Intranet blogging

[sawyl]

I've started an experiment using the blogging facilities of mediawiki — when all you've got is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail — to keep track of my daily work. Unfortunately, it's not really up to the job. Here are just a few of the annoying features:

• It doesn't support RSS feeds
• It's not possible to add user blog pages to a watchlist
• Articles are sorted by modification date, not publication date
• Adding a discussion item to a post page causes it to bubble up and become the top article on the blog page
• There doesn't seem to be an easy way to set up comment notification
• The active page doesn't seem archive older articles

Why, you might ask, do we not have proper internal blogging facilities? Because no one is willing to bite the bullet and agree to provide support for them. Which is insane, when you think of the the potential benefits. Here, off the top of my head, are just a few:

• System diaries. We maintain a diary of system events using a simple table in mediawiki. The time, system name and fault description must all be entered by hand; archiving and indexing is similarly manual. Blogging software would seem to be an ideal solution — not only would it provide proper article management, it would allow fine grain access controls to be applied to sensitive events and tagging would make it easy to track faults of a particular type.
• Improved user/support contacts. Blogging current work makes it possible for users to comment on particular pieces of work before they're completed. Posting something to a discussion thread is more permanent than a phone call, more public than an email and less formal than a helpdesk ticket. It provides a good way of tracking the rationale behind changes to a project or utility and allows other interested parties to see the reasons why one course of action has been selected ahead of another.
• Performance tracking. Our delightful performance review system shifts the burden of proving a particular level of performance from management to employee, so if you don't want to get a flunking grade, it's up to you to provide the evidence. I'd imagine that a blog would be a good way of doing this. OK, sure, evidence in blogs can be faked, but then so can almost every other form of evidence — we are, after all, living in a hyperreal world. But in most cases, your line manager should have a pretty strong idea of where you've spent your time and should be able to spot any serious bogosity, so the blog acts as more like a mnemonic.
• Better communications with management. Bless them, they tried with this one. The former director had a blog but, instead of lots of small updates, he would dump something a bit like a school report into the stream once a week — and it was very schoolish: at one point he mentioned how, on a visit to ECMWF, no one had wanted to sit next to him on a night out. Far better if more of the Masters after God were willing to post short updates about their current projects on a daily basis or something, just to keep the unwashed masses informed, than to rely on tedious monthly briefings. Where they to do that, at least we'd be able to pick and choose whether we wanted to read the article on the new accounting process, rather than be forcibly subject to a thirty minute sermon on it.

And those are just off the top of my head. I'm sure there are many more, far better, reasons. But, as ever, for want of support for WordPress, we'll probably remain stuck in the 1970s for another five years at the very least....