Dave part 3: Bloggers in organizations as information routers

I came to Harvard a few months after a conference where they said, “The dot-com thing is over. What do we do with the Internet?” And they decided to share information across the schools using weblog technology. And that’s how I got the job.

Think about it this way: In every workgroup, there’s one person who sends emails saying, “Here, you’ve got to check this page out.” In a sense, that person should be running the blog for the workgroup. Instead of emails, you get a trail that can be searched, checked by date, added to a taxonomy. When a new person comes on they don’t start from scratch. It also facilitates information sharing. While not everyone in the organization will be interested in this and subscribe to everyone else’s feed, if one person in a workgroup does this, that one person could act as an information router. Will everyone do this? No. But couldn’t we do better at moving information around organizations.

This is where the excitement is: using this flow, using open standards, a low tech approach. And I think Microsoft could do well here.