Geodog

Just don't call them weblogs

Lots of people who write weblogs seem to take great pleasure in debating what a weblog is, and more importantly for some, what a weblog isn't. While trying to understanding what the new tools enable, and how they are changing the nature of the net, journalism, and public discourse, seems like a worthwhile enterprise, I never saw the point of spending a lot of energy debating what was a weblog and what wasn't. One might as well debate how many Angels can dance on the head of a pin. I saw a great example of this today.

One of the more interesting sessions at ETech today was a presentation by three people from different units of Disney, describing how they are using three of the tools customarily associated with webloggers: weblogs, RSS and wikis. During the talk, Mike Pusateri described his secret for getting people to adopt weblogs as a tool for communicating information at Disney, "don't call them weblogs." He just told people working in Disney's 24/7 operations center that he had a better tool for a task they were already doing. They were already creating what they called shift logs to keep track of information that the people coming in on the next shift needed to know, using a proprietary application based on FoxPro. He told the op center staff that with the new tool (Movable Type) they would now be able to edit and revise and format their information, and that the information would be viewable on the intranet. They loved it, and, as he put it, they never knew that they were blogging. Similarly, he got the staff to start using RSS by having Movable Type generate the feeds, and having the staff all adopt Newsgator, an RSS aggregator that plugs into Microsoft Outlook, the standard email client at Disney. To the users of Newsgator, the updated RSS feeds just looked like email, and they could deal with the feeds they same way they were used to dealing with emails, filing them or forwarding them with comments, using the same interface they were used to dealing with for email. So the users didn't have to change any existing habits, and they had little new UI to learn, but they got a lot more functionality. All at a very low cost to Disney, compared with their traditional methods of developing custom applications.

We technologists are often so entranced with the new that we forget the value of the old and habitual. This was a great illustration of the value of leveraging people's existing habits. It also illustrates the cost savings in using standards and off the shelf tools. I imagine that we will see widespread adoption of "shift logs" in all kinds of businesses where people are already working with computers, and where there is a critical need to transfers information between shifts. I know that in health care alone, nurses spend at least 1/2 an hour at the beginning and end of every shift transferring information. If even a bit of that time could be saved, and the current error rate reduced, the cost savings would be considerable.

For those looking for a more complete account of the talk, Cory Doctorow did his usual fine job of near transcribing the presentation.