FW: A Better Way for Businesses to Blog

[Dr. Richard C. Cassin]

Business 2.0 - What's Next




            A Better Way for Businesses to Blog
            Traction Software bends the blog to the needs of business.
            By Rafe Needleman, August 04, 2003

      I've written before about novel knowledge-management and groupware
startups like Groove Networks, Tacit Knowledge Systems, and Kubi Software.
These businesses all take clever approaches to knowledge sharing within the
organization. However, they all share one barrier: They require the user to
learn a new form of communication.

      Not surprisingly, these new tools are expensive, mostly because they
require businesses to invest in training workers to use them. Meanwhile, new
forms of electronic communication -- like blogs, short message service, and
instant messaging -- are coming at users from noncorporate directions. Guess
which tools are more popular?

      So it should not come as a shock that some companies are doing the
smart thing: leveraging the buzz around end-user technologies and applying
it to the corporation.

      Traction Software is a purveyor of corporate blogging tools. Sure, any
CEO with a smattering of typing skills can use the Google-owned Blogger, but
Blogger (like the other standard blogging tools) doesn't offer the same kind
of security features as a corporate blog. For example, Traction lets you
assign permissions to individuals or groups. So you could set up the CEO's
blog so everybody can read it, or create a research blog that allows a small
group of scientists to post to it and a larger (but not all-company) group
to read it. One clever feature is that Traction narrows its search results
to those areas a user can access.

      Traction's system is actually a deep hypertext database. Every entry
can easily be linked to any other, and the system tracks those links. You
can attach your own personal notes to an entry as well, or create notes for
just your group. If this sounds more like an information-processing
experiment than a corporate product, consider Traction's roots. As CEO and
co-founder Greg Lloyd told me, the whole thing got started because he and
co-founder Chris Nuzum were on a "Let's go build a Memex" kick. To refresh
your memory, the Memex was the hypothetical hypertext machine constructed in
Vannevar Bush's seminal 1945 article "As We May Think."

      Back in the practical world, Lloyd and Nuzum were smart enough to
realize that blogging works in corporations for two reasons: First,
businesses pay for knowledge management software. Second, blogging is
perfect for some business solutions, particularly in departments that live
or die by logging and sharing time-critical information. Think of police and
crisis-management teams. Traction's focus on these customers has landed the
company a contract with the Western States Information Network, which runs
networking and data services for multijurisdictional law enforcement. In
this and other types of public service, a blog of events has the advantage
of being secure but easily accessible by any designated user with a Web
browser. No fancy logging or knowledge management software is required at
user sites, and no IT support is necessary to give users access.

      We tend not to think of corporate leaders and FBI officers as natural
bloggers, but a large component of these jobs and many others is recording,
sharing, and logging information. Judging by blogging's popularity among
people with seemingly very little to say, it appears to be a natural human
instinct. So it makes sense for simple blogging tools to reach the corporate
world, where they can be put to work.

      -Rafe Needleman















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