IBM intranet: 200 active bloggers

Via the IAOC blog.

Blogging at IBM by Phil Borremans at 05:27PM (CET) on March 4, 2005

Hi everyone, just wanted to give an overview of how blogging is used at IBM.

At this moment we have about 2800 internal weblogs (on a total worldwide population of about 330.000 IBM'ers.) with about 12700 entries. About 200 blogs have more than 10 posts on them...

On the other hand, editors can come from any part of the company; engineers, communications, research, software... you name it. ...

Some of these blogs are "information blogs" linking to interesting articles, URl's, RSS feeds etc... but some are used for project management.

In this case blogs are used to get the team on "the same page" with regards to progress being made or issues being tackled.

We also have external blogs, mainly written by our people from developerWorks. As these are written by our engineers and developers they tend to cover specific topics in their area of expertise.

What can we extrapolate?

1. Less than one percent tried to blog inside the firewall (I'm looking for a term besides "intranetally" or "domesticated"). About 0.8 percent.
2. Let's assume most dabble first (people try a first post or two and abandon their first blogs), just like in the wild. So let's chalk up 6000 posts to experimentation. That leaves another 6700 posts for the 200 active bloggers, or 34 posts per blogger.
3. Assuming 3 posts a week, most of the active blogs are less than three months old. So it is still very early in their adoption.
4. Other blogging may not "public" even within the general intranet, limiting visibility to a project's or team's members. These blogs are unlikely to show in stats from a central blog host.

Questions:

• How do bloggers choose to blog internally or externally? What are the likely indicators?
• How much positive feedback does a blogger need to stick with blogging and make it a personal work practice? What forms of feedback (e.g. commenting in a blog, linking to a blog or blog post, showing up in a blogroll, mention in private, mention in a meeting or in public) work best?

Thanks to Steve King's IFTF Future Now blog for the tip.