Wigley and Associates

Dave Winer reports that BlogRoots has the Using Blogs in Business chapter of their forthcoming book online.

A number of media articles this month focus on the use of weblogs in organizations. See the recently updated list on our weblogs page.

Steve Clift, longtime e-democracy advocate and editor of the Democracies Online Newswire, has published a very helpful document titled Online Consultations and Events - Top Ten Tips for Government and Civic Hosts. For his section on Online Guests/Panels, he links to a couple of forums that I’ve moderated for the City of Northfield and the Metropolitan Council.

Salon.com announced a community weblog service in a press release yesterday.

A colleague and I pitched this idea to another media company about two months ago… and we’re still discussing it with them.

It’s a signficant development. Not only will other media companies likely follow Salon’s lead, but any organization that has an online community of users, readers, listeners is now a candidate for something similar. Poynter Institute’s Steve Outing goes into greater detail on the possibilities in his blog piece yesterday.

I’ve removed the Bloglet alert feature that I added a couple of weeks ago since most of my organizational clients will want to be able to capture the email addresses of those who signup to receive email alerts. I’ll keep searching for another 3rd party service that offers this.

Since like many of my smaller clients, publishing a separate e-newsletter is not an effective use of my time, I’ve removed that section of my website. Instead, I will use the “email a webpage” feature of Mojo Mail to send a page of recent weblog postings. I’ve changed the signup box (right side of page) to reflect this.

The Citistates Group (a client) has launched a collaborative weblog on its homepage. Current contributors are Neal Peirce, author and syndicated columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group; and Curt Johnson, longtime civic activist and commentator.

I’m experimenting with Bloglet as an email alert service for this weblog. I like it better than Spyonit because it doesn’t require extra steps to register. If it doesn’t “know” you, it uses your email address as a username and automatically emails you a password. But there doesn’t appear to be a way for the blog owner to identify who’s subscribed. I also experimented with NotifyList but I don’t like not being able to edit the email messages that get sent to the subscriber. Still looking….