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February 9, 2004
Computerworld on Blogs Bubbling Into Business
Posted by Clay Shirky
A piece over at Computerworld on
the use of weblogs in business environments. Not much that will be unfamiliar to Many-to-Many readers, and they conflate blogs with other collaborative tools (the lead graf is about
Socialtext, which combines the weblogs and wikis) but its a good piece to show the curious.
There is one great quote, from Jamie Lewis:
But Jamie Lewis, an analyst at Burton Group in Midvale, Utah, says he isn't sure all companies should immediately jump on the blogging bandwagon. "Whether companies should look into using it depends on corporate culture and the kind of culture they're trying to develop," Lewis says.
Blogging is like a lot of other collaborative tools -- if the company is good about trying to encourage and generate cross-functional and interpersonal collaboration and communication, then it's a good idea, Lewis says.
This is commensurate with what we know from earlier studies of IT in the workplace -- technology tends to be an amplifier, so streamlining things often makes a bad culture able to to get worse faster. If a company distrusts employee initiative, blogs won't help much, except maybe in that "precipitate a crisis" way -- they are tools, not magic pixie dust.
Comments (3)
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1. anon on February 9, 2004 6:25 PM writes...
Bad cultures exist around crisis. They endure because the rate of crisis does not exceed the capacity of the organization to respond in a manner that protects its entrenched interests and their status. Tools like this may engender collapse as the status quo is overtaken by events - and in this way, the technology becomes a good thing, at least insofar as it demonstrates dramatically their incompetence. (Hopefully paving the way for something new in its stead.)
Permalink to Comment2. Jason Banico on February 10, 2004 5:21 AM writes...
Maybe enterprises can also take a look at FriendBlogging, collaborative journal writing by distributed social networks, as in the case of Funchain.com, the FriendBlogs engine...
Permalink to Comment3. Piers Young on February 10, 2004 10:25 AM writes...
When you mention earlier studies of IT in the workplace are there any particular you have in mind? Just interested.
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