Intranet Journal
The online resource for intranet professionals
Give Your Users the Power of the Press With Weblogs and Wikis
Anyone who wears several IT hats in an organization knows the phone doesn't stop ringing some days. During my time as a database administrator, sometime-helpdesk, Netware apprentice, and general purpose "tech guy," I expected a few calls a day from just about everybody.
The calls started to get out of hand, though. When you're sitting down to working out how to make a RDBMS that doesn't understand SQL at least speak with a SQLish accent, interruptions can be hard on your productivity. So I put up a Web page.
It wasn't much, but it had a few useful details, like "the database is backed up as of this time" and "if you were waiting for that reindexing so you can start entering this quarter's data and still see the last's, it's done." I wrote articles explaining how to accomplish a few small tasks users could print out, along with a few tasklists. It didn't set the world afire, but it gave me something to tell people to go read when they had a problem, and enough did that my life got a little easier.
Though Web-based comment boards were nothing new, even then, they preserved an essentially one-way relationship between an information wrangler and the readership. I could have chosen to don an editor's cap and taken 'submissions' from a few of the more advanced users who wanted to write up assorted tips and tricks they'd learned, but I didn't want to be an editor, and there weren't many inexpensive, simple tools for making myself more of a publisher shepherding a whole community of editor/writers.
If all that seems far afield for a database administrator and part-time network gnome, it really was part of the job: sometimes the resident technician is as much an enabler as a fixer, charged with helping her user community solve problems using technology they themselves can't identify by discrete components, let alone manipulate creatively. And even if your users don't want you to think it up for them, they'll want you to implement it.
So what's better since my one-way experiment in micropublishing? Several things, actually, two of which are the weblog and the wiki.
Weblogs Make Micropublishing Easy
If you've been keeping up over the past few years, you've heard about Weblogs: personal journals maintained by, these days, anyone smart enough to do about what it would take to open a My Yahoo! account. Weblog (or 'blog) maintainers (lately they're referred to collectively as "bloggers") link to and write about whatever's
of interest to them (even if that's just blogs). Some are more interesting than others, some are inveterate navel-gazers. What's interesting about 'blogs isn't necessarily the culture surrounding them, but the technology that's growing up to enable the process of quickly and easily committing thoughts to the Web, offer limited discussion/talkbacks, and syndicate new items to make it easier to keep up without constant checking back.
Weblogs and most software that produces them specialize in "micropublishing" and "microcontent." They aren't seeking a mass readership, and they usually they aren't worried about presenting book- (or manual-) length bodies of text. They tend to seek a focused audience (or even affinity group) and provide smaller, article-length items, sometimes just links with a few words of comment. Though in the wild, most weblogs are single-author/editor affairs, some allow multiple editorial accounts with varying levels of access privileges, turning them into collaborative online writers' colonies.
A few examples of weblog software you can try out for free include Movable Type and Greymatter. Both can be installed and configured in as little as an hour with minimal tweaking. Radio Userland is very popular, too, and offers perhaps the most user friendly interface and setup, though if you're responsible for bringing Weblog technology to your organization, you should be competent enough to set up the others on your own servers.
So what would you do with a weblog? Or more appropriately, what would your users do with it?
For one, it's an excellent way to allow anyone to publish content on an Intranet Web server quickly. Most weblog software design acknowledges that not everyone is conversant in HTML, so it's usually possible to simply type the content without worrying about tags. The content is almost instantly available via a Web browser, which is another score for simplicity where readers are concerned. Informal documentation, announcements, link-sharing, and limited dialog about any of those are prime territory for weblog software. Even if your users don't need the tools weblogging software provides, you can use it to keep them up to date on technical issues in a way I wish I'd had when I was writing static update pages and tossing them up on the local servers. They'll even be able to talk back.
As an administrator, you'll probably appreciate weblog software, too. Most of it "just runs" with very little maintenance once installed, taking a minimum of server resources, with an eye toward keeping bandwidth usage down in the default page templates.