March 3rd, 2005
The rise of blogs and wikis in business
It is no secret that corporate use of blogging technology is on the rise. An article from The Gilbane Report does a great job tracking the latest in corporate use of blogs, wikis, and related hybrid technologies.
But in a blog post pointing to the report, Frank Gilbane acknowledges the common skepticism about the use of blogs and wikis in business:
"Most of the discussion about blogs is centered around their affect on mainstream journalism, their power as a new communication channel and voice of the people, and how this will impact society. All this is interesting, but what does it have to do with implementing content or knowledge management, or enterprise collaboration applications? IT, business managers, and even analysts can be forgiven for thinking "not much". In fact, we have been skeptical ourselves."
One of the key takeaways from the report is that the growth in business blogs/wikis is for internal use, rather than customer-facing applications. Gilbane singles out two software vendors, SocialText and Traction Software, as leading the charge with enterprise offerings that combine both blog and wiki technologies with added features such as full audit trails and version control.
