Rick Klau has some interesting lessons from a 30 day 12 person pilot of Radio Userland in his company. I found this particularly interesting because I want to set up a Radio Community server for the CMU MHCI students and alumni. At the moment there are about half a dozen active bloggers and I think there's some value in connecting us all.
Some lessons I learned from this experiment:
Have a problem to solve. Just telling people "things will be better" when they don't know that there's a problem is tricky. As mentioned above, weblogs are many things to many people. In our pilot, we started out by simply saying we wanted to see if people found them useful. In other words - we weren't trying to solve a problem.
Reward participation. A number of people stated that they had trouble working blogging into their daily routine - that they had a number of other priorities competing for their time. Not surprisingly, they tended to gravitate to things for which they received recognition. A successful deployment of a k-log will need effective rewards to help reinforce the desirability of participation.
Define what you're looking for. This is related to the first point, but I think it's important enough to discuss on its own. I was surprised at the number of people who understood conceptually what the weblog did but who were still unclear on what they could contribute. People are very used to a fairly formal communications format - and weblogs are highly unstructured. Without a focus, inertia seemed to dominate.
Ensure senior participation. I tend to believe that grass-roots KM is the most difficult to achieve. When a program like this is supported from the top down, people are more likely going to appreciate the importance of the project - and appreciate the connection between the project and the company's overall success. If we are to increase the k-log's success, we will need to involve more of the senior management team.
Google's Top 100. What are the most linked-to pages? If you do a search for HTTP (as in, http://) you get something pretty close to the answer. It's probably not exact (Google and Yahoo are reversed from their Google Directory rankings, for example) but it's pretty interesting. [Google Weblog]
9:09:29 AM
