January 26, 2004 (Computerworld) --
Jacob Crossman, a software engineer at Soar Technology Inc. in Ann Arbor, Mich., uses blogging tools from Palo Alto, Calif.-based Socialtext Inc. to keep an up-to-date engineering notebook on his ideas about a particular project that can be accessed by other project participants. "One of the disadvantages of a paper-based engineering notebook is that it's hard to find things unless you want to go through it manually," Crossman says. "So I decided to use the blog feature of Socialtext's software to keep track of my ideas. I would type them in, and then they're immediately searchable using another feature of the software." He is also able to link to other documents about the project using the blog entry. Crossman is not alone. Recently, weblogs, or blogs, which let anyone with a Web browser and some easy-to-use software publish a personalized diary online, have started to emerge as valuable knowledge management and communication tools in companies. But blogs aren't entering through the CIO's office. They often first appear in companies as the convenient records of engineering or design projects. They're taking the same bottom-up adoption path followed by instant messaging, another collaboration tool originally used for personal communication. Weblog software, whether free, inexpensive or not so cheap, aggregates and publishes unstructured content on the Web by time and topic. XML can be used to embed links in the blog from a variety of resources, but no knowledge of that language or HTML is necessary. The details and features of the technology vary by vendor, but blogging software is basically a simple content management system that's designed to take content written by the blogger and post it at the top of a page. That content is either stored in a database or a flat file, depending on the software. Usually the presentation layer is separate from the content, so that the blogger can design the look and feel of the blog and simply fit the content elements within whatever format the user wants to read. Many blogging systems provide templates to make that easier. Using blogs, companies can easily and quickly communicate information such as project updates, research, and product and industry news both inside and outside the business. Security issues are the same as with any Internet-based application. Even though blogging technology has the potential to become important to their companies, most CIOs haven't paid much attention to blogging, and it's not one of the tools they're considering to solve their myriad IT problems, according to John Patrick, president of Attitude LLC in Ridgefield, Conn., and former vice president of Internet technology at IBM. "I believe it is important to the
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