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.
