Blogger was launched in 1999 long before the technology became commonplace. Since then blogs have reshaped the web, impacted politics, shaken up businesses, and enabled millions of people to have a voice and connect with others.

Now this technology is becoming more and more applicable to the enterprise both inside and outside the firewall. As this year’s Intranet Journal product award winner in the blogging software category shows, Blogger is at the forefront once again.

The blogging software category ballot was wide open with a variety of hosted and installed platforms. Competition included: WordPress, Movable Type, Traction TeamPage, Apple iWeb, and TypePad.

With the variety of platforms and ways in which to use blogging software, this category is a lot like comparing a basket of mixed fruit. There is no simple one to one comparison. Simply deciding whether your company’s internal blog will reside within the firewall with an installed solution, or be access-controlled outside the firewall with a hosted solution is a major strategic and technology decision unto itself. At the end of the day, one voter’s comments sums up why Blogger got the nod: “simple, fast, hosted.”

If you have only thought of Blogger as an Internet platform open to all, what makes it possible for internal use is its access control feature. Access Controls let you decide who can read and who can write to your blog. Small teams within organizations (or even the entire organization for small operations) can use a group blog with multiple authors as a communication tool.

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Access is managed using team member’s email addresses, so manual administration of the blog needs to be factored in to your overall strategy. To keep the access private, you also lose some of the power of the RSS features. Therein lies some of the tradeoffs between Internet hosted and internally installed applications.

Also performing well in this category were WordPress and Traction TeamPage. Voters raved about WordPress as being “very flexible, easy to customize and use;” “flexible, powerful, accessible;” and “committed to the product and further development.”

That’s good news if you want to build an internal blog using what is an incredibly popular and extensible platform in the Internet blogging space. Voters recognized the unique features that Traction brings to the mix with comments like, “Traction TeamPage was the first to market with facilities for enterprise blog, wiki, and social tagging. Furthermore, it’s best in class (by a LONG shot) on facilities for blog, wiki, threaded discussion, social tagging, search, and notification — all with permission controls.”

As these comments indicate, the intranet blogging arena is still in its adolescence and choices run the gamut in terms of features and application depending on your company’s overall blogging strategy.

Blogger was one of the earliest dedicated blog-publishing tools and was intimately responsible for helping popularize the format. This experience coupled with its ease of use on a proven, hosted platform is what makes Blogger this year’s product of the year.

Source: www.intranetjournal.com