There are some interesting discussions underway in the act-km discussion group. One recent post by Shawn Callahan speaks of how corporate leaders can use blogging to help share their vision. I also see this as a great way to create a corporate history. History grounds people and helps to explain why certain actions were taken at a point in time. It also celebrates success. Over the last few weeks I have been reacquainting myself with some past colleagues and nothing connects us quicker that reliving our joint successes. In the “KM” space I would begin sharing “KM” success via weblogs. My own experience shows that one small seed of success grows many more elsewhere.
Regarding the analogy between blogs and what a journalist might write, I was thinking that weblogs are more akin to a newspaper column rather than a traditional journalist’s article. A column has a particular style which may not adhere to the formula of getting the main message out in the first paragraph yet can be quite circuitous whilst entertaining and informative (I’m thinking here of Phillip Adams column in the Australian. Readers discover and lock into a columnist they like and become regular readers.
With this view of a blogging I can imagine thought leaders of an organisation blogging to make their thinking available to their clients and staff. The content of these blogs over time would reveal what these people valued and believed and given these are two fundamentals of an organisation’s culture, could be influential in affecting people’s behaviour. This approach has been taken by Ray Ozzie (the original developer of Lotus Notes) as CEO of his new venture (see http://www.ozzie.net/blog).
I agree with Shawn that a CEO’s blogging may be influential if made so public. This gives employees (and customers) the power to understand better what the CEO has in mind. As always, just as interesting would be to see what is not said. That’s where the “blog” can assist greatly in the creation of trust through the creation of transparency.
The relevant act-km discussions are “The nature of Weblogs”, [“Weblogs compared to diaries”](http://groups.yahoo.com/group/act-km/message/ 1576) and [“Blogs vs Oral Stories”](http://groups.yahoo.com/group/act-km/ message/1602).