Many thanks, Tim.  That is good advice.

len


From: Tim.Bray@S... [mailto:Tim.Bray@S...]On Behalf Of Tim Bray

On Oct 5, 2004, at 1:05 PM, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:

> Asking here because it is the only place I know to ask.
> This is very general.
>
> Suppose an executive decides to set up blogging for
> corporate employees.   Where do they start?

We had a useful session on this at the Foo Camp.  There are three 
interesting issues: 1. internal/external, 2. policy, 3. technology

1. internal/external - I am not aware of any instance of really vibrant 
& useful internal blogs.  They do happen, other people tell me about 
them, but if you have both external and internal, the external tends to 
end up being the big deal.

2. policy - ideally, the draft policy should contain two sentences.  
The first says "1. Exercise good judgement"  The second says "2. If you 
contravene #1, you're in trouble."  For our effort at Sun, we went 
quite a bit further: 
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/05/02/Policy - internal 
versions have refined that a bit but they're not public yet

3. technology - there's lots of good software out there.  We picked 
Roller and it held up pretty well under the strain of 500+ bloggers but 
we wanted changes so we hired the author, and now it's going to be 
moving forward much faster because it's his day job.  
http://www.rollerweblogger.org/page/project

In terms of infrastructure, it won't take much, blogging is a low-rent 
web app.

Of course, the hard part is finding the courage to pull the trigger and 
let your people speak to the world.  It worked for us but your mileage 
may vary. -Tim