Advocating Blogs in the Workplace
A centerpiece of the college campus where I work — the steps that lead up the hill to our administration building — is being demolished and replaced this summer. Installed in 1910, they’ve cracked and weathered beyond repair. This is a milestone event in the history of the college, and my boss wants to keep a visual record of the demolition and reconstruction online where alumni around the world can visit and watch it happen.
I’ve been trying to convince him that a photoblog is the ideal way to do this. Today, I sent him the following e-mail to try and persuade him:
[Name of Boss],
Last week, I suggested using a photoblog as a way to record the reconstruction of the 77 online and promised you more info soon. Here’s my assessment of the pros and cons of a couple of our options, with plenty of informational links both for you and for the CIC if you should choose to forward this on to them. More personal and casual that a press release or official web presence, weblogs are starting to be used as a way to communicate with customers and constituents in both the for-profit and non-profit arenas. I think that we can use this trend to our advantage here at [College Name].
As you probably know, a “blog” (short for weblog) is a web site with chronological entries. These can comprise a personal journal, news updates, progress reports, links to web sites of interest, or virtually anything else. In the last few years, shutterbugs started catching on to the blog phenomenon as a way to publish their pictures online and the “photoblog” was born. For examples of the form, you can visit Photoblogs.org.
Blogs can be made and maintained in several ways, but the easiest way to do it is with software designed for the task. Blogware usually resides on a server, and is interacted with via a web browser (similar the way Hotmail and other web-based e-mail programs work). The user types in entries or uploads photos, pushes a button, and the software takes care of the rest. The better programs will generate the web pages, create easy-to-browse archives of past entries, and allow users to post comments on the individual entries. It’s all very slick once you get it set up. Set up can be a hassle depending on the software you choose, but that’s the CIC’s problem.
One of the best blogging programs available today is Movable Type. It’s free for non-commercial use, and it has a wide user base with lots of easy-to find help and how-to information on the web. Non-commercial users can also make a $45 donation to be eligible for technical support from the company. There are some excellent ready-made photoblog templates (used by the software to generate the actual web pages) at this web site. The output of the templates look like this, and can be refined by someone with web design experience.
Movable Type has two drawbacks: (1) it’s difficult to set up, so CIC has more to complain about, and (2) it requires a server-side database to work, which Scott might not be willing to do. Screenshots of the Movable Type interface are available.
A better alternative, if the CIC won’t go for Movable Type, might be Pivot. Popular in the programmer’s native Netherlands, Pivot requires no server-side database and is much easier to set up (it’s a 10-minute process, max). It requires that the PHP Hypertext Preprocessor be running on the web server, but I think we already have that here. The downsides to Pivot are (1) a relatively small user base and (2) no existing ready-made photoblog templates, although there are a few sites offering other kinds of templates starting to pop up. On the positive side, Pivot has some built-in tools that might make uploading and managing photos much easier than with Movable Type. Pivot is also free. You can find some screenshots here.
Hope this helps,
Adam
Alas, he wrote back in short order and told me that efforts were already starting to do it a different way. That’s okay. I’m doing it myself anyway. 
Has anyone else out there tried to advocate a blog as part of your employer’s online presence? How did you go about it, and what kind of luck did you have?
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