An interesting tweet exchange from @briankelly caused me to revisit an earlier post to this blog. The question is whether it’s good practice to host your blog off-site as in Brian’s UK Web Focus blog, or Andy Powell’s Eduserv Foundation blog, or whether if you’re blogging with the explicit support and encouragement of the organisation you’re working for, it shouldn’t be from an on-site platform, after all that’s what No 10 does – not to mention eBay and Yahoo – they all use the WordPress blogging platform.
That is not to say that you shouldn’t be using an engine such as Typepad or WordPress, but rather whether you should be running it in-house. Thus we (in Cardiff University) currently look both ways. On one hand we have a WordPress Blog for a Library site, and support for our website authors is also provided off-site; on the other hand we’ve been working hard to develop an industry strength blogging platform using Roller to support “enterprise/corporate blogging”, and Confluence for our wiki platform.
Is this a waste of time/resource? I think not! I believe we are very much following the IBM example of the multi-tiered approach to blogging.
From the enterprise, to the collaborative developer, to the marketeer, to the individual, IBMers express their thoughts and make pronouncements. All on different platforms, but it is clear that the first-one is where the official message from the organisation emanates.
Thus watch out for Cardiff Blogs, not to mention Cardiff Wikis (which will be kept as an internal collaboration environment and blogging platform for staff and students), it’ll be appearing in a browser window near you shortly!