I’m not a scientist, so I can’t relate to this problem. I do know, however, that web development is a very competitive field as well. In web development, blogging gives you an edge. Taking part in (or even hosting) a global conversation about your field gets your name out there. For web developers, this can lead to key jobs, book deals, or even sponsorships. Wouldn’t these benefits appeal to scientists?

Today, at a company-wide Brown Bag lunch presentation, I officially launched the CogBlog: The Cognitive Science Weblog. Ever since returning from Webvisions 2006, I pushed for my company to establish a blog. And now it has happened.

One nice thing is that it isn’t just a corporate blog for Aptima. Aptima is simply hosting a cognitive science blog for our company, customers, partners, competitors, and other members of the community of interest.

I’ve got two posts on the blog as we kick off. First, I provided a Hello World! post to kick things off. A sample:

I’d like to brag that I fought a gallant battle to convince Aptima to host a weblog in order to better have a pulse on the human-centered engineering community—but I’m proud to say that there was no “fight” involved at all. Aptima’s line of work (new and exciting technological solutions to mission-critical problems) is a breeding ground for great ideas that should be shared with our customers, partners, competitors, and other interested members of the field.

I also provided a more research-based article titled “Distributed Learning for the Army: Cost Effective or Just Plain Effective?” In this post, I talk about how distributed learning might not be simply more cost and logistically effective for the Army, but but also far more effective because it will be using technological means that new recruits will already be familiar with. A snippet:

I’d suggest that the benefits are not just about efficiency, flexibility, and frugality. In the not-too-distant future, distance learning could actually be a preferred method of training for new soldiers. Why? Because we’ll be seeing more and more enlistments from the MySpace generation.

I would really like to send a big thank you to Brian Oberkirch and Jeremiah Owyang for their indirect support during the planning stages. And of course, Dan Cederholm was very inspiring for the development stage. I recorded the audio of my presentation to the company kicking off the CogBlog, so I’ll see if I can mash it up with my slides to make a compelling archive.

So, check out the CogBlog if you get a shot. It’s also semantically marked up, designed to be bulletproof, and kinda pretty if you ask me.

A while back I mentioned that I was kickstarting the initiative to start a corporate blog for my company, Aptima. There are a few reasons why I haven’t posted here in a while, but one of them is that every spare moment over the last couple of weeks I have spent designing and implementing the blog for my company.

Well, today I launched the blog internally on our secure server. It was a very fast development process for a few reasons—the biggest being that I didn’t have a budget for it, so I did it on my own time. I consider it my Christmas gift to the company.

We even had a bit of a contest to name the blog. Luckily, I was still allowed to take part. My lone submission ended up winning: CogBlog. We have a large number of Cognitive Scientists at Aptima, so it seemed to be a good fit.

So, what are some notes on the development so far?:

• Multiple Authors: We will have quite a few folks contributing to the blog, and I wanted each blogger to have an identity. One design decision I made right away that seemed to help this was adding a thumbnail photo for each blogger. Also, each author will have an archive page that will also contain a short bio.
• Excerpt vs. Full Content: On the home page I’m showing just an excerpt of each article. Why? Since we have many bloggers, there is bound to be many different topics on the front page (more so than if it was just one blogger). So, for that reason not every reader will be interested in every topic. Just posting the excerpt will allow readers to see more posts than just the most recent.
• Popular Posts: I found and installed Alex King’s excellent Popularity Contest plugin. It uses an algorithm to calculate the most popular posts based on views, comments, trackbacks, etc. Should be interesting to see how this plays out over time.

Also, (of course) the blog is done with 100% standards. I’ll be looking out for places to add Microformats, but I’m not seeing any obvious choices yet.

More to come as we inch closer to launch. We’re anticipating sending the blog live sometime in January. So, stay tuned. I’ll post more info here.

I’ve got to tip my cap to Jeremiah here. His work and his advice was instrumental in helping me formulate an attack plan for this—though not much of an “attack” was really needed in the end. I went into the meeting with some notes, shown below. A great deal of this came from various posts by Jeremiah, and I thank him for that. I’ve included all my notes, with the exception of my section on “Recommended Next Steps.”

John Shaw, our CEO, mentioned in the company-wide email today that my WebVisions presentation was instrumental in kicking this into gear. Thanks to Aptima again for sending me there, and thanks to Jeremiah and Brian Oberkirch on giving me so many great ideas at the conference and in the months following.

And, the notes:

What is a blog?

• A simple technology
• A conversation
• A relationship
• An opportunity to share

What isn’t a blog?

• A series of press releases
• A news ticker
• A sales pitch
• A guarantee of increased revenue

What are the benefits of a blog?

• Your site always has fresh content
• Search engine optimization (search engines love blogs, improve rankings)
• Customer opinions easily published and searchable, which is good because customers value other customers’ opinions above all others
• Consumers are having conversations about companies with or without you—it is in your best interest to participate
  • If you’re not participating, you at least need to listen
• Dialogue with customers proves you care about them
• Prospective employees get a more detailed look at the company
• Web research is an important stage in the purchase process

What are the keys to success?

• Authenticity
  • In your voice (be yourself)
  • In your message (don’t have hidden agendas)
• Commitment
  • To your writing schedule
  • To writing with your customers’ goals in mind
• Focus (Stay on Track)
  • On your own goals
  • On your audience’s goals

How do you measure success?

• Web Traffic Analytics: Both for the blog and the main site
• Discussion: Number of comments on blog
• Inquiries: Track number of emails to contact addresses before and after
• Technorati: Ranking within blogosphere
• Subscribers: How many are regularly checking your site feed
• Be sure to prepare these measurement methods before going live

Who should blog?

• Someone who is:
  • Available (if people contact you, you need to be able to reply)
  • A domain expert
  • An effective writer with conversational style
  • A web user (up to date on how the blogosphere works)
  • Passionate (about the topic and about sharing)
  • Honest and transparent
  • Committed (you have to keep it up)
  • Thick-skinned (the blogosphere can be mean—customers can be frustrated)

Individual vs. Group Blogs?

• Individual blogs:
  • Pros: Users can subscribe to individual bloggers within a company, get content more specialized to their needs; each blogger has a stronger identity with the audience.
  • Cons: A well-read blogger could leave the company if offers start coming in because of the blog (but remember that person did open up new channel of conversation for the company); more pressure on each blogger to write consistently.
• Team blogs:
  • Pros: Less pressure for each blogger to write as often
  • Cons: Can come across as “faceless” if not implemented right (need to promote the individual personalities of each blogger)
• Team blog doesn’t have to be the whole Aptima team. Could have blogs for product teams.