It’s interesting to look at my top entry categories:

• Prospectives, proposals and tenders (401 posts)
• Gossip (154)
• Workshops (138)
• Project updates (119)
• Resources (105)
• Conferences and events (91)
• Product development (77)

It’s been busy, very busy. No shortage of work, and lots of gossip…

But now to a common point of frustration: all too often when I go to link to a blog entry, I struggle to find the name of the author. You’d think this would be straightforward, but it isn’t so. I hunt through the “about me” page, I carefully examine the footer of each post, I examine the home page of the site. Nothing other than a username!

So my advice for everyone with a blog: make sure your name is clearly visible throughout your blog. Ideally, this should be listed on the sidebar of every page, perhaps even with a photograph and a brief bio. After all, a blog is supposed to be the voice of its author…

Take the 60 seconds test: can you find your name on your own blog? Your time starts now!

Structured blogging activity has accelerated, and has reached the important milestone where there is debate about whether it will amount to anything. If you are not familiar with structured blogging, the term itself should be enough to give you a good idea – think of structured editing, eForms, and blogging all mushed together.

In August, IBM made its first official foray into podcasting by launching a series of programs called “IBM and the Future of…,” featuring its scientists and other staffers discussing topics like driving, shopping, banking and urban planning. Postcasts are audio files designed to be played on PCs or portable music devices like iPods; listeners can use software to subscribe for automatic downloads of new podcasts in series that interest them.

[Thanks to Toby Ward.]

While the McDonald’s Corporation has not jumped headfirst into blogging, it certainly is further along the path of acceptance than many companies of its size.

Last week, the company began an internal program that introduced corporate blogs, available only on the corporate intranet, behind the firewall. While this is seen as a small first step, it’s an important one in a company the size of McDonald’s, said Steve Wilson, senior director of global Web communications for McDonalds. Wilson spoke to a crowd of bloggers and curious marketing folk at Monday’s BlogOn social media summit in New York.

[Thanks to Toby Ward.]

Descriptive headlines are especially important for representing your weblog in search engines, newsfeeds (RSS), and other external environments. In those contexts, users often see only the headline and use it to determine whether to click into the full posting. Even if users see a short abstract along with the headline (as with most search engines), user testing shows that people often read only the headline. In fact, people often read only the first three or four words of a headline when scanning a list of possible places to go.

This Guide is the result of 350 hrs of learning and experimentation to test the boundaries of blog functionality, scope and capabilities. I myself began this process as a total newbie about six months ago — which likely shows in gaps and naivete — but I have been aggressive in documenting as I have gone. The learning from my professional blog journey, still ongoing, is reflected in these pages. This Guide addresses about 100 individual “how to” blogging topics and lessons, all geared to the content-focused and not occasional blogger. More than 140 citations from more than 80 experts provide additional guidance. The Guide itself occupies 80 pages. It is all free.

[Thanks to IDM.]

Through the central blog dashboard at the intranet W3, IBMers now can find more than 3,600 blogs written by their co-workers. As of June 13 there were 3,612 internal blogs with 30,429 posts. Internal blogging is still at a stage of testing and trying at IBM but the number of blogs is growing rapidly — and they are appreciated, with everything from water cooler talk to discussions about IBM’s business strategies.

[Thanks to Charlie Wood.]

• Link-only
• Link blurb
• Brief remark
• List
• Short article
• Long article
• Series postings

[Thanks to Bill Ives.]

Aside from participation in discussions, the community manager often needs a consistent and accessible place to have an independent voice to relate community news and information. Below you will see how a weblog may be used to fill this need.

We rambled on about how much fun it would be to observe patterns in the use of comments, classification, cross-linking between entries, aggregation, and so on. We brainstormed a few metrics that could be tracked longitudinally against the growth of the system’s content and usage. And we came up with some fun questions that could be investigated. For example, would a static set of general classification terms lose value as content grew? Would more precise terms be added, or would students naturally rely on other approaches, such as cross-linking, to make the content more accessible?

In conclusion, I would like to stress that the informal and engaging attributes of the weblog format can be used even in the light of tightly scheduled and highly focused training situations. The simple alternatives outlined in this paper can liberate us from the tyranny of product-oriented delivery and help us build continuous, engaging and memorable learning experiences.

[Thanks to elearningpost.]

Before the development of weblogs, “online community” tools like forums, mailing lists and bulletin boards were predominantly used for community building. Experience seems to show that weblogs are proving far more effective in creating meaningful interpersonal connections than centralized community spaces on the web. Can networks of bloggers be seen as the future of online communities?

[Thanks to Jack Vinson.]

Our internal use of Weblogs has greatly accelerated, and we’re beginning to see more tangible benefits as we’ve begun to reach a critical mass of internal contributors. At the end of March, my team held an off-site retreat and created a rolling six-month plan for IT initiatives at InfoWorld, which we posted to a Weblog available to all employees. For each month in the plan, we created a checklist of projects we would be working on and noted which ones would be completed in that month. We also scheduled what we call “fire drills” — our internal term for the intentional failure of a specific key system to test fail-over capabilities in the event of an unexpected outage of that system.

Posting this plan on a Weblog made three key things happen. First, it forced the team to strategically organize its IT initiatives into a coherent roadmap fit for broader internal consumption. Next, it created a sense of accountability for these initiatives within the IT team because we had collectively agreed on the initiatives and documented the process. Finally, posting our plan for the entire company to see helped foster a sense of accountability to our non-IT colleagues within the company.

[Thanks to elearningpost.]

For a company employee weblogs can provide a unique opportunity to access usually invisible trails of development and flows of ideas, a window onto practice. It can serve as a learning resource for others, as well as providing a better overview of internal expertise and experts, and may lead to the speeding up of innovation due to earlier cross-fertilisation of ideas. Weblogs can be used as a technology for facilitating and extending existing apprenticeship and coaching programs or capturing stories of retiring experts.