Since implementing an internal blog about 18 months ago, Google has seen tremendous benefits from it and may in the future consider providing tools and expertise for this purpose to interested clients, according to a report in InfoWorld.
Google deployed an internal blog for its employees shortly after acquiring the blogging service Blogger in early 2003. Jason Goldman, Blogger product manager at Google, said employees have found many useful and creative ways for the internal blog:
Since then, we have seen a lot of different uses of blogs within the firewall: people keeping track of meeting notes, people sharing diagnostics information, people sharing snippets of code, as well as more personal uses, like letting co-workers know what they’re thinking about and what they’re up to. It really helps grow the intranet and the internal base of documents.
InfoWorld quotes Allen Weiner, an analyst at industry analysts Gartner as saying there is growing interest among businesses towards blogs as business communication tools, particularly among IT departments.
"The mandate of IT organizations today is to do more with less, so the better they can communicate and share things, the more efficient their operations will be," Weiner said. "There’s a huge benefit in blogging for companies implementing IT projects. It’s going to be a growing trend over the next couple of years."
InfoWorld | Google sees benefits in corporate blogging
The interesting comment from Google’s Goldman is how he seems to see the blog as an extension of his company’s intranet. That’s a very good way of looking at it.
I hear comments from some people about blogs replacing intranets. No, that’s not how to consider a blog from an internal communication perspective. Complementing an intranet makes sense as one way of leveraging the already-made investment in an intranet.