Clarke has been lamenting about how so much of his conversation/experience seems to live in his blog – granted Clarke was lamenting to me over a pint, he didn’t actually publish anything about this issue.

However, I am finding that the older I get the more that I have to remember, and since my brain feels like it never stops, I write a lot of stuff down. But recently, I’ve started to add some structure to my thoughts (please don’t laugh) and have a number of blog postings sitting in my drafts folder – you might get to see some of them, you might not.

In May 2004, when I finally arrived in blogsphere, or so I like to kid myself, I struggled for blog content. Now, pretty much a year later, I’m tripping over content. Of course, having content is one thing, finding the time to write it up and blog about it is another. This is especially true as, currently, I don’t blog during office hours.

Similarly, some blog content might not be suitable for public consumption, so now I realise why some colleagues have two blogs: one that is publicly visible, the other that is totally private. Wherever you blog, it doesn’t matter, because when you do blog, the act of writing something down and hitting the save or publish button has the psychological effect of clearing it from your mind. In reality however, it has the opposite effect: it firms the blog posting up in your mind. Well, it does for me at least: your mileage may vary.

With that thought, I am now very much in favour of blogs for project management. Not that I was ever against them, I just hadn’t made my mind up until recently. Blogs are important communication devices, teams can gain access to project specific blogs, publish their own content and generally use the blog to organise the project’s artifacts and facets.

With careful use of RSS, blog content can be pushed to team members. Prioritisation of content can be organised via the frequency at which the project feeds are polled: my RSS aggregator lets me configure the feed polling time on a per feed basis. I have important feeds polling every hour, less important feeds every six hours.

“But”, I hear you cry, “why not use e-mail?”

E-mail is great, but how often have you ended up becoming embroiled in a massive exchange of e-mails over something trivial? Try organising a meeting spread over two or more geographic locations with more than five attendees and you’ll soon find yourself dealing with an in-box full of “I can make the 5th, but not the 7th”, etc. Anyway, this is a deviation from this posting – I’ll be writing more about the proper use of e-mail in one of my project management posts later this month.

Anyway, I’ve said a lot in this posting. I’ve hinted that I’m in favour of using RSS to improve communication, and as I noted here, I will be writing an article about the subject: Using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) To Improve Corporate Communication.