Status-Q

In my new company, we’re using blogs internally as a sort of lab notebook; it seems to be working quite well. I call it a ‘Klog’, short for ‘worklog’, though that word has been used by others for ‘Knowledge Log’, typically meaning the same sort of thing.

It’s catching on. From this Fortune article (which may now need a subscription):

Google’s public relations, quality control, and advertising departments all have blogs, some of them public. When Google redesigned its search home page, a staffer blogged notes from every brainstorm session. “With a company like Google that’s growing this fast, the verbal history can’t be passed along fast enough,” says Marissa Mayer, who oversees the search site and all of Google’s consumer web products. “Our legal department loves the blogs, because it basically is a written-down, backed-up, permanent time-stamped version of the scientist’s notebook. When you want to file a patent, you can now show in blogs where this idea happened.”

In a silly mood, the other day, after listening to some of Adam Curry’s ‘Daily Source Code’ podcast [?], I recorded a bit of audio on my iPod while I was in the bath, and sent it to him as ‘the first ever bathcast’. Sure enough, he included my silly comments, with appropriately silly responses, about 25 mins of the way through his podcast on the 27th. So I have now been heard by hundreds, maybe thousands of people, broadcasting from my bath. Which sounds like the sort of thing decadent emperors might do. Please don’t listen to it… it will spoil that picture completely.

Thanks to Brian Groce’s email notification plugin for WordPress, you can now ask to be notified by email whenever there’s a new Status-Q post. Just fill in the little box on the bottom-right. All email addresses will, of course, be kept completely confidential.