The weblog for Putting Family First (AKA Family Life 1st) is now up. I’m currently coaching several board members on the process for posting.

I had coffee with Doc when he was in town to give a speech last week.

This article in Wired profiles the use of weblogs by Macromedia product managers for customers.

Note the informal weblog cluster that includes a developer/customer: “Hall has his own blog, and he often links to the Macromedia blogs, and they link to him, and others link to all of them — creating a community of Flash blogs that the company says addresses the needs of its customers.”

And note the process by which cream rises to the top: “The important items — the best Flash examples, the most interesting tips, the most pernicious bugs — are passed through the developer community at blog-speed, which can be quite fast. The unimportant stuff isn’t passed around as quickly — which of course is just how it should be.”

I received confirmation yesterday on contracts to set up group weblogs for two organizations: one a non-profit, the other a professional services group. I’ll post links as soon as I have them up. Interest in organzational blogs is building: I have 6 other weblog proposals waiting action.

I’ll be working with the Metropolitan Council again to do a web forum in June on their Blueprint 2030 Plan.

The Weblog Tool Roundup in HotWired’s WebMonkey.

The New York Times has a blog piece today titled, At Large in the Blogosphere.

“Blogs provide a counterweight to the increasing unreality of mass journalistic culture — its quality of having been processed beyond the realm of the recognizable, its frequent tone of unearned authority. They’re the antidote to the blow-dried anchor, the unsigned editorial, the pronunciamento of the token credentialed expert.”

Dave Winer doesn’t like it but Doc Searls does.

Jim Cashel interviews Blogger founder and CEO Evan Williams in the current Online Community Report. Good to see that “blog clusters” are part of the future development:

At Blogger, we’re working on a bunch of features under the umbrella of “networked publishing.” Essentially, these are about leveraging the network of blogs and blog readers — as well as the web itself — to do new things that result in more collective intelligence and higher quality content.

And as for blogs and online communities:

The difference I see between informally linked blogs and other sorts of online communities, is that when people have their own space to write and express themselves, as opposed to some sort of shared space, they feel a lot more ownership and freedom in that space. This encourages more of themselves to show through, which I think can actually result in a stronger community than something that is more structurally linked. We’ve recently done some licensing deals that we hope will create this same effect within other sites.

Since I’ve begun working with several organizations to start using weblogs as a complementary tool on their web sites, it only seemed appropriate for me to use one here.