Scoble: How many bloggers does IBM have?

June 8 2004

Eric Mack alerted me to the Scobleizer's take on Barb Darrow's "old fart" article from yesterday.  In his blog, Scoble wonders aloud

how many bloggers does IBM have? They have six times more employees
Well, first off, I would assert it is quality over quantity :)  There are tons of IBMers who blog.  Are they aggregated in one spot?  No.  But some of the best known blogs on the planet are written by IBMers.  Sam Ruby.  Mark Pilgrim.  But wait there's more.  IBM developerWorks recently launched a blogs section, and you can find Grady Booch and several others blogging there.  Oh, and of course, there's my weblog on lotus.com/weblog, which launched seventeen months ago, where the readers are helping shape the future of that blog.  And this site.  And dozens if not hundreds of other personal sites.  A few are listed in my blogroll "colleagues" section, but that's just a small snapshot.  I know 20 more that I occasionally surf or read via RSS.  And those are just the ones in English.
And those are just the public blogs.  What IBM does uniquely is offer every IBM employee a blogspace within our Intranet's "On demand workplace".  I've personally chosen not to blog there -- two is enough (so far) -- but there are, hmm, exactly 624 active weblogs on that intranet site at this moment ("active" weblogs have two or more entries -- nice that they are excluding "hello world" blogs from the count).  So if an IBMer wants to, as Scoble says blogs can, "tell the execs what they are doing wrong", there are ways to do so -- executives like Steve Mills and Donn Atkins maintain blogs or other blog-like interactive spots on the IBM Intranet, too.
To say "IBM has six times more employees" as if that is some yardstick of how active IBMers should be in the blogging community is somewhat misleading, too.  Everyone has something to say, of course, but some areas of IBM technology are more bloggable than others.  With no offense to my colleagues, I don't imagine much synergy between blogging and the IBMers who maintain the (insert favorite "maintenance mode" technology here).  Hardware-related blogging hasn't exactly been commonplace.  IBM Global Financing probably doesn't have too much to contribute to the blog world.
We are running a better organization because of our blogging; this is not some unique Microsoft phenomena.  Aside: Scoble also says that there are "over 600+ webloggers here at Microsoft".  How many of those "Microsoft bloggers" are really regular bloggers?  If Eric Rudder leads by example, then I wouldn't be too quick to assert that number as indicative of the importance of blogs at MS.
Do the IBMers who are blogging get attention internally for blogging?  Absolutely.  The three executives up the ladder from me all know about both of my weblogs and read at least one of them.  Blogging, RSS, wikis (IBM intranet has a Wiki site too) are becoming mainstream technology topics in internal discussions.  Heck, we started the lotus.com/weblog in the first place because we recognized the power of a less-formal way for Lotus marketing to be able to communicate to the market -- something that press releases and new web pages can't do.  Both my weblogs are read by large numbers of IBMers -- as diverse as VPs to lawyers to sales engineers to, well, I don't even know, I suspect!  I've received speaking invitations as a result; I get involved in customer situations because of my blogs.  It's been inspiring and rewarding to blog, and I would do it whether I was one of 10 or one of 1000 IBMers blogging today.

Ed Brill Highland Park, IL USA Category:  Blogging  Add/View Comments [10]

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  1. 1  Buzz Bruggeman  http://www.activewords.com/  | 6/8/2004 10:24:57 AM

    When I was at Lotusphere there was one company and one IBM labs project were blogs or RSS were discussed.

    It there are lots now, that would be a sea change. I sure hope so, and hope that these blogs are out there in the blogosphere and not behind some firewall.

    Buzz

  1. 2  Dave Winer http://www.scripting.com/ | 6/8/2004 12:26:02 PM

    Wes Felter

    http://wmf.editthispage.com/

  1. 3  paul http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/paul/ | 6/8/2004 9:17:43 PM

    You left out my namesake; http://www.pmooney.net/

  1. 4  Ben Langhinrichs http://www.GeniiSoft.com/showcase.nsf/GeniiBlog | 6/8/2004 9:23:08 PM

    Blogging was a frequent topic of discussion at Lotusphere. There were blogging get togethers, at least three aggregation tools for consolidating all the blogging about Lotusphere, and talk at both sessions and in the labs about blogging. I personally talked with IBMers in at least three labs about blogging and how IBM supported it both from a software point of view and from an infrastructure point of view. I just had to make that point.

    Oh, and 100% of the people at Genii Software have blogs, so I am OK with the whole blogs/employee ratio comparison. LOL

  1. 5  Randy H. http://blogs.msdn.com/rholloway | 6/9/2004 12:14:12 AM

    This reads like sour grapes Ed... I think you should be a little more cautious in your characterization of the MS bloggers. Show me a top IBM VP who is submitting to interviews on a site like Channel 9. This isn't just about weblogs- it is about sharing information.

  1. 6  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 6/9/2004 5:31:43 AM

    no, not sour -- just a bit defensive. In the context of an article which called Microsoft "the new IBM", Scoble asserted the number of MS bloggers as evidence of internal acceptance of dissenting voices. I was merely pointing out that the raw number was meaningless.

    I don't track the entire ibm.com universe, but within lotus.com, we frequently feature interviews with General Manager Ambuj Goyal and the other executives on the news section of the site. He's only two levels down from Palmisano, so not bad. I'll have to dig a bit to find out what the rest of the ibm.com universe does.

  1. 7  Heini  | 6/9/2004 6:03:50 AM

    Sounds way cool. Would be nice to hear (and see) more. How collaboration works inside a collaboration company, interesting topic.

    For this topic. I am not a native speaker but is this really a company bloggers count? The more employees blog, the "better" the company?

    Or a senior executive that blogs excels xxx staff members. Sounds more like discussions that I have had a long time ago (decades).

    And totally off-topic. I do not know who invented this "On demand" stuff but does it really make sense to append On demand to everything that IBM does?

    I am now getting my On demand beer as it is quite sunny here and I have a day off today.

    Cheerio

    On demand Heini

  1. 8  Dumky http://blog.monstuff.com | 6/10/2004 2:43:25 PM

    Adding linebreaks would help.

  1. 9  Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 6/10/2004 5:26:15 PM

    I think it looks just fine in Mozilla Firefox, but I suppose other browsers may not look quite as nice.

  1. 10  Rob Witte  | 6/12/2004 12:09:44 AM

    Perhaps IBMers haven't been as quick to jump on the RSS bandwagon because we already had great tools for collaboration (Notes, Sametime, Quickplace). There wasn't a void to be filled.

    Microsoft employees, on the other hand, had public folders and e-mail. Need I say more?