Blogger Behind the Firewall

Dave Winer weighs in on the Blogger deal. His take on the rationale is exactly like mine:

Blogger is not open source, in fact ordinary people can't even purchase a binary license, so there's probably the reason they did the deal -- to get the source for Blogger, which is now written in Java, and to license it to their corporate users, along with the Google search appliance, which goes for about $25K per box. If this is true, then you will be able to add, say, $1K to the price of the box and get a copy of Blogger along with the search engine, allowing people to create weblogs on a local network. This is very important for business use of weblogs, which is growing now at a fast clip.

I continue to believe that blogs will be important in knowledge management, learning, higher ed, and schools -- not to mention sort of a "people's journalism" that is taking hold.

Even with the backing of Google, blogs aren't going to take off behind the firewall without a good nudge. Most of the populace isn't expressive. It takes motivation to get them to share.

Yesterday Sam Shmikler and I were talking about how to make eLearning successful. Sam says you must have incentive. A program he developed for (then) NationsBank awarded frequent flier miles for completing eLearning. In short order, people were bailing out of instructor-led workshops to get those miles.

Posted by Jay Cross at February 20, 2003 08:36 AM | TrackBack