Microsoft Innovation: Open Blogging for IT Managers
It started with an idea about a year ago with official pre-launch November 28th with John Oxley's invitation and my response. The Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS) is a partner and Computing Canada linked in with their editorial feature Blogged Down in January—in their magazine, they highlight and then point to an interview which appears here first.
Our first podcast was the interview in December 2005 with Dr. Maria Klawe, at that time Dean of Engineering at Princeton and a top-ranking computer scientist. [That first one took more than 100 hours in preparation. Who said podcasts are easy?] As an update to that interview: in May 2006, Maria became a CIPS Fellow for "outstanding contributions to the advancement of information technology." Effective July 1st, Maria's takes on a new role as a US College president and I have another interview on the books with her late this year.
You already know what I'm talking about right? It is this forum, the Canadian IT Managers blog or CIM. I like acronyms J. We now have a great team of fellow bloggers too—have a look at the left-side panel! Barnaby Jeans leads the way as the overall CIM manager.
Official blog counts started January 10th, so going back to November, I made about 100 posts so by year-end it should be more than 200. Hey, it is work, and the bloggers here volunteer their time, but it's also a lot of fun. However to make it really worthwhile, I want input from you! I would like to see more comments from you and have you join the blogging team. This CIM forum is really about you and what you want. What would you like to see in the CIM?
So what prompted this blog…
Yesterday, I caught, This blog's for you by Grant Buckler in itbusiness.ca. As noted in the article through these excerpts:
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Barnaby Jeans , IT Pro advisor at Microsoft Canada and one of the resident bloggers on the Canadian IT Managers blog, says he believes it is one of the first to focus on IT from a wider perspective, and its target audience has shown a good deal of interest. "We're getting more comments and more responses than we have individual posts," he says.
"It's a different metaphor," Wright says. News groups focus more on simple information exchange – "someone asks a question, someone answers." Blogs contain more opinion, and posts tend to be longer and more carefully constructed.
Richard Giles, director of Clique Communications in Perth, Australia, says a good way for businesses to approach blogging is to try to create resources for the industries they serve.
Ventures like Executive Graffiti and the Canadian IT Managers blog seem to be trying to be something other than corporate blogs. If they can find the right approach, such efforts might produce some useful new ways for people who work with technology to share information and ideas.
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Microsoft's John Oxley and Barnaby Jeans took a bold and innovative move by opening up this forum to a wide audience creating the first collaborative medium for IT Managers. I say IT Managers since a solid portion of the audience is also international.
One final note in closing. Coincidentally, Richard Giles, who is noted in Grant's article, has provided a CIM career tip and we have an upcoming "Blogged Down" interview with Richard appearing here. He provides really interesting insights into the state of online technology and on blogging. Watch for it!
Thank you,
Stephen Ibaraki