CNET :: Blog on
By Stefanie Olsen
...Forget whistling while you work. Many Googlers are blogging while hard at work on the world's largest search engine, thanks to a simple technology Evan Williams developed. Nearly eight months after Google bought Blogger creator Pyra Labs, Williams is helping Google deploy the technology he built only as a side project in 1999--which is now part of a revolution in personal journaling.
As it does for thousands of people who use the Web logging (or blogging) tool to publish online, Blogger enables Google employees to update personal pages within seconds to the company intranet. Blogs are continually updated Web pages that often turn out to be personal journals or digital diaries, but they can also be news or politically focused. And they've caught on like wildfire: There are roughly 3 million active U.S. blogs, according to a report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Williams, a Nebraska native, moved to the Bay Area in 1997 and worked on intranet Web development for O'Reilly & Associates. That liaison would prove fortuitous. Tim O'Reilly, the company's president and an early investor in Pyra, had friends at Google, and in October 2002, he suggested that the two companies meet.
Williams recently talked to CNET News.com about Google and the future of blogging...
How many people blog at Google?
Not sure what the count is, but I know there's a couple hundred or more. It's really interesting to see the network grow from scratch.
Do you use that to get to know one another or to keep up-to-date on projects?
A lot of people use it to keep up-to-date on projects and to share pointers or expertise. I've heard people comment on how it's way easier to know what's going on internally now. You can find out what's going on when you go there or when you're curious about it, but you don't have to be deluged or distracted from your normal day.
Do you think that's a viable area for knowledge management?
It's really interesting for internal communications. The term "knowledge management" has gotten a bad wrap, but some people say that's because systems have gotten too complicated. A Blogger-like system is the lowest common denominator to putting stuff up, which may be its benefit. If you can easily search over that stuff or follow topics of interest, I think it could be interesting, but it's not yet well explored...