The role of a blog as a collaboration tool is primarily to have a medium where people from a same team can exchange their ideas, build their ideas from comments of other members and come up with great solutions.
A collaborative blog could therefore in this case be compared to emails. Emails are made to communicate from one person to many other persons but when you want to communicate ‘many to many’, it becomes a lot more complicated. Blogs gives you the opportunity to do it quite easily.
However, for the blog to be an effective tool of communication, it needs to be updated quite often so people keep coming to have a look at the blog for the latest update of their project. However, like every new technology, people can be at first confused and reluctant to use the blog. That’s the reason why, at the beginning of implementing a blog, the team manager should be responsible for implementing it and communicating with its team to help them use it.
A training should be conducted to every members of the team so they feel comfortable with it. A good way of introducing the technology and members of the team would as seen on Jive, a software company providing tools for internal business blogs, would be to create a section where each member would introduce themselves and talk about their first week, month or year.
The latter webpage on Jive presents other ways of using your blog as a collaboration tool such as replacing it for meeting notes where everyone could be contributing if anything was missed out in the summary, or use it as a status report to update every one on their goals of the week
Blogs can replace emails or videoconferencing or be a complement to this technology. This will depend on the use you want and how people on your team are receptive to the different tools. However, blogs will allow keeping trace of your meeting in the same place as all your other thoughts and projects.
One of the most powerful features of the blog is the transparency and historical record that it places around conversations. This means that the decision-making process itself becomes more tangible and thus more likely to be followed, preventing discussants from focussing on the output. It is the quality of the process that we know impacts on the quality of the decision outcome. the fact that discussants can refer to earlier discussion points and re-consider them, take time to re-examine the process details and reflect on the process in more details is conducive to better decision-making outcomes.
Honestly, blog is a good communication tool as Krisine contributed. However,it might not attract the reader’s focus if it’s presented only by text. It’s more obvious while the topic is not that attractive or the audience involvement is low.
Therefore will it be better if blogs are organised with colorful content with pictures embeded?
I agree with your position that a blog presenting only pages and pages of text might not be attractive to users. To prevent people from being bored, I believe that they need to get some sort of different media such as graphs, pictures, link to videos. It also depends on the subject of the blog and what you want to get out of it. My blog was more about blogs that a team could use as a collaborative tool to use for example as we used the discussion threads on blackboard to exchange ideas during our virtual assignment. Moreover as Kristine said previously being able to go back to what have been said before, to reflect on it was of great help. If you need a more comprehensive tool where you can exchange all sorts of files then you can use a web 2.0 tool where such things are possible.