Personally I have a blog (at http://greyhawk68.dominohosting.biz) for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, I see it as a wonderful networking tool. The Domino community of bloggers is fairly tightly knit, and I feel a wonderful sense of belonging to a group of like-minded individuals. In the blogs I visit, I can get info on pretty much anything Lotus or IBM related. I can also see jokes, read about personal lives of contemporaries, get info on vendor's products, and get the low-down on all the various gadgets that abound in our geek universe.

Why is this important? Well to me, it validates what we do. I know that sounds strange, but I'm one of the only Domino people in my workplace, and aside from the local Notes/Domino user group, I don't have very many people to bounce ideas off of. That's where blogging has filled a niche.

This niche to me is like hanging out at Lotusphere year round. You get to communicate with other people that "get it." Not only on a technical level, but a personal level as well. And the best thing is that you can give back to this community. You can create a blog and share your experiences as well. The more of us that contribute, the stronger the community becomes.

Blogging in the workplace
Blogging doesn't just have its personal uses. Blogs can be beneficial in business as well. It might seem strange, but a blog is a wonderful tool for such things as project teams, change logs and simple content updates.

In a project environment, you could have a blog that several people associated with the project could update. It's a quick and easy way for the project "community" to keep each other up to speed. Add in RSS (Really Simple Syndication), and you have a mechanism for people receive automatic updates whenever the content changes. This fits very easily into existing Domino environments and leverages the skills you already have.

What do the big guns think? In order to gauge what the future holds for Domino blogging, I conducted email interviews with three of the more popular bloggers in the Domino community.

Interview with Ed Brill
The first person I talked to was Ed Brill, Senior Manager, Lotus Marketing, IBM. Ed maintains two Domino blogs. The first is his Lotus blog at http://www.lotus.com/weblog. The second is his personal blog at http://www.edbrill.com.

DominoPower: So, why two blogs?