to enterprise users. Chief among them is its immediacy. Once a weblog has been set up, posting a new entry is simply a matter of opening a new page in your browser or email client, typing a few sentences, and then clicking a submit button. The new entry appears instantly at the top of the online weblog page, above the other most recent entries, while earlier contributions are archived. Blogs can be individual, or shared by members of a team.
This is real-time publishing, perfectly integrated into the daily routine of anyone who spends a significant amount of their working day in front of their browser or email inbox (and what office worker doesn't these days?).
Within an intranet, blogging allows members of a team to share relevant ideas, news and other snippets of information as they work. It's less intrusive than instant messaging and more efficient than email, and the archive capability means the weblog becomes a permanent, searchable store of information.
Individuals who are experts on specific topics can use an individual weblog to disseminate useful insights and resources in a more effective, spontaneous manner than earlier knowledge management systems have allowed. Companies can use weblogs on their Internet site or within an extranet to publish news, insights and links to show off their expertise to potential customers, or to keep partners up-to-date.
Despite these potential advantages, weblogs are bound to have their detractors, who will argue that weblogs will distract workers from their core duties and are open to abuse. Certainly the public Internet has plenty of examples of weblogs that are either disjointed scrapbooks of inconsequential links to other sites, or electronic soapboxes for voicing unsavoury ethical or political viewpoints.
Critical mass
The reason blogging has been so successful on the Web despite these negative aspects is that a whole paraphenalia of rating and aggregation tools have grown up alongside it. The best blogs rapidly surface to the top of the pile because search engines and aggregators like Google, DayPop and Weblogs.com constantly monitor which of them are getting the most links.
Indeed, if Google hadn't introduced its system of weighting results by link popularity and relevance, then weblogs would probably still be the preserve of a small handful of pioneers. There are other factors that have delayed the realisation of Berners-Lee's original vision until the present day. Weblogs thrive because of the critical mass of information that's available online, and because of the critical mass of users whose daily routine puts them in front of their browsers. XML plays its part too, in the form of the RSS specification, used to publish weblogs as newsfeeds on user desktops or at aggregation sites.
All of these factors need to be in place for blogging to repeat its popular success within the enterprise. So although it's relatively easy to set up a weblog using an existing server platform such as Lotus Domino or even by programming direct in PHP, adding link popularity ratings and RSS capabilities pose more of a development challenge. In time, the top-tier vendors will add that functionality, and in the meantime early adopters can turn to weblog pioneers Userland and Blogger for products that are better adapted to those needs.
Culturally, enterprises will have to adapt to blogging, learning how to introduce and manage it in a way that works for their business. As in the early days of desktop publishing and website publishing, some early mistakes will be made. But there can be no doubt that blogging is here to stay. It's not just that the enabling technology is now in place. Just as newspapers evolved the broadsheet and tabloid formats with their headlines, bylines, columns and 500-word stories, so the Web has evolved the weblog format, with its datestamp, page links, archiving and 100-word entries.
Blogging, quite simply, is the Web's native format for writing.
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