weblogs, aggregators, and wikis in an org

In this new millennium we have come to rely heavily on emails as a way of communicating. This reliance can be seen even more so in that of a large corporation one for example like Kaiser Permanente. It can be assumed that those who are a part of this corporation receive company wide emails each day, many of which have no relevance to them personally or are overwhelmed by so many that the majority are left unread. Michelle Eberhart makes an example to this kind of redundancy with the emails received at Marymount. I just signed onto my account for the first time last week in all my three years here so I'm just coming to learn all the needless information sent out to you in the Marymount system This was something that we faced at the beginning of t, but now we've come to be presented with several new ways to communicate within an organization.

Blogs are a way to personally present your information. In a company they can be easily used to find out any new topic that that particular person of the blog wants people to know. So if Tina your boss wants all of her employees to know a task to do that day she can make a post about things that she feels her people should know. This eliminates a mass amount of general emails to everyone, which most likely might not be read. If Tina wants to tell an employee something specifically pertinent to them than she can revert back to her email. Elizabeth Rodriguez also points out that blogs make a company or a personal blog accesible to search engines like google. This can be both a good and a bad thing since you might not want to post to personal or confidential information since it can be accessed by all who use the internet.

An additional aid to a blog is an aggregator. One sets up a system where all blogs or websites that they frequently look at and are interested in and they can put them all together and have a way to monitor their activity. Anytime anything is updated or changed on a blog that person can use their aggregator to see whose blog or website has been changed and find out any new information they may need to know. This also is another example of how these new communicators are better because instead of going through each email to find out something new you have an aggregator that will tell you whether something has been added or not. Also aggregators help you to be connected to everyone in the organization at all times. It’s not as impersonal or secluded as emails tend to be because it isn’t one person sending out to a group of people or to one other person. But instead, if everyone in the organization all has a blog and an aggregator it’s a more circular or closely nit way of being connected as opposed to linear.

Wikis are something that I am unfamiliar with, but they do sound very helpful. Steph S seems to be ahead of us all since she says she has been familiar with blogs for three years now(good for you). To me the link we were given to Business Week Online made them sound very useful in a business. As opposed to the community that the new social software of blogs and aggregators give wikis allow a community to be connected to and have access of one site. Each person can add to and edit the wiki according to information that they think is new, old or needs more explanation to the group.