I need a corporate blog

Whenever someone looks up a piece of documentation regarding our product (the much appreciated IBM XIV Storage System), they don't look for "anything written by avi aharon", certainly not for "the latest and greatest from avi aharon, the later the better". (Although, I must admit, to be asked whether I published "anything interesting lately" is a question I'm willing to be asked on a daily basis.)
Technical documentation is signed by the company, not by the individual who writes it, and for a good and obvious reason. However, I aggregated links to whatever I published in a blog format (that is, last in - first seen).
Why is that?

We have a publication center that is organized by topic (product, or technology). We also have internal websites for drafts we don't delete, to allow for historical research. One way trace the history of a certain feature as reflected on the way it was documented. This is much easier than scanning the code, not to mention design documents, or specs.
Yet, I added this sorted-by-date page.
The reason for this is obvious: the easiest way to find what's new is to look at the top of the page. This is better that compare versions of a wiki page (this website is wiki-based), even better that to look at your RSS reader (my reader feels most comfortable when it's "over 2000 items unread").
The most important feature that information could have is the ability to be easily found. Then comes relevance, then comes accuracy and completeness.
This is easily achieved when you have developers who document what they develope all by themselves, of course :) The top five documents on the screenshot above, the longest of them is 36 pages long, were all written by the developer. I heavily edited them of course, but was amazed by their clarity, accuracy and conciseness.
Such developers make my life so easy that all that is left for to do at work, is to blog.

Blogging as a form of Procrastination

Inpired by this post I am pleased to announce that earlier this month I have shut down two blogs of mine. Yeap, you don't have to be a teen to have multiple blogs aimed at multiple audience.
The two deceased blogs were quite busy. I wrote 3-5 posts a week per each. I t was fun, it was productive, it help me to a achieve a well set goal and learn something about myself, all in a package of a blog that I could shut down just like that.
Mabe that is exactly the point. Sure, blogs are procrastination. But, they are so as a form of documenting scattered thought. (I alomost worte "managing thoughts") Real life - if held correctly - are purposeful. Blogging - if taken to what they are - are everything else. Blogging means thinking freely. Thinking freely means thinking randomly. Randomness won't achieve any goal for me, but it allows me to recreate and to keep track of my thought at the same time.
The next thought that has just popped up is that procrastination is demoting a short-term goal my daily tasks) for a longer one. Longer, and less definite. Now, I don't know wxactly what I meant by this one, but hey, this is what blogging is all about - keeping track of this halfbaked thought in order to be able to return to it later on.

Flatland - the metaphor works in both directions

BlogScholar (to whom I have arrived via Commitment to Living) writes that academics should leverage themselves through the blogosphere.
I am not going to add my two cents to the "of course you should have a blog or two, too". Instead, I would like to state that one of reasons I'll probably won't see the university from within is that all I need to know is available on-line.
Sure, there are lots of things I would like to learn. Moreover, there are plenty of things I need to learn (for example, in order to stay in the business).
However, instead of driving to the nearby university campus, guessing whether I have chosen the right professor for my needs, guessing I know what my academic needs are, and keeping them from evolving throughout a 13-weeks long semester, *
instead of doing all that, I am quick-searching a subject, read a post or two (or two-dozens, depends on how long does it take me to get it straight), post several comments with questions, and always get a decent feedback from the blogger.
The land is, indeed, not flat anymore, and it works for non-academics as well.

* OK, no English professor would ever allow me to write such a long sentence. Maybe the university has a point after all ;-)