One company that I've been spending some time at has an intranet blog
for its employees, but I see a few factors that inhibit adoption, and
these issues span both technology and culture:
- RSS feeds cannot be read using consumer versions of a feedreader like Bloglines or NewsGator for security reasons.
This means that most people (even junkies) have to revisit the site for
updates to comments and new posts. A bit of a drag ... you mean we have
to go to the corporate CIO to get NewsGator authorized for the
corporate Outlook software stack (I'm not picking on NewsGator btw)?
These kinds of things are just effort killers for intranet blogging
though ...
- Many corporate cultures view blog reading as a waste of time.
Evangelism is still needed to get blog reading accepted into a
corporate culture. If you can point an organization to a high-quality
blog in your industry, this goes a long way to dispelling the myth that
blog reading is a waste of time. In fact, people can get a lot of
consolidated information and synthesized analysis by reading blogs.
- Many corporate cultures still view corporate email, newsletters,
and enterprise systems as the means for handling, disseminating, and
using information. Things like wikis, social bookmarking, and blogs
are not well understood in terms of their productivity enhancing
aspects. When I recently showed someone how bookmarking tools could be
used on the Internet as the equivalent of Post It Notes, there was a
huge "a-ha event" that took place. We often tout tools in conceptual
terms and with respect to their Web 2.0 social aspects. In reality,
sometimes to get these tools to take, you simply have to show people
the money.
Do you see any other barriers to intranet blogging?
Update (12/20/05): Folks still trying to learn about social media in large corporations should check out Jeff Nolan's post
here.
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