One of the producers of the BlogOn conference finally took the stage as a speaker this afternoon at the Copa. Suw Charman gave a spirited pitch for the internal use of blogs and wikis by companies. Her speech included some statistics, including the fact that 34% of e-mail received by business people is occupational spam (work-related e-mail which has nothing to do with the person receiving it). No filters can stop that. But, says Charman, an internal blog could.

She used a couple of case studies to illustrate her points. In a nutshell, this is what she said internal blogs and wikis can do for your company:

- Cut down the amount of e-mail
- Improve quality of information
- Keep employees on the same page
- Provide transparency
- Unlimited capacity (blogs don't slow servers down)
- Searchable archives
- No spam
- No occupational spam
- Easier to ignore than e-mail

I spent a couple of minutes looking for a hole in her argument, then realized I couldn't. Internal blogs would probably solve a lot of problems facing IT departments and companies as a whole. The problem, as Charman said, is that there aren't too many CIOs out there who are brave enough to say, "OK, we're going to scrap this $200,000 infrastructure we bought last year and replace it with MovableType for $350." — Brian Ward

Go to the the BlogOn Web site and the event blog.

Tags: blogon, BlogOn2005