Blogging Down Under

Former InfoWorld news editor and InfoWorld Tech Watch creator Mark Jones is back on on the air with Filtered. Welcome back, Mark.

In an early post, Mark advises the "Aussie media types" who are asking, "why bother with a blog?"

I'll offer my opinion. In media business circles, most discussions focus fundamentally on ROI. A lot of these folks are asking, "What is my return on weblogs? Why do weblogs?" In financial terms, because weblogs are so simple to produce, I think the business folks should focus more on the minimal "I" involved -- the investment. There is very little financial risk in starting a weblog, so clearly-defined returns aren't as necessary.

I'm not trying to minimize the time that writers invest in weblogs, which is clearly the most valuable investment. I think that in most web/print media organizations, writers want to write more than they can fit into a magazine or into traditional stories on the web, and weblogs are the perfect outlet for those "between the lines" thoughts (seriously, imagine how much poorer the IT media would be if we couldn't read new material from Jon Udell on a daily basis?) Writers shouldn't be forced to contribute to a weblog, but if there are writers in a media organization who want to start one and it makes editorial sense (like Mark did with Tech Watch), I say set them loose and see what happens.

Lotus Notes and RSS

Anyone who knows me or reads my columns regularly know how I feel about Lotus Notes. Those feelings aside, I did just come across a Notes-based RSS aggregator via Lockergnome's RSS Resource. The instructions for the R5 release are available, as well as instructions on how to get it working in R6.

The simplicity of RSS triumphs in yet another environment.

Documentation dilemma

This week's InfoWorld column ("The documentation dilemma") deals with the ever-present burden of documentation in IT. I think I found a way to deal with it, or at least stop worrying about it.

If you feel guilty about the lack of traditional documentation in your IT organization, you shouldn’t — you might only need to change your approach. Over the past few years, I’ve become an adherent of the Alfred E. Neuman “What, me worry?” school of traditional documentation, because I’ve learned to attack the challenge differently. I realized that with limited staff, a rapidly changing IT environment, and increasing complexity, my own inflexible documentation practices had to be updated to reflect more dynamic environments.

Read the rest here.