Reviewing blogs

The BBC's been fiddling about with social software for a few years now, both internally and externally. This has largely been ignored in terms of information management, although we have had a bit of a look in terms of information policy compliance and in the past I've written a couple of short briefing documents on the issues raised by internal blogs and wikis.

More recently, due to changes in the software we're using to power these, a lot of the old blogs and wikis may have to bite the dust, so we've been taking a look at them to see (1) if there's anything worth saving for archival reasons (2) if there are any business/compliance reasons to keep anything around and (3) to draw up some guidelines on the future management of them. It's largely been a process of feel it and see as we've been trying to figure out how to manage this process. Today we came up with our first stab at some appraisal criteria for the blogs, which falls somewhere along the following lines:

1. It must have content. It probably shouldn't be surprising that there are blogs to which the creator never returned after asking them to be set up. That and those that consist of a few test posts and nothing else. Anyway, this is a fairly simple method of quickly narrowing the field of material to be reviewed.

2. The type of blog. We've managed to categorise most of the blogs into a few different types and assign values to each. These largely fall into the following:

• Personal blogs - no value. These are the blogs that are about people's general reflections on life, or what they watched on TV the night before. They might be fine as social documents (if written well), but they have no worth to the BBC in business or archival terms. If you find it a little odd that the BBC provides personal blog spaces within the corporation's firewall you'll have to ask Euan Semple, former knowledge manager at the BBC, about it.
  
• Work journals - medium-high value. Some good material here at times, at least in terms of recording information about the working lives of the BBC staff, which must be of some use to a social/media historian - at least if the content is any good.
  
• Work issues - low-medium value. Largely collections of links (some reviews) relating to the issues and technologies around people's jobs.
  
• Communications - no/low value. A means of disseminating information among staff. Tends to be very ephemeral and frankly if the communication was that important, it's more likely to have gone out on an email rather than a blog.
  
• Technical logs - temporary business value. These contain lists of things like service outages, the nightly programme schedules. Of use in the short term, but unless you like dull technical lists, no one's going to want to keep it around for long.
  
• Media comment - medium value. Someone's thoughts on what's going on the television/radio/online/news world. Can provide an interesting collection of observations, largely depending on who's doing the observing.
  
• Test blogs - no value. Largely goes back to the 'No Content' criteria, although some test blogs clearly have a lot of content - it's just all meaningless for anything except the original test.
  
• Advice/Information - low/medium value. Mostly a temporary business need as the content of these blogs seems to date quite quickly. And experience suggests there's no real value in preserving it for historical purposes.
  

3. Usage Indicators. We use a scale of density/time - so anything with high density over a long period of time gets extra points, with the opposite end of the scale obviously being low density over a short period of time.

4. Creator. Judged on the significance of the person/contributing team to the BBC. Senior Executives will score high here, but in terms of appraisal weight, it's only of tertiary significance.

5. Number of links. The higher the number of links, the less interesting the blog becomes. Until we find a way to capture the content of items linked to from a blog, the meaning of that link disappears the moment the information at the other end disappears. The best use of links tends to be when it provides supplementary information to the blog that when lost will not effect the reader's comprehension of the blog. Which is something I'm going to aim for with this blog.