Internal blogs: How not to start

I had a funny meeting with a software sales guy the other day. As he was sitting in the conference room, not at all worried about being the most casually dressed person in the room and the only one with a chewing gum, he explained his idea of a blog before I even had the chance to explain the reasons for wanting one.

10 minutes into the meeting, I finally realised what he was trying to sell: Some kind of content management system that required HTML knowledge and was also in most other aspects a thing of the past.

Another 10 minutes later I was most happy he was not trying to sell me MS Frontpage with single user licenses and HTML training courses for everyone from the receptionist to the CEO.

It seems that just like in the beginning of KM, when every basic DMS (like my favourite "KM tool" iManage) pretended to be a "holistic and visionary KM suite" inclusive of some of the most dubious ROI calculations, software companies are rebranding their most successless CMS products as blogging software. DONT BELIEVE THE HYPE. If you are looking for blog software, try finding someone who knows what social software is. My favourite leftover from the days of dot.com with his unbuttoned polo shirt pretended to have not understood me accustically when I asked about tagging. The only thing that kept me from getting angry with the guy was that I felt very sorry for him.