If you're an information/knowledge professional providing research and analysis services, it's likely that you'll be part of a network of fellow professionals, whether you're all employed within the same organization, or as part of an extended network of individuals, supporting each other with specialisms on particular projects.

In both cases, online collaboration tools are enabling ever more efficient interactions and transactions between co-workers - streamlining workflow processes, integrating disparate but complimentary activities and accelerating the delivery of end-products and services to users.

However, Weblogs (blogs) have yet to make much headway within the researcher/analyst world. This is probably due to the fact that blogs, although well-known in themselves, have not, to date, been regarded as collaborative communication and workflow management tools in a research/analyst or knowledge management environment.

The origin of blogs as individual and independent publishing platforms, albeit with built-in capabilities and functionality to enable intra-site linking, referencing and commenting, has not particularly encouraged their take-up amongst these groups.

Furthermore, as with Instant Messaging (IM) up until only recently, their rapid early adoption by 'consumers' has not been mirrored within enterprises. This will change once enterprises work out, as with IM, that the opportunities they bring far outweigh any currently perceived threats.

An outstanding article written earlier this year by Dave Pollard, a highly regarded thinker and writer in this, and many other fields, about Blogs in Business, provides a map outlining the way forward for enterprise blogging in general.

So, with much yet to come from the demand side, it's heartening to witness increasing activity from the supply side.

21Publish Inc., a weblog service provider typically viewed as targetting the enterprise market, along with a (very) few others, such as MyST Technology Partners, Socialtext and SilkBlogs, has recently announced the launch of blogging software specifically designed to create private-label blogging 'communities'.

"21Publish provides a hosted application that enables organizations to easily set up a private-label blogging community, called a BlogPortal. A BlogPortal is a network of inter-connected blogs that operates under its own domain name and can be customized to reflect the look and feel of any organization. Additionally 21Publish's sophisticated access management system ensures access security and allows individual bloggers to decide if content is available to the public or to a selected audience only.

With 21Publish organizations, associations, small and medium sized enterprises, alumni associations, online communities, etc. can instantly, easily and effectively share information that they previously were able to communicate only through complicated email chains and limited-access websites."

21Publish is a spin-off of 20six (http://www.20six.co.uk/), a European provider of weblogs, with communities in Germany, Netherlands, France and the UK.

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