The Problem Of Unstructured Blogs That Are Hard To Search
Made out of people asks a very relevant question: Can we find a better way to find stuff that might be out there.
The question might seem ordinary and not that exciting. But the discussion goes to the heart of business blogging, especially internal blogging with KM purposes. The author suggests that while external blogging is successful and growing in companies like Microsoft, Sun and Yahoo, their internal blogs tends to fall apart.
The problem is the difficulty of finding important information in old blog posts. Intranet search engines often don't perform very well - and there aren't that many alternatives to searching.
Blogs have made it easy to get stuff into intranets (and the web, the discussion is just as relevant externally) but they don't necessarily make it easy to get stuff out.
I think this discussion is much needed. I like blogs, which you probably have noticed..., but I have one major problem with the format and that is exactly this: They're unstructured to a degree that makes the information useless just a couple of weeks after it's published.
The categories you see in many blogs doesn't help if your blog is big enough. It just gives you 10, 25, 50 unstructured sub-blogs.
I don't claim to have The Answer, but I have one answer to the question asked. I think you have to incorporate the blog format into a more traditional web site if you want it to be an information source and not only a part of the conversation.
That is the way I do it here. I post about many things - sometimes a random thought, sometimes my take on a discussion in another blog. But now and then I find a link or learn something that are relevant to my original idea with CorporateBlogging.Info: To be a basic help for professional communicators that wants to find out more about business blogging, especially from a European perspective. In those cases I also update the more static content of this site (basics, listings, testimonials etc). I have come across many blogs that would have kept me as a reader for much longer if they just had done some good old IA.
UPDATE: If you're interested in this discussion and know German, you should read Blogs stellen Zeit dar. Wikis den Raum. (also see Jim's comment to this post). Jim suggests an "intelligent hybrid of a blog and a wiki".