Blogging in the Public Sector
By Andy Budd
The Audiences Experience of Blogging
- Does everybody know what a blog is?
- How many people read blogs on a regular basis?
- How many people have a personal blog?
- Are you currently using a blog at work?
What is a Blog?
- A ‘blog’ (short for ‘web log’): an online diary or journal - Joe Clark
- A public web site where users post informal journals of their thoughts, comments, and philosophies, updated frequently and normally reflecting the views of the blog's creator - Unknown
- A weblog, web log or simply a blog is a web application, which contains periodic posts on a common webpage. These posts are often but not necessarily in reverse chronological order - Wikipedia
Early Personal Web Publishing
- Originally static pages
- Needed to be updated by somebody familiar with HTML
- Time consuming
- Preserve of a small number of technically savvy people
The Effect of Blogging Applications
- Small, specialised CMS
- Free or inexpensive
- Easy to set up
- Little or no technical knowledge required
- Publish easily, quickly and from anywhere
- Massive bloom in personal publishing
Popular Blogging Applications
- Blogger
- WordPress
- TypePad
- Movable Type
The ‘Blogsphere’
- Geek term to describe the blogging community
- Blogs cover everything from personal diaries, politics, arts, culture, activism, news, technology etc.
- Blogs are now being used by corporations, news agencies, governments and political campaigns.
- Ability to leave comments allows a community to grow around blogs.
- Blog search engine Technorati, currently indexes 16.5 million blogs
Benefits of Internal Weblogs
- Very cheap and easy to set up
- Disposable
- Provides an easy mechanism for annotation and feedback
- Content is searchable and easy to categorise
- Content is accountable i.e. date and author
- Wide reach through RSS
- More targeted and controlled than email
- Particularly useful for geographically diverse organisations
Internal Communication
- Effective way to share ideas internally
- Way of canvassing staff opinion
- Narrow the perceived barrier between staff and management.
- Increases transparency.
- Example: Blog of Departmental Head. Provides a good means of communicating and connecting with staff members.
Knowledge sharing
- Used for personal or group knowledge sharing
- Example 1: Departmental Blog. Departmental head posts news, alerts and other useful information.
- Example 2: Help Desk Blog. Operators post up answers to common questions, unusual questions etc
- Example 3: Shift logs. Staff post information on what has been happening during their shift
Project Management
- Streamline communication on internal projects
- Used to track status of tasks and projects
- Leaves an audit trail
- Example 1: Press department can use collaborative blog to track the progress of different marketing campaigns
- Example 2: Individual staff member can post their current workload status.
Institutional Problems
- Culture shift
- Internal blogging will need to be promoted at the start
- Start small, with several blog champions
- Email use will need to be discouraged
- Many organisations fear frank and open discussion and criticism
- However open discussions are healthy
- Control culture needs to change
- Need to have an internal usage policy