Why Blogs Haven’t Stormed the Business World

Why Blogs Haven’t Stormed the Business World: mentions a couple things that the author feels have slowed the spread of blogs into the enterprises. Two main issue are raised: blogs are not portable, and “it is just a big heap of stuff.” I think that these issues are not a major problem with weblogs and should not slow the use of weblogs in business

“The greatest problem, however, is not the limitations of the front end of this software, but rather what goes on behind the curtain, so to speak…. What would happen if you were to switch tools tomorrow? With even the simplest blogs, many users would be daunted by the need to move files, change directories, get the new tools to hook up with the old. In short, each new tool would break your current blog. There simply is no portability under the current structure.”

I feel that backend portability is less of an issue for blogs than the author realizes. In general weblogs are very simply and consistently structured and this makes it easy to export and import weblog content. It was very easy for me to import my old entries from Greymatter into Moveable Type using the simple instructions provided by Moveable Type. I know that many users would be unable to do this on their own. However, in a company that is supportive of blogging, I see the company standardizing on a particular blogging tool and supporting it through a project team (hopefully comprised on someone with computer skill). If a decision is made to change the blogging tool, it should be easy for the project team to make or at least heavily assist in the conversion.

“[T]he heap of content produced by blogging is not the ideal knowledge store a company might wish to produce as a result of employee participation.”

The internet is a much bigger, and less structured heap of stuff. However it has become a crucial knowledge store for many companies. If fact, I would argue that a major problem of current knowledge management tools is the attempt to over structuralize the storage of knowledge. Weblogs provide a simple structure and let other tools such as search engines and aggregators help users find what they are looking for.

Despite my apparent disagreement on these two issues, I must admit that the suggestion the author makes at the end of the article is good, and that it would improve both portability and structure of weblogs.

“[T]he XML standard for structured Web data could be used as a uniform way to transform each tool’s blog into another’s, in order to hand off control.”

I must concede that weblogs are not as portable as they could be and an XML standard could help. This XML standard could also aid in the development of new tools that help search and structure content. In fact I have done a little work on making a script for Moveable Type that would return an XML version of a day’s entries. This would allow other programs to easily access the content. While weblogs have been around for years, they are still in the early adaptors stage. However, it may soon be time to make the leap over the chasm. [See the life cycle of technology]