François Nonnenmacher (EN) | FR

An interesting point of view on Microsoft, blogs, and community by a non less interesting Microsoft fellow. Macromedia weblogs are also famous, although they illustrate the difference between empowered individuals who express themselves as easily as they would on a face-to-face chat with you and me, and corporate marketing using yet another fashionable channel.

Weblogs have a tremendous potential for companies. Internally and externally. Most theories on knowledge management are utterly disconnected from reality. I wonder, not if, but by which order of magnitude a mix of weblogs, semantically correct intranet sites and a simple search appliance would beat the overly complex towers of Babel that "KM theories" produce in corporations.

Likewise on the Internet, the impressive number of active communities that have been built around weblogs ranking from open-source to ridiculously cheap software or service, cries for revisiting strategies based on expensive and closed solutions.

Technologists finally convinced corporations to look into free software (despite what the bean counters claim). Now they have to convince the content producers that everything lies in their content, the only thing where they can't afford to be cheap.