Griff Wigley: Clusters

An Open Offer to Utah State IT Employees

The State of Utah's CIO is using his weblog to issue a challenge to state IT employees to launch their own weblogs.

I believe that the 900 or so IT employees of the State of Utah would benefit from speaking and listening to each other more. I think we need groups of specialists inside various departments to communicate with others in their specialty and without. Consequently, I'd like to see more people writing blogs and communicating their ideas through an open forum like the one blogs engender. To that end, I'm willing to pay the licensing fee to Userland for the first 100 employees who start a blog.

State of Utah's weblog cluster

Doc Searls noted these "intra-gov" blogs this week and after I poked around a bit, it appears to be a weblog cluster - state government agency weblogs that got going in Utah in late May.

Phillip Windley is the state's Chief Information Officer (CIO) and runs Windley's Weblog on Enterprise Computing.
David Fletcher is Deputy Director of Utah's Department of Administrative Services and runs the Government and Technology Weblog.
Bob Woolley has a Technology Weblog. No info on his blog yet as to who he is and which department he works for, but his blog is linked to from Windley's and Fletcher's.

They're all using hosted versions of Radio Userland. Where have I seen those templates before?

Weblog Clusters; Google weblog cluster searches?

It's time to add "Clusters" to my categories of organization blogs, even though it's not quite a neat, logical fit with the others. For some reason, I like the word 'cluster' better than 'community.' Maybe it's because 'community' is so overused, but I tend to think that it's overstating it when there's no formal intentionality among the blogs in the cluster.

I think organizational Weblog clusters could prove to be an important development. I'm pitching the concept to a group of civic-oriented groups here in my hometown of Northfield, as well as to some organizations in the Twin Cities. I ran some ideas about it past Doc Searls yesterday, who was in town to give a speech. He seemed to see the potential, too.

Noodle this related issue around: how could Google be tweaked so that a weblog cluster could be searched? Or better yet (especially for civic/democracy-related purposes) how could Google return a result on a certain topic within a cluster of weblogs?

For example, if a cluster of organizational and personal weblogs in the Twin Cities all touch on the topic of urban sprawl over a six month period, would it be helpful to be able to do a Google search on the phrase "urban sprawl" and have it return a result that would indicate "cream rising to the top" somehow, i.e., whose thinking/writing on the issue within the cluster is most linked to?

Blogging Goes Corporate

This article in Wired profiles the use of weblogs by Macromedia product managers for customers that I wrote about last week.

Note the informal weblog cluster that includes a developer/customer: "Hall has his own blog, and he often links to the Macromedia blogs, and they link to him, and others link to all of them -- creating a community of Flash blogs that the company says addresses the needs of its customers."

And note the process by which cream rises to the top: "The important items -- the best Flash examples, the most interesting tips, the most pernicious bugs -- are passed through the developer community at blog-speed, which can be quite fast. The unimportant stuff isn't passed around as quickly -- which of course is just how it should be."

Matt Brown's Dreamweaver Blog

Matt writes:

"This is not the only blog about Macromedia from the folks at Macromedia. All the Community Managers here have set up blogs for the products that we represent. There is also going to be a lot of cross linking since everyone is now so plugged into each other's products."

Note that these are external blogs, i.e., employee-run blogs for accessing by the general public.

I need to start making a distinction between external org blogs and internal org blogs which seem to be increasingly referred to as kblogs (or k-blogs - Knowledge Management Blogs).

7/16 note: I've added this to the cluster category because there are now several Macromedia product-related weblogs. See the blogroll on the right side of Matt's weblog