Reasons to blog

Slightly off topic for me, but this post from Andrew McAfee defines precisely why I choose to blog, and it may be of interest to other professionals, in any sphere. There is just so much information to assimilate, supplemented by rapidity of change, that tools are required to maintain information currency and be able to innovate.

Andrew McAfee

It’s very reasonable to believe that most busy professionals are only going to blog if it helps them get their job done. But it’s also pretty reasonable to conclude that blogging will do exactly that.

He goes on to suggest other reasons for blogging, that are quite correct. Blogging tends to be viewed as a personal diary, corporate marketing or technological. But this notion of employees using web 2.0 tools to enhance their productivity, which can be business or personal, is powerful.

Lots of knowledge workers spend lots of their time on two activities:
keeping their colleagues appraised of what they’re doing, what progress has been made, what they’ve learned/concluded, etc. and trying to locate  resources within their own organizations— facts, references, work that’s  already been done, people with relevant smarts or experience, etc. Blogs (like  the other Enterprise 2.0 tools) can help with the first of these tasks, and in  doing so also help with the second.It’s not too farfetched to envision companies in which people use Enterprise  2.0 tools to report progress, collaborate, and share the outputs of these  collaborations. These same people would probably also search the company’s  internal ‘collabosphere’— the collection of blogs, wikis, group-level instant  messages, tags, etc.— early and often in any effort.

In short, I completely agree that most workers these days feel busy, and  hard-pressed to keep up with both demand and supply of information. The  tools of Enterprise 2.0 can help do both.