Matt Mower skyped me in my early morning hours. Blame errors or recollection on being awake all night.

Speaking from theory, what might be some core business cases for intranet blognets?

Project communication.

Team blogs. Project aggregators and RSS feeds. Individual blogs. Blog your thinking as you scope the project. Blog flash reports. Meeting minutes. Task notes. Use a blog-to-email gateway for stakeholder communications. Socialize new project members faster and more completely. Create better after action reports.

Projects often fail due to poor communication. Blogs aren't a magic pill, but they are a fast and cheap way to produce more and better communication. More, because blogs lower some of the barriers to communication and create personal and peer reinforcement for sharing. Better, because blognets' social nature also improves the quality and context of those communications. The PMBOK describes a basic project communication; you can live it with blognets.

Scale social network from small to medium, medium to large

When your workforce can fit in your neighborhood Starbucks, everyone knows each other. Blognets help you scale that experience. Do you plan for growth? Foster blognets to smooth the way, to preserve values and culture, to reinforce the informal organization that gets things done.

Cross stovepipes

Marketing doesn't talk to engineering? Raise two blognets. Expose them to each other with discovery tools. Not only are you getting blogging's baseline benefits, hidden processes and thinking see daylight, and you can improve the quality of dialog.

Due diligence

Merging with another department or company? Buying one in the next few years? Selling your company? Start your blognets now. Help appraisers value your org's social capital. Reveal the power of your informal networks, your workforce's individual and collective knowledge and capacity.

You're buying one of two apparently identical firms, but one has a healthy blognet. Which has lower risk? Which gives you an added factor to consider, reinforcing management's claims?

Transition and Continuity Management

Your chiefs adopt a new strategy. The new direction calls for changing the workforce over 2-3 years. Layoffs. Mergers. Retraining. Recruiting. Retirement. For the chiefs, blognets shorten new hire learning curves. Help two organizations merge their informal social networks faster and with less struggle. For individuals, blognets strengthen your personal brand (good or bad, but stronger) and improve your marketability within the enterprise.

And I haven't even evoked tying blogs to your enterprise systems and processes.

[a klog apart]

 

I'm reading a political thriller. Except William Shakespeare is the hero. And Spain occupies England. With the Inquisition and Irish mercenaries for enforcers. Ruled Britannia by Harry Turtledove. Haven't put it down all weekend.

There is something delightful about living in a time where little corner bakeries in Oakland's Chinatown have web site address printed on their street awnings. How else would I have known that Sum Yee Pastry delivers DimSumOnline?

Q. If American Jews go out for Chinese food on Christmas, where do Chinese Americans go on Rosh Hashana?

[a klog apart]

Dina notes the fear of loss of control behind a study of IM use. The article proclaims "IM is for Scheming, Flirting, Gossip." Of course. Small talk is a necessary social lubricant; it engenders feelings of trust and raport that permit business tasks and transactions to occur. But the kneejerk reaction to studies like this is to buy software that monitors conversations or blocks chat altogether.

You're worried about wasted time? Secrets leaked? Offended personnel? Don't blame the medium.

Look to mismanagement. I worked for a semiconductor firm. Fab down-time cost more than $3000 a minute. A server controlling the fab went down during the night shift. An operator had been downloading porn videos, filled up the hard drive, and crashed the system.

• Was the problem the ability to download porn? [reaction: identify and block porn sites]
• Or the ability to download anything (you'd get the same result from getting The Sound of Music or The Little Mermaid)? [reaction: block p2p tools, threaten offenders]
• Or was it that the operator was uneducated in the consequences of his actions (lots of disk space required)? [reaction: train users on how the software works]
• Or could it be that the operator was not focused upon the appropriate business goals, sharing the firm's priorities? Or unskilled in recognizing the blurry line between personal time and (admittedly boring) work time? [reaction: train and certifiy personnel]

In this particular case the guy was not smart, aware, or motivated. But is the offense worse because of the tool? Would you ban periodicals if he was caught reading a porn magazine instead of doing his job? Is this worse or different than if he was drunk or high on the job?

Totalitarian management. There are still places where phone calls and sites surfed are automatically logged and the lists routinely sent to your manager for review. Since everyone offends, this gives those managers the power to reprimand or fire on whim, if they choose. It's those choices that shape the culture of trust, the attitudes and behaviors that create or destroy performance.

Would you feel differently if the outcomes were dire? Loss of life, not just loss of cash?

This becomes a public policy question. Do you create a country where nobody has a reasonable expectation of privacy? Where everyone's choices are narrowed to prevent the chance of an offensive act? Or do you rely upon the marketplace of ideas, tools of information and persuasion, to preserve the freedom to do anything and the social norms to choose for aligned personal and communal interest?

[a klog apart]

Do you live for the elegant hack? Compete in the Google Code Jam 2003. Say you don't slay the competition.How dying for a living? Win a walk-on roll starring your own demise in Showtime's Dead Like Me (the Win A Job To Die For sweepstakes). The drawing is around October 1st.