[Sigia-l] Corporate Blogging - the problems

[Michael Angeles]

> I don't know what you mean by "our strategy" (your company's?), but 
> another,
> perhaps much stronger trend is for something like Google to do its 
> magic.
> mostly unattended by homo sapiens, thereby relieving the latter of much
> drudgery and some classical IAs of employment opportunities.

I was referring to my department's strategy to make intranet blog data 
usable. I work in the library & information service organization within 
my company. I don't know that search engines are always the answer to 
all problems. Yes search is necessary, but are search engines the front 
end you want to use for all types of databases?

We do, in fact, have search engines in-house that do cluster analysis 
and offer categorized and relevancy ranked web site search results. But 
we aggregate a lot of data -- most not from websites -- and our process 
for indexing this data uses a combination of machine and human 
indexing. Computer algorithms have not proven to be capable of 
discerning some concepts as well as humans. I don't think we're in the 
business of indexing this way because we're looking at keeping 
librarians (not IA's) in jobs, it's mainly because people in the 
company continue to come to us looking for this quality of indexing.

Back to the topic of weblogs. I've noticed that people are starting to 
use weblogs to capture and share knowledge within their communities of 
practice. We've responded to customer requests to help support 
knowledge creation by offering XML for search results, in effect 
letting bloggers with feed readers/aggregators follow database searches 
in their own tools. Typical sources are news databases, technical 
document repositories, etc.

While we wait and watch for k-log growth in the intranet, I've been 
thinking abou the next stage -- making blog data usable and findable in 
the enterprise. Part of that strategy has to do with aggregating and 
classifying blog entries for retrieval.

-Michael



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   michael angeles
   michael at studioid dot com