Doug Cornelius .com

The crew at Common Craft has come out with a great new video: Blogs in Plain English.

The national Law Journal has an article on how law students landed jobs by blogging: Blogging may be ticket to a job (subscription may be required).

For students, it allows potential employers to see their writing ability and knowledge about a subject. It also shows that the student is “motivated, innovative and takes initiative.”

As I was lying on the couch reading The Boston Sunday Globe I came across an article by Penelope Trunk in the jobs section: Blogging Offers a Lift to Your Career.

“Blogging allows you to create a high-quality network for yourself based, not on the old model of passing out business cards, but on a new model of passing out ideas.”

“Most of the time you spend blogging will be reading other peoples’ blogs and linking to them and writing commentary on your own blog about what others in the blogosphere are talking about. It’s a constant course in your specialty and keeps you on the cutting edge.”

I think these are two great reasons to blog in the blogosphere, as well as within the enterprise.

Scott Neisen of Attensa pointed out a post by Mike Gotta: Getting Over “Fear-of-Blogs”.

Mr. Gotta proposed four categories for the application of Blogs: Internal Communication, Project Management, Community Building and Business Process.

Internal Communication.
In a previous post, I pointed out the virtues of using a blog for internal communication: Better Communication through Blogs, Wikis and RSS. I have focused on this category in the past because I think it would be an easy transition for the communicators. I see the challenge in weaning the communication consumers from getting all of their information in their inbox.

Project Management.
I have thought about using a blog as a communication tool within a project team, but I have doubts about how successful this would be for a legal case. I thought of using a blog to keep track of key decisions and information for an ongoing legal matter. However, on most legal matters there is too much communication among the working group. Emails flow constantly. I think having a common location for lawyers to deposit, share and read email would be more effective and more easily adopted than using a blog. It would be great if that email repository had an RSS feed so the group would know when a new message is added.

Community Building.
Blogs can be effective as a personal knowledge management tool [See my previous post: Why Blog? My Reasons]. The question is how that carries over to an application within the enterprise. I see two options for deploying blogs in the enterprise:

Option One: Set up a blog for a practice area of lawyers, allowing any of them to post information and comment on the information.
Option Two: Set up a blog specific to each user.

I think option one would be better served with a wiki. Information could be more easily be connected with similar information. Information can be built upon rather than being restated. With a wiki you still have the benefit of an RSS feed so users can see changes so you still get the communication benefits.

I have given a lot of thought about option two and I just do not know how users will react. Since our platform will allow us to easily set up blogs, I think I may just give a blog to anyone who wants one and let them do what they want with it. This strategy is less about community building, and more about harnessing personal knowledge management in a way that can be easily leveraged across the enterprise. Assuming blogs get used by a large base of users, you would end up with some duplication of information: when that important case comes down, several people may blog about it.

Business Process.
I am not sold on using a blog to address a business process in the law firm. I have not encountered much of a need among the lawyers for a process that is conversational in nature.

There is one process that I have been am looking at for using a blog. Some of our transactional practice areas are sending out an email to the group that a transaction occurred and some details about the transaction. Then our knowledge management administrators harvest that information into our matter information database.

By using a blog to post information, it moves the communication out of the email and creates a searchable repository that can be tied into the matters database.

I do not blog for fame or fortune. (There is none.)

I do not blog for you. (Although I do appreciate you taking the time to read my blog posts.)

I blog for me.

Not for narcissism, but for capturing knowledge.

Ken Adams points out in his post: Reflections on a Year of Blogging:

“To feed the blog beast, I’ve had to scour the online and paper worlds and the remote recesses of my brain, looking for issues that I hadn’t addressed previously or needed to revisit. I’ve then had to prepare analyses that would withstand scrutiny while being halfway engaging. It’s been rare for a day to go by without my doing some form of work related to the blog. …
In particular, I have a second edition of MSCD to produce. Without the blog, working on the second edition would have seemed a looming and monumental task. But now I have a year’s worth of great material to work with, and it addresses a far broader range of topics than I would have dreamed up without a hungry blog to feed.”

Matt mused in his post: Blogging: Why would I want to do that?! :

“If, like me, you’re a knowledge worker rather than a process worker, you use knowledge and information to get your work done. If you need to find information, clarify your thoughts and share them with others before you write that paper, maybe blogging is the way to help you get your proverbial ducks in a row. Maybe blogging will help you get comments from others, whether they’re peers, colleagues or people you don’t even know who are also doing the same sorta stuff as you.”

Matt coined the term “thought incubator” in one of his comments on one of my posts.

This blog is primarily a personal knowledge management tool for me: A space where I can keep information, wrap context around it, categorize it and search for it.

I blog as a way to capture information on the internet and wrap some context around it. I bookmark sites in my browser and bookmark sites with del.icio.us. (Feel free to check out my tags). [The bookmarks in my browser are for sites I visit regularly. The bookmarks in del.icio.us are for sites that I found interesting and may need to turn back to one day.] But bookmarks do not have much context. You can wrap some metadata around them by giving them tags or putting them into folders. But you really do not have much of an opportunity to say why they interested you.

I blog to write my thoughts down on knowledge management in a way that I can reuse them and adapt them.

I blog to highlight information for future knowledge management projects that I may want to start or to highlight future goals for existing projects.

The search feature of this blog allows me to quickly find the post I was looking for, even if I forgot the name of the post or when I published it.

The label feature allows we to review my thoughts, along the lines of Matt’s “thought incubator” concept and Ken Adams “material generation” concept.

Why blog? Why not blog!

Blogger and many of its competitors are free, easy to set up and learn. If you are shy, Blogger allows you to keep your blog private. (Sorry if that sounds like an ad for Blogger, but I did not know how easy it could be to setup and run a blog.)

Ron Friedmann of Prism Consulting put together an excellent presentation on why law firms should use blogs: Blogging: Why the Fuss?

I have been trying to convince my marketing group to convert some of publications into blogs. The hang up seems to be trying to put together a blogging policy and branding (beyond the typical concerns about learning a new technology and attorney concerns).

I set up an example blog using Blogger in a few minutes and transfered over a substantial amount of content in a few minutes. Since it was Blogger it was free.

Cheap and easy is my kind of project.