Building on the success of Weblogs for personal Web publishing, enterprises are starting to tap into blogs to streamline specific business processes such as intelligence gathering or to augment traditional content-and knowledge-management technologies.
Free or low-cost personal tools from pioneering software companies such as UserLand Software, Pyra Labs, Moveable Type, and others have fueled the thriving Weblog personal publishing movement since its emergence in the late 1990s.
While many freeware vendors also offer fee-based software and services for corporate users, a newer crop of vendors is stepping up to extend Weblogs to specific business processes such as corporate intelligence gathering and market research.
These enterprise-specific blogs from companies including Traction Software, Tech Dirt, and Trellix use the same core user-friendly Web publishing approach with added features to regulate access control and security and to bolster functions such as search.
Using time and topic as organizational themes, Weblogs allow users to easily collect and publish information to the Web from e-mail, Web sites, Microsoft Office documents, and other sources. In addition, Weblogs typically use XML to embed links from a variety of information sources.
Blogs could be a good way for enterprises for information sharing and knowledge management. In fact, blogs are quite malleable – depending on how the organisations want to leverage them. This year should start seeing some success stories coming out.
