Serendipity35

Though I'm talking about blogging for the business sector in this entry, many of the benefits listed below would apply to a school blog.

How does a blog benefit a company?

• It offers a low cost web authoring solution (free hosting is available or open source software on a company server)
• Blogs can be authored without web design (HTML) knowledge -though web design skills at any level can help an author enhance/customize the design of a blog site.
• There can be (and should be!) regular updating.
• No special software is needed.
• Updates can be done away from the office - from home, on the road - even without an Internet connection since audioblogging can be done using a phone.
• A blog's intended audience can be internal - for knowledge dispersal, project management, discussion...
• or the audience can be established/potential customers - for product updates, press releases etc. and using public comments, it can be a method of aggregating customer feedback.
• Providing an RSS "subscription" link allows interested users to automatically receive updates.
• Because blogs are generally updated more frequently than typical websites (sometimes daily), they are found by search engine bots including specialized ones (like Google Blogsearch) which can move your blog up in search rankings.
• For larger companies, blogs can be integrated with existing tools (for example LDAP and Oracle 10g allows management of blogs) including database integration and tagging.

More Information:

It's a Blog World After All - "Blogs were once the domain of angst-ridden teens and doomed presidential candidates. But the likes of Verizon, IBM, Microsoft, and Dr. Pepper are all climbing on the blogwagon. Turns out, Web logs are a nifty knowledge-management tool. And companies also see them as a promising medium for advertising (naturally)." read this article at http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/81/blog.html

Google's Corporate Blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

Sun Microsystem's offers blogs to "any Sun employee to write about anything" - one of those bloggers is Jonathan Schwartz

Macromedia had five of its "community managers" create their own weblogs (using Radio and Blogger, two of the most popular blog publishers) - the five are John Dowdell, Mike Chambers, Matt Brown, Vernon Viehe and Bob Tartar.

Microsoft has several public blogs including an Internet Explorer Blog

and one by Robert Scoble (How's this for a disclaimer: "Robert Scoble works at Microsoft (title: technical evangelist). Everything here, though, is his personal opinion and is not read or approved before it is posted. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here.")