Internal blogging at Microsoft

Kevin Briody with some interesting opinions about why internal blogging hasn’t caught on at Microsoft, especially when compared with external blogging. Also an interesting internal communications wish list:

• Create a formal internal blog site and tools, integrated with MSWeb (like the effort around My Sites, but focused on blogging). Put real resources and headcount behind it, don’t rely on volunteers.
• Invest in tools for discoverability of internal blogs and RSS feeds (e.g. a Technorati of sorts)
• Encourage a culture of blogging for communications, to replace status email blasts. Let me just subscribe to your team/group/project blog if I want to keep up on what you’re doing. Break the culture of “cc for importance” and our focus on subscribing (or being subscribed) to vast amounts of email discussion lists or team/group aliases. Execs need to set this example.
• Enable RSS on every part of our Sharepoint portals and team sites – whatever it takes. Let’s look at how Basecamp uses RSS for project and document collaboration. Please make this happen.
• Set up some pre-canned internal OPMLs — role, division, and interest based. Say you’re a product manager  here’s an OPML with internal blog and SPS feeds of interest to your career development. Or you have a strong interest in the VS05 launch - here’s an OPML with feeds for the key launch news blog
• Finally, heavily promote RSS aggregator use – go talk to Dare and get simple instructions on RSS Bandit, pre-load (private label in effect) it with those role/division based OPMLs, and drop it on MSWeb, with tech support set up. Make it a default part of the laptop OS images for new employees. Or go strike a deal with the Start folks, whatever works.

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