InfoTech: Blogging
1 Feb, 2006 By: Tyler Whitaker Landscape ManagementThe Web, with all of its vast information and great searching capabilities, is now putting the power to publish in everyone's hands.
Do you ever have the feeling that your company memos are just wallpaper for the break room bulletin board? Is the area surrounding your company time clock the main distribution point for company goals, strategy and culture? All too often we find ourselves spending time looking for memos, answering questions that have already been answered, and repeating meetings with the same old announcements. If this sounds familiar, you might want to start blogging.
It's all about communication
In a labor-intensive industry like ours, employee communication is a critical success factor. That's why we spend so much time in meetings, training sessions, reading e-mail, reviewing company memos and the list goes on. But are we as effective as we could be? What happens when someone misses the meeting or loses the e-mail? When in a meeting, who keeps track of the key points and new policies discussed? From personal experience I've found that the hardest question of them all is: Where can I find all of this information when I'm ready to review it? The answer is: the Internet.
In the past, if you wanted to publish information on the Internet, you needed a Web page and a fair amount of technical skills to make it happen. Businesses got in on this concept by creating "Intranets" or internally focused Web pages to communicate.
Author your own Web site
The Web with all of its vast information and great searching capabilities is now putting the power to publish in everyone's hands. It's called blogging. The word blog is short for "Web log," similar to an online journal. But with the latest blogging software, you can now create full-scale interactive Web sites that allow your staff to post thoughts, pictures, exchange comments, and collect information, all on an easily accessible Web site.
You don't need to be technical to make it work. If you can send an e-mail or edit a document, you can blog. And best of all, in the time it takes to type in your information, you can have it available online for anyone to read, search, and most importantly make comments. Blogging really does two revolutionary things. First it provides an easy way for anyone to publish information on the Web. And second, it empowers the reader to type in their comments in response to your information.
I know what you're thinking, "How can I get started? We don't even have a server." Here's where blogging really shines. Simply put, you don't need a server. Several Web sites out there provide everything you need to get started. Just sign up, give your blog a name and start adding content. Check out these Web sites:
www.blogger.com,
www.wordpress.com,
www.typepad.com. You can literally get started in a few minutes.
— The author is chief technology officer for the Symbiot Business Group. Contact him at 801/733-6900 or
twhitaker@symbiot.biz.
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