I recently received an invite from Ankush Gupta, who has the Learned Man! blog, to look at the company blog of Tata Interactive Systems. I’ve read Ankush’s blog on and off for a while and found that he provides some solid commentary on elearning, so I checked out the Tata Blog. It’s a multi-user effort with posts so far from the CEO and various instructional design consultants. The review of Allison Rossett’s First Things Fast is worth a read, as this is an excellent handbook for performance improvement.
It will be interesting to see how this corporate, multi-user blog evolves over time. One successful multi-user blog, though not from a single company, is the Learning Circuits Blog. Whether a company blog can have the same depth of conversation remains to be seen. So far, I like the initial posts on the Tata Systems blog, especially on their work for learning disabilities and participation in the Mumbai marathon.
A different approach to company blogging is SilverOrange, a web-systems company on Prince Edward Island. There are no direct links from the company website, but the individual bloggers proudly link back to their company. SilverOrange bloggers include Dan James, Daniel Burka and Steven Garrity.
Here are two approaches to blogging and work. In one the blogger is part of a corporate blog while in another the blogger is an individual who happens to work (or own) a company. The use of blogs is evolving over time and there may be a day when a company blog is identified (by the majority) as a separate entity from an individual blog. Does it matter? I think that the level of comments and interaction, especially when controversial subjects arise, will show if there is a difference. Dan James has even stated that "Companies don’t blog, people do".
My interest in all of this is how this medium is being used and what its effects will be. Will blogs become the equivalent of the e-mail scourge of the next decade? Will employees be forced to blog on the company site? These are the early days of blogging for the mainstream and it’s still fun to watch the field change and read new blogs.
