Despite your company’s success in the last months you still feel an “incomplete” businessman, because you don’t have a corporate blog yet. Don’t worry, though: I’ll teach you how you can get this thing done without an headache or a computer degree.

Why do you need a corporate (internal) blog? Because you perfectly know that a blog can help your company’s growth and improve inner and outer connections between your employees, both in small or big companies. If you do it in the right way, it can make an important difference.
Bear with me this five simple steps you need to follow to start your corporate blog. We are talking about an internal blog, something that it’s accessible only within your company’s boundaries. We’ll see in another article how to start an external corporate blog.

1) Start small but think big. Of course, you aren’t experienced with blogging. It’s better to start with a technical solution that will not be an impediment later on. I suggest you to try Wordpress or Movable Type: they’re very good, customizable, and full of additional plugins. I prefer wordpress, like problogger does.
Ask your technical guys to install one instance of the platform you’ve chosen (or do it by yourself, if you’re not scared), and then PLAY with it in perfect isolation. You need to be aware of its potential and its limits, before even thinking of delegating it to someone else. Don’t start a personal blog now: you would need time that you don’t have at this moment.
After a couple of days, you feel you’re really into it. Ready to move to step 2!

2) A test bed. Call some of your employees or co-workers, and tell them you want to launch a corporate blog. Be prepared to say WHY you want it: to improve employee participation, foster free discussion of issues, create a sense of community, have a better communication between different layers of your organization… and so on.
Ask to play with it a little (like YOU did), and warn them that you’ll run a little survey by the end of the week. This way, you’re sure they’ll try it.
By the end of the week, throw in that survey in a calm moment, and be sure to understand what they like, and what they don’t. Forward it to your tech department (or yourself, if you’re enjoying working under the hood), and fix the blog with their advices.

3) Corporate blog contest: win free tickets for the stadium. Good chances that you live in a city in which people go to stadiums. Buy some tickets for a match, and then announce the birth of your corporate blog AND your first contest: every employee will have a secret account, and must post without revealing his/her identity: in a week, the nicest post will be rewarded with two tickets; next week, the same again. At the end of the third week, the best “blogger” will receive a special reward, and all identities will be revealed. It’s sort of a game that helps you encouraging your employees in using it. Once they’ve posted a couple of times, they’ll never stop.
Forcing your company to blog is not wise, and can lead to downside effects.
You can also avoid the secrecy if it doesn’t fit well with your organization, but always include some form of rewards.

4) Set the rules… with them! Now your corporate blog is up and running, but you still don’t know what is allowed, and what not. Let THEM decide, with your supervision! Once rules are set, they’ll be aware of them because they created them!

5) Create a second, for-fun, internal corporate blog. During the military service in 1999, I was a programmer at the Ministry of Aerial Defense in Rome, Italy, and we had two mailing lists: one for serious things, which we called “Gimondo” after a geeky Colonel, and one for fun, called “Dafastidio” after the motto of a very funny Marshal. This way we were able to mentally separate work from fun, and it helped supporting the success and growth of both lists.
The “serious” blog will be a tremendous tool to increase communication and productivity, while the “funny” blog will foster the sense of being a community.

I hope you enjoyed my short list. Please share with me your stories! Feel free to email me for anything related to this article. Thank you!

And many others.

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I was intrigued by this sign, outside the parking lot of a nearby restaurant:

(in italian you write “proprietà”, NOT “propietà”); the sign mean “private property”.

Directly from Jono Bacon (why not Mark, I wonder?), few hours ago came the announcement of the new name for the next Ubuntu release, expected for april 2008: Hardy Heron!

It’s a LTS release, or Long Term Support: it means that the server version will have 5 year support, and the desktop version 3 years support (instead of the canonical 18 months).

Jono (which I met at Ubuntu Live, and which attended my presentation of UbuntuSemplice :-D) doesn’t give more details, but suggests to communicate your ideas for Hardy Heron, which will be then discussed at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Boston, in october 2007.

NO, I’M NOT GOING… don’t have a budget for that

Finally… do you like strips? Here’s one I’ve prepared for you!

However, it is also true that in some cases, for example when you admin a server INSIDE your LAN, it could be useful to have some graphical tool, and could save time. Also, you can still be secure if you don’t enable accessing to GUI admin tools from outside.

We’ll see what the future holds for us!

I don’t believe that, and you’ll soon see why.
(This is not AGAINST Desktop Linux, by the way: I’m just trying to see things in a clearer way. This is not against KDE or Gnome, either. I’m not discussing their quality, but just their diffusion in the planet.)

PRINCIPLE: If we have two similar products, and they’re both internet-related in some way, we can guess their diffusion simply comparing their “ranking” among search engines and stuff like that.

A) I took the first four sites about KDE and about Gnome, and these are their “web popularity” results:

You can see that KDE gets +2 Pagerank in total (I know, it’s not linear, but you get an idea), and better overall Alexarank than Gnome (remember that lower is better).

B) Now let’s see their Link Popularity:

KDE gets ten times link popularity on Google/AOL/Hotbot, and a slight advantage on Yahoo/Fast/Altavista. Remember that it’s more difficult to get links counted in Google.

C) If you search Google, Yahoo! and DMOZ, you’ll see that…

Googling for Gnome: 35,500,000 results.
Googling for KDE: 70,000,00 results.

Yahoo!ing for Gnome: 30,100,000 results.
Yahoo!ing for KDE: 63,100,000 results.

Dmozing for Gnome: 315 results.
Dmozing for KDE: 595 results.

So, my dears, I guess KDE still holds the throne, in terms of popularity.

I’m pretty sure, though, that with the rise of Ubuntu among Linux distributions, and its wider diffusion than Kubuntu, Gnome is getting much attention, and will soon compete for the first place!

Hope you enjoyed my reasoning; feel free to comment if you have suggestions.

UPDATE: It seems that results were in some way faked at the end… see here: http://dot.kde.org/1187823215/1187853706/. Fast: the last 10,000 votes were mostly OpenSuSE and Gnome… a suspect pattern, isn’t it?

It’s an online university (a joint venture between O’Reilly and University of Illinois) that offers Information Technology courses with an innovative education method.
You have classes for beginners, intermediate and expert, for Linux sysadmin to web developers.

Every course rewards you with Continuing Education Units, and an official letter from University of Illinois.
Courses cost an average of 398 USD. They’re pretty good, and a young resume can deserve one.

http://www.oreillyschool.com

We’ll talk about Ubuntu, sometimes with techy things, sometimes more human ones

Hope you enjoy it!