Well, I actually do not believe this and it would be an odd post on an Enterprise 2.0 blog. However, this is the title of a blog post I wrote on May 31, 2004 as I was first getting to know blogs. I had just attended one of Dave Winer’s blog meetings at the Berkman Center where he said that he heard from those who have seen blogs both inside and outside organizational firewalls that the more interesting blogs are outside the firewall. I added in my post, “If the goal is objective and entertaining journalism, then I would agree completely with Dave and, in fairness, this was likely his context for the comment.” However, we have gone far beyond this use of blogs in 2007. The early uses of blogs attracted a lot of attention, as blogs were one of Webster’s Words of the year in 2004. This attention both helped and hindered their use within the enterprise.

There was a lot of debate in 2003 and 2004 about what is blog. Jordan Frank summarized some of this discussion in his post, What is a Blog? A Wiki? As Cesar Brea said in 2004, blogs can be considered as both a style and technology. For each objective, there will likely some unique aspects of the technology, the functional design, and the style. Dave Winer focused on the style and defined blogs as the unedited voice of the writer and they reflected a personal perspective. He viewed technical functions as not as important and the need for comments as optional. Jordan focuses more on the technology as he defines blogs and wikis as “A system for posting, editing, and managing a collection of hypertext pages (generally pertaining to a certain topic or purpose)…
Blog: …displayed as a set of pages in time order…
Wiki: …displayed by page as a set of linked pages…”

For Enterprise 2.0 purposes the emphasis should be on the technical capabilities, on one hand, because it opens up more uses. From a purely technical perspective Jordan boils the tools down to their essence and essential difference and this is useful as we think of new uses. As he wrote, why should a technology be defined (and limited to) by its initial major use case. However, the Enterprise 2.0 technology does enable a different “style” of interacting with others and this is something many of us prize. And blogs and wikis have distinct styles apart from each other. Blogs are more about communication and are author-centric. Wikis are more about collaboration and are content-centric. The open communication of both blogs and wikis is much more than a technology and Enterprise 2.0 is much more than a technology play. It needs to be more than technology to realize its potential and to succeed.

I found that the early perceptions of blogs as personal political platforms often got in the way of acceptance by those within an enterprise or least it limited their thinking about what can be done with these tools. We still have a job to overcome these early perceptions of blogs while maintaining some of their open communication. Wikis seem to have less baggage attached to them and that might partially (and only partially) explain their recent rise in use within the enterprise.