Email is where documents go to die

Why blogging matters to your business and your IT is an interesting article by ZDNet’s David Berlind. The article is based on an interview between the reporter and UserLand Software CEO Scott Young. They talk a lot about how much knowledge and value is lost in the corporation by an overemphasis on email:

How many of the e-mails you publish should be stuck in e-mail? How many times have you caught yourself deliberating over who should see it and who shouldn’t? Why should that be the burden of people who are creating valuable information? The burden to get a report done or to summarize a meeting, or to register your thoughts within a collaborative environment before the project moves on to the next milestone is absolutely the burden of the publisher. But when merged with the notion of subscribing, there’s no reason that the people can’t bear the burden of tuning in themselves. Call it good listening skills. Not only that, it creates an environment where people that you never envisioned tuning in start to tune in, which leads to more knowledge sharing and, hopefully, more informed decision-making.

A very good summary of the benefits to business of adding blogs to their workflows. There’s even a podcast – an MP3 of the actual interview, and the article itself gives the timecodes of the podcast so you can easily move to a section of interest. Very well done. (The subject of this post is from a quote in the article. Great line, wish I could take credit for it.)

Simplicity, the sustainable competitive advantage

I will ruin the ending of a fantastic piece by Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz:

The simplicity of blogs, the convenience of pervasive networks, and an explosion of new content sources – as a combined force, is radically underestimated. And not for its impact on the publishing industry, in specific, but on any industry that finds competitive advantage in the latency of information, or in complexity. From national security to the whole IT industry. Simplicity can be a sustainable competitive advantage. It’s becoming more obvious by the day.

It’s a must read article…

Blogging from Kilimanjaro

Via Slashdot:

Apparently a charity called Cops On Top is climbing Kilimanjaro as a memorial to the late Officer Isaac Espinoza of the SFPD. That in itself is pretty amazing, but the /. amazing thing is that they are AudioBlogging the whole thing via Satellite Phone by calling to an audioblogging site and having their MP3s automatically posted to their dasBlog (open source blogging system) at www.copsontop.com/climblog. Cool stuff. Their latest blog post is at 15,500 ft.

These guys are audio blogging using the very fine AudioBlog tool which we demonstrated on BlogHarbor here. Nice work, Audioblog.com!

The state of blogging

Pew Internet & American Life Project released a report called The state of blogging, where they note the following:

  • 8 million American adults say they have created blogs
  • blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users
  • 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online
  • 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs
  • 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.

Click here for their report, downloadable in PDF form.