While reading blogs at work last week, ironically, I read this article about reading blogs at work.
Now as you can guess, I’m converted: I think irrelevant of the medium, you should be keeping up with developments in your respective field. I would say that easily more than half of my research is done on regularly updated websites (whether they be wikis, blogs, or traditional websites with web feeds). If you’re reading this between 9am and 5pm Monday to Friday, we could speculate that you too are one of the converted. However an interesting question might be: does this really apply to all fields of work? Or perhaps which fields does this not apply to?
If we put our minds back in time to 2005, it was difficult to find much professionally relevant content on the blogosphere (population 10,000,000). Most of it was political punditry and “cat blogs”. Have things advanced sufficiently in 2008 (133,000,000 blogs created)? I think definitely in the field of ICT (and I am talking about both information and communications); blogs are now the status quo. I do wonder if other fields are as advanced. In some ways the actual answer might be irrelevant, the trend is inevitable. Just as once people protested “we don’t need a website”, one day soon “we don’t need a regularly updated site that allows comments from outsiders and our own staff” may sound just as silly.
I would be most interested to hear from individuals who do read blogs at work, but do not work in communications, ICT, or anything else which relates directly to the medium of blogging itself. In addition, if New Zealand public sector are gathering information from blogs, which ones are they?
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I got that article through the RSS and I agreed entirely. The trick seems to be ensuring that the blogs at work are *mostly* work-related so that you can most effectively use your time.
Being a researcher I tend to RSS blogs like Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge, this blog, NPSC blog, SoSaidThe.Organisation (which webmarshall thinks is p0rn for some strange reason?), and of course, Garfield Minus Garfield.
It’s important to keep a well-balanced portfolio and get just the right insight into the world.
Thanks for that Che. Do your colleagues also read blogs? If so, do you have a kind of division of labour, so that you collectively cover more ground (”I’ll take this one, you take that one”)?
Not at all. Reading of content at work seems to be the perogative of the individuals in the team.
Most people have key interest areas that they square off themselves.
That’s likely to be inefficient, but not so different to the old days of sifting and reading published journals for relevant material.
I too get them through RSS. I find it easier to read all my feeds at home as I use a software rather than a service to aggregate them (I like the email-ish approach). I don’t really find it appropriate to be reading blogs during work time, but it does happen on occasion. Of course, this means it encroaches on my personal time. I do tend to come across more and more blogs when searching of course for work related content.
Hi Gavin,
“I don’t really find it appropriate to be reading blogs during work time”
and
“I do tend to come across more and more blogs when searching of course for work related content” seem to mildly contradict each other to me.
Could you possibly expand those points for clarification?
What I find is that if you have a blog on your screen it doesn’t look like “official work stuff”. So even if I’m reading/writing work stuff there is a feeling that I should be doing more worky things (like typing a word document or something)
Absolutely Hadyn: “Ahhh excuse me, that looks insufficiently onerous to be of any real business value.”
I think it is a confusion of defining blog as a genre versus simply a medium (which can carry any number of messages/information),
“…it’s the equivalent of viewing a hammer as only a means to hit nails. Obviously that is the task at its most basic. But what does it mean? In the case of the hammer, it means we can build a doghouse, a bookshelf, or a house. Until we look past the task and functionality of a tool - to what the tool enables - we largely miss the beauty of why it’s so useful.” - George Siemens
This is an area I have been mulling over also for some time.
(In the early 1990’s I felt guilty when using the only PC in the organisation to read things, rather than running spreadsheets or numeric models! The typing pool did the typing.)
Why do we “go to the office”?
Isn’t our office work about gathering, creating, collating, applying and distributing ideas?
Aren’t blogs, SMS, meetings, Forums, conferences, reports, etc just a means for doing this?
Shouldn’t we be using the most effective and efficient means for doing this => mindmaps, podcasts, vcasts, cafes, street theater
I agree Jim.
I remember watching Hans Rosling http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html for the first time and thinking “gosh, cartoons are now an acceptable medium for conveying information”.
But why should we have ever thought otherwise?
We are simply used to the act of learning new ideas and digesting information being hard work. Perhaps we assumed because it always has been that way, that it always would be.
Why we have trouble is that people have preconceptions - in the past cartoons have not been acceptable for delivery of business messages. We have to be sensitive / empathetic towards the audience. You don’t wear board shorts to a cabinet meeting unless your have a very strong message and are very confident. Otherwise the message gets overwhelmed by the package.
However, with greater acceptance of change and continuing focus on effective and efficient rather than the package perhaps we will all be able to sit at home / at the beach / in the mountains and have our avatars interact in 2nd Life at “the office” rather than fly to Wn put on the suit and go to the office.
In my experience the finding and digestion isn’t the hardest part, rather the assimilation, the remixing, the extension and the delivery to and wrangling with others is the challenge and the buzz!
I am looking forward to the Warcraft kids bringing their modus to “the office”. Got a problem? Get a virtual team together and go for it!
Editor’s note: This comment was moved from “Government Use of Offshore ICT Service Providers: Interim Guidance“
Ok so having had to get introduced to this blog via govloop (which is a bit ridiculous considering i work in design for IR) im a bit late on the reply but yes absolutely i follow blogs at work.
Joho - David Weinberger’s blog - internet and society
core77 - design
wikinomics - like you don’t know that one
gizmag - technology (not really a blog - more a magazine site)
govloop - not really a blog but hey it has blogs
and various other irregularly but those every day (and at work too)
Presently im working on the Transforming Employer Information project as a design advisor and pushing a 2.0 solution.
It’s tough work but damn is there some good literature coming out right now!
From IBM, Deloitte, and the European Commission joint research project.
All great papers giving clear arguments for gov 2.0 in language public sector managers should understand (or at least have their attention captured)
Frankly i think i will end up depressed and at risk of substance abuse issues if i give much more energy into promoting 2.0 approaches thinking i can convince old timey thinking derivative free market capitalism business educated managers that 2.0 is a quantum leap in public administration so that they will wake up and think beyond their out-of-date performance measures and personal career development risks (this is maybe a bit unfair) and read their strategies with fresh eyes.
Considering i had to get informed about this blog by govloop and not through gov channels and im working in the technology design aspects of IR, how do you guys feel about how your going working these ideas into wider government?
We have people at MED who want to read blogs in their chosen field, but they aren’t allowed RSS.
Go figure.
Greetings Matt - I’ve been consuming RSS since 2004/2005 and have learned a great deal - of direct relevance and utility to my line of work as a lawyer - as a result. In the legal field, one can subscribe to RSS for, among other things, legal blogs, some law firms’ updates (New Zealand and overseas), legislation updates, case law developments (more overseas than NZ at the moment), and legally- and matter-relevant topics via search feeds (on the likes of SocialMention, Icerocket, Google News, MSN Search, etc etc). To me, RSS is an indispensible information-gathering tool; it has fundamentally changed the way I consume information.
Michelle,
“They aren’t allowed RSS”. Does this mean:
1) there is specifically a rule against using RSS
2) there are no desktop RSS aggregators available by default
3) there are no desktop RSS aggregators available on request
4) all online RSS aggregators are blocked
Richard,
You illustrate the point that RSS is much wider than blogs, and also that a blog itself is simply a medium that can carry any message, including legal analysis. I think you are spot on.
Not to start a discussion on an old thread but… We’ve got a couple of work-based blogs. Both have RSS feeds and neither of them work.
One doesn’t work because it’s a password protected Blogspot site that (for some reason) won’t “talk” to Google Reader. If I take the password off it works but then we couldn’t have the blog.
The other doesn’t work because the blog sits on our internal server and… actually I don’t really know why it doesn’t work.
But my point is that people have already told me that they don’t want to keep checking the blog and would rather receive an RSS-style update, yet we can’t get it.