developerWorks : Blogs : James Snell

developerWorks : Blogs : James Snell: "As has been reported on a variety of blogs around the net, IBM today is publishing an announcement on its Intranet site encouraging all 320,000+ employees world wide to consider engaging actively in the practice of 'blogging'. This move follows several years of persistent grassroots efforts by an informal community of IBM bloggers. Technical leaders like Sam Ruby, Grady Booch, Robert Sutor and business leaders like Ed Brill and Catherine Helzerman have played a very significant role in this effort by providing excellent models for other IBMers to follow. Behind the scenes, a small handful of technical innovators developed and deployed an internal blogging service that has grown in a period of just 18 months to just shy of 9,000 registered users spanning 65 countries, 3,097 individual blogs, 1,358 of which are considered active, with a total of 26,203 entries and comments -- all of which has been put together strictly through word-of-mouth promotion. And it's still just a pilot. Externally, IBM's developerWorks site is now host to 20+ blogs focused on a variety of developer-focused topics including emerging technologies, open source, the PowerPC architecture, SOA, autonomic computing, industry standards, and so on."