Weblogging, or "blogging," as it has become better known, has taken the Web world by storm. It's spawned its own little subculture, complete with celebrities and gadflies, and has been covered widely, if tolerantly, by the journalistic community. But, as was the case with the Web, and even earlier with radio and television, blogging has, at its core, serious communications done in a new way.

Most blogs are updated daily and consist of a series of entries, often containing links and commentaries to other sites. One leading blogger, Dave Winer, is currently a fellow at Harvard, looking at how weblogs influence the Internet and society. He's taken a stab at describing what makes a blog, and you can read that at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/whatMakesAWeblogAWeblog. One element key to blogs, Winer says, is the "unedited voice of a person," a single person.

In a sense, blogging lets a wide audience get inside the head of a single individual. This very personal broadcasting medium is reaching wide audiences. There are bloggers inside of Microsoft, and if you can find them, you can see very personal snapshots of life within that great company. And blogs are being started by political candidates, leading pundits to predict that you'll get a much better feel for what a candidate is thinking by reading his or her blog. Personally, I'm a bit nervous about seeing inside the heads of most politicians!

Blogging has reached the Lotus world as well. Ed Brill "Manages the positioning of Lotus software solutions in the competitive marketplace." Ed also has a blog, shown in Figure A, which appears to be updated every week or so (and sometimes more often). You can read it at http://www.lotus.com/rw/eblog.nsf.

FIGURE A

Get a Lotus viewpoint by reading Ed Brill's blog. Click picture for a larger image.

Another interesting resource, shown in Figure B, is DominoDeveloper.net (at http://blogs.dominodeveloper.net), a site that hosts Domino-related blogs and a Domino blog search engine.

FIGURE B

Take your time exploring DominoDeveloper.net. Click picture for a larger image.

BlogSphere, shown in Figure C, is a Domino blog management and publishing system, now at version 1.02. You can read more about BlogSphere at http://www.blogsphere.net.

FIGURE C

You can download your own blogging software from BlogSphere. Click picture for a larger image.