It seems to me blogging is full of potential to be one of the driving forces on the Internet to help promoting information sharing among individuals as well as enterprises.

Otherwise IBM wouldn’t announce two blogging tools, taking advantage of a practice of enterprise blogging which starting to be a new trend in big companies like Google, Microsoft, etc. Take for instance, we have seen Google Blog from Google teams and IE Blog from Microsoft.

Quoted:
IBM sees blogging as a key way for companies to promote information sharing. “In an enterprise, corporate knowledge is in employees’ heads most of the time. We are providing tools that help to capture that knowledge and share it through the organisation,” said Ed Brill, business unit executive for Lotus and Domino sales at IBM.

One of the tools IBM just launched is Weblog Preview, which is available as a trial download from IBM’s AlphaWorks developer site. This application is believed to be a better tool for internal blogging in an enterprise.

Quoted:
Weblog Preview works with the Workplace collaboration platform, and will ultimately be integrated into the platform as a core component. IBM is also releasing a blog development component with Workplace Designer 2.5 in August. The tool also integrates the usual blogging components found on personal blogs, including a public list of favourite Weblogs linking to internal or external blogs, support for Atom and RSS syndication, commenting, archiving, permalinks, a rich text editor for posts, and full-text search for posts and comments.

Tools like Google-owned Blogger may be fine for external blogs, but internally the tools need to be integrated with the rest of a company’s infrastructure, but by putting Weblog Preview into Workplace, IBM is saying that they expect everybody in an organisation to be able to be a publisher, not just a consumer of information, Brill said.