Last week, I wrote about RSS, veering around the recent discussion of changes and politics, and focusing purely on the utility
of RSS as it now exists in my day-to-day life. The flow of RSS content into my newsreader each day has become as important
to my personal information flow as e-mail. Whether it's information bubbling up from folks working on developing standards
or just the opinion of an individual or media organization I respect, RSS helps me get my job done. While RSS might be underhyped
as the little engine that could behind the Weblog explosion, it's tempting to characterize the Weblog phenomenon as severely
overhyped. Judging from my conversations with skeptical CTOs, there is still a sense that Weblogs are produced largely by
teenage girls who write about what cereal they ate for breakfast. I used to agree, but now Weblogs have become so useful for
me that I now have three of my own, each for distinct but highly useful purposes.
My first Weblog is the public one (you can read it at www.infoworld.com/ 93). In this space, I use Radio Userland to post my thoughts on a number of issues,
knowing that anyone can read what I write and offer comments, either via e-mail or personal Weblogs. Anyone can subscribe
to the RSS feed, which means I get useful feedback from people I have never met. At worst, it gives me a means to organize
my thoughts on a number of subjects. At best, I connect with people who think about the same issues and help me solve real
problems. You don't have to work for a traditional publishing company to be a part of this, hence useful Weblogs from software company CEOs, key developers at Microsoft, venture capitalists, and attorneys.
Not everything I deal with on a daily basis can be distributed publicly, but there is still information that needs to be disseminated
regularly and made available to a group on an ongoing basis. This leads to my second Weblog, which isn't actually a Weblog
per se -- it's a Groove discussion for members of InfoWorld's technology department. It functions essentially as a group Weblog
(in fact, Tim Knip's Groove Interop Tool for Radio can make it officially a Weblog). I think one of the biggest mistakes people in corporate IT make is wrongly assuming that
documentation is something that ends at some point. In reality, IT is an organic beast, and documentation is never really
complete. Fortunately, the Weblog paradigm gives corporate IT the means to create documentation that works the way people
think -- in dates (When did this happen to the system?), incidents (What happened, and how was it fixed?), and people (Who
fixed it?). We've used the Groove discussion to manage the IT logistics of office moves, server migrations, and the RFP (request
for proposal) process for Web hosting. This method of group documentation works better in practice than anything I've ever
seen.
My third and final Weblog functions more as a private information manager used and read only by me, a series of not-ready-for-prime-time
"notes to self" about personal and professional interests. It's a scratch pad for ideas that I don't want others to comment
on, if only because I don't want to be constrained by having to write sentences that make sense to the larger world. Some
of the more finished thoughts bubble up to the InfoWorld group Weblog, my public Weblog, and sometimes this column. In the
process, Weblog tools help me maximize my and others' ideas, something that can never be overhyped.
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