Like many companies, especially in the tech industry, IBM is no stranger to public blogs with more than 20 employees listed at the developer blogs' portal.
What I doubt is known at all is how deeply IBM has embraced blogging within the organization.
According to Philippe Borremans, PR Manager at IBM Belgium & Luxembourg, writing in the IAOC blog, there are currently some 2,800 internal blogs at IBM.
From Philippe's post:
At this moment we have about 2800 internal weblogs (on a total worldwide population of about 330.000 IBM'ers.) with about 12700 entries. About 200 blogs have more than 10 posts on them... [...] Editors can come from any part of the company; engineers, communications, research, software... you name it. [...] Some of these blogs are "information blogs" linking to interesting articles, URl's, RSS feeds etc... but some are used for project management.
[...] But I have also seen that blogging is not for everyone. Some people are so used to the "older" methods of working that they really do not jump on the wagon. Being able to change people and get them to participate from the start is the biggest part of the job.
The screenshot (click for larger image) is with Philippe's post, and shows a view of his blog. What caught my eye is the entry you can see about podcasting within IBM.
What this knowledge about IBM's internal blog efforts also indicates reinforces a point I made in a recent post about Intel COO's internal blog - many companies are quietly planning and implementing blogs within the organization that we don't hear about publicly until either the company chooses to disclose the fact (as Philippe has done here) or until a journalist or blogger gets wind of it and writes about it (as was the case with the Intel internal blog).
We might be experiencing a new era of corporate blogging when Big Blue introduces a new level: reBlogs. I guess this will become inevitable at some point.
Posted by: Irakli | 05 March 2005 at 19:37
Irakli, you may be right... if I knew what reBlogs were! What are they?
Posted by: Neville Hobson | 07 March 2005 at 11:16