In my InfoWorld column this week (“Blogging behind the firewall“), I write about a small but really amazing outpouring of information-sharing in InfoWorld’s IT department since we started a group weblog a few months ago. After I filed my column, I came across a Jon Udell column (“Publishing a project weblog“) on roughly the same subject (with slight differences which I’ll get to in a moment) — about a year ahead of me, as Jon tends to be. In my experience so far, weblogs work best as documentation repositories in the spirit of what Scott Ambler has written about as “agile documentation,” a concept I also discussed recently.
Scoble wonders what we write about in our internal InfoWorld weblog. Here are a few recent headlines to posts with some background info in parentheses:
- Vacation – IT staff (a scintillating view into the summer vacation schedule for InfoWorld’s IT staff)
- Long-term equipment plan (5-year plan for Test Center capital spending)
- FY 05 Capital budget planning (our purchase plans for web site scaling, desktop/laptop replacements, etc. for next fiscal year)
- Oracle migration procedure (a step-by-step explanation of what we did to upgrade from Oracle 8i on Solaris to Oracle 9i on Linux for our CMS)
- Firewall settings (see why this stuff isn’t public?)
- MX record trick to fake out spammers
- InfoWorld: Behind the Music (a link to a Quicktime video clip of various members of the InfoWorld IT team rocking out during a recent off-site retreat, shot with an iSight camera — see the photo of Wade Grubbs — our systems administrator and resident musician — with this post)