When reading posts relating to the latest 4.5 release of drupal, I came across an interesting post exploring the use of drupal for university wide blogging. Drupal for the EDU Enterprise (40K users?) I was immediately curious as to which University was pursuing this venture. Seeing that the post was from lhl, I followed his profile to his personal blog, the about in turn leading me to his USC personal page. I knew that USC was involved in internet2 and the middleware iniative, on the grid computing front, but had not made contact with anyone from USC participating in the WebISO and directory areas. USC also has a nice installation of [uPortal], http://my.usc.edu/. Apparently they are using Pubcookie instead of Yale CAS. David C., you may run into Leonard Lin at JA-SIG Summer 2004. Anyway, it would be good to follow up with him, about JA-Sig, WebISO, university blogging etc, since we don't have too many local contacts with uPortal and I2 Middleware. Anyway, I am quite interested in blogging as a feature for simple ad-hoc web publishing for our constituents. Students specifically would I think latch on to a blogging service if we were to offer one through Cougars' Den. There are some sites focused on the blogging and such in the classroom, such as kairosnews.org, also a drupal site btw. One drupal contributer, also a teacher, is using technical writing courses at his university to produce open source software documentation. I have seen anything that lends toward collaborative book writing, as easy as a blog, in eCollege. Of course blogging among Faculty and Staff within a university could generate more categorical knowledge sharing than any other currenlty available medium. The truth is, blogging is just the name for the simple publishing, sharing, and conversing of information. Its knowledge management in the most organic sense. Blogging brings something traditionally difficult, web publishing, to just about anybody. I don't think people care about having "home pages" beyond a simple blog with a customizable theme, links, their thoughts, and a simple way to attach images or files. Perhaps its time to start thinking of Enterprise Content Management is more than a three letter accronymn with a large vendor pricetag. Certainly blogging doesn't solve workflow, imaging and archiving and other advanced ECM topics, but I doubt one monolithic solution will do the trick. Worth a thought. Speaking of easy web publishing, I need to write about a next generation Wiki, Jotspot. Here's a great writeup about jotspot from social software expert Christopher Allen. I watched half of the flash demo, and will need to spend some more time with it before sharing my thoughts. It may not be "it", but something as simple as it, could take over the collaborative, workgroup, workflow, knowledge management software landscape easily.