Work – Page 5 – Just thoughts

An interesting tweet exchange from @briankelly caused me to revisit an earlier post to this blog. The question is whether it’s good practice to host your blog off-site as in Brian’s UK Web Focus blog, or Andy Powell’s Eduserv Foundation blog, or whether if you’re blogging with the explicit support and encouragement of the organisation you’re working for, it shouldn’t be from an on-site platform, after all that’s what No 10 does – not to mention eBay and Yahoo – they all use the WordPress blogging platform.

That is not to say that you shouldn’t be using an engine such as Typepad or WordPress, but rather whether you should be running it in-house. Thus we (in Cardiff University) currently look both ways. On one hand we have a WordPress Blog for a Library site, and support for our website authors is also provided off-site; on the other hand we’ve been working hard to develop an industry strength blogging platform using Roller to support “enterprise/corporate blogging”, and Confluence for our wiki platform.

Is this a waste of time/resource? I think not! I believe we are very much following the IBM example of the multi-tiered approach to blogging.

From the enterprise, to the collaborative developer, to the marketeer, to the individual, IBMers express their thoughts and make pronouncements. All on different platforms, but it is clear that the first-one is where the official message from the organisation emanates.

Thus watch out for Cardiff Blogs, not to mention Cardiff Wikis (which will be kept as an internal collaboration environment and blogging platform for staff and students), it’ll be appearing in a browser window near you shortly!

Just a quick note to self, more than anything else. Whilst at the Gartner ITExpo2008 Symposium in Barcelona I was using Windows Live Writer to blog, and this worked very well. I was able to take notes in sessions in real-time where there was no wireless and as it was being saved on my laptop, as long as I had electric power – no problem. What I made the mistake of doing was publishing the blogs as soon as I had wireless connectivity – almost as if I was frightened I’d lose the pearls I’d written.

What I had forgotten to do, was “engage brain”. Therefore, I’ve found myself editing like mad this weekend, adding links and reconstituting the larger posts into smaller more subject-focussed ones. Therefore my twitterfriends (because I forgot to switch-off twitterfeed) have been bombarded by blogging that is more akin to bragging, or blagging even. My apologies to them.

The lesson to myself is that blogging is like any piece of document production. Consider the audience and what they might want to read. Have a structure for the post(s) that meets the requirement of the audience. Don’t publish until it’s finished. My excitement at being able to do it, overcame the good sense of knowing when an what to do.