Mercurial

I gave a copy of the CIO Magazine article on plogs to my project approval guy, the one that holds the purse, to see if he gets the idea of putting a lot of people on blogs and start using any CMS.
Hell, do not get it, even, just let me implement that - we need the collaboration space and the application serves us perfectly.
Of course, I had to circle only the relevant parts of the article, because it begins with a lot of FUD. Only on the second page it becomes useful to us bloggers trying to get an internal corporate implementation of a plog

And that sums the article. On other place, Matthew Langham chimes, much more concisely, that

Not surprisingly, blogs are recently making headlines and appearing everywhere, with the result that a lot of us are considering them for our places of work, trying to get the decision makers to approve it, suggesting it for new projects or simply planning on getting blog certified. If that exists: Probably start with the foundations onto the ideal CMS from Matthew Thomas (via Mark Pilgrim).

It takes an evangelist to create an organizational attitude favorable to change, and I am experimenting already with a huge resistance to that change. Depending on the organizational culture of the company in which you work, you will find it more or less easy to implement a blog for projects and the like.

To enlighten those seeking about the situation with corporate blogs, a little of my experience: Resistance comes from various camps, finding excuses that range from technical viability to usefulness and clarity of concept, to the old "we are doing it already / that's how we used to do it". However, one of the new aspects that companies area dealing with right now is the fact that emails are not enough any more to maintain a coherent group, and that Sarbanes-Oxley places a significant burden on companies by requiring them to store their emails for a significant amount of time.

Picture this scenario: You are having a discussion with an colleague that lives 30 miles away, or is in another territory - sales, for example. The issue must be notified to everybody, so instead of a simple email, everybody gets the attachment, a typical bloated powerpoint presentation a megabyte heavy. Fifty people, fifty megas wasted on the initial announcement; couple that with the clueless and absolutely normal behavior of emailing back a "me too" response with the full attachment on, and you end up gouging a severe hole on your company's resources, such as bandwidth, storage and, worst of all, the time and attention of your employees - email overload syndrome soon takes over, and urgent important information is likely to be passed while poring over the same email over and over again. Think about the unwieldy nature of email as well: it is not a place for conversations, but the extension of the old letter that you wrote, a thing you seldom shared and that had a very specific format.

The blog is an agora, and those are its benefits: it is open, it's out there, it starts bottom up embodying the principles of empowerment, and it is persistent: you can search it, modify it, and store your and your peers' participation, keeping a high signal to noise ratio.
The blog can reunite the knowledge of the organization in a way that allows it to capture the collective wisdom of its often dissimilar and often separated groups

So, it is with a heavy heart that I must report that there are not going to be blogs installed at my current place of work: the structure is highly hierarchical, and the implementation of such an open and deliberative space seems subject to a lot of red tape. There are better battles to fight.