Captain Ahab maintained a ship log aboard the Pequod. Captain Kirk kept his StarDate log on the Enterprise. Logs and journals have always been — and will remain — an important way to record facts and observations.

Web logs, or blogs, are the evolution of logs that leverage the power and global reach of the Internet. Anyone with access to a computer can participate in a global dialog on any subject matter.

There's a new awareness and focus by the media on blogging in general, but what about blogging in business? Join me for a wide-ranging interview with two of Sun's top thought leaders and bloggers, Tim Bray and Simon Phipps, as we discuss the history and role of blogging in the Participation Age.

Bill Howard (BH): We've all heard a lot about blogging, but there may be some others still around that don't fully understand what it is. So, to level-set everyone, just what is blogging?

Simon Phipps, Chief Technology Evangelist (SP): The best definition of blogging may be to describe it as an online Web page that is maintained using easy tools. It's a venue for someone to speak in their own personal voice, where each entry can be uniquely linked to on the Internet and where the content is available in a machine-readable form for consumption by aggregators.

Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies (TB): Simon has captured the definition very well. I would add that one of the other distinguishing characteristics is that a blog is almost always associated with a unique personal voice. There are examples of group blogs, but they are in a small minority.

BH: Blogging in the enterprise is a fairly recent phenomenon. Can you provide a rundown on the origins of blogging?

TB: The history of blogging is fairly long. When the World Wide Web was being built by Tim Berners-Lee back in the very early '90s in Switzerland, one of the first popular Web pages was called What's New Today and it was basically just an enumeration of interesting new things that showed up the Web. And if you look at that today you would say, "Oh yes, that was a Web log."

The form really began to emerge again in the mid to late '90s when a fellow called Dave Winer had a site called Scripting News that started to take on all the significant characteristics of what we would now call a Web log. Starting from that, the numbers have gone up and more or less the same way the numbers for the early Web did — first hundreds then thousands and then hundreds of thousands. Today it's really hard to count, but there are at least 10 million bloggers in the world.

BH: Why would an enterprise choose to embrace the idea of blogging by its employees?

SP: OK. To answer that question you have to ask some questions about how society is changing. I believe that we are in a society which has been transformed by the availability of Internet connectivity. There was a seminal book published right at the beginning of this millennium called the Cluetrain Manifesto. The authors asserted that we are right on the pivotal edge of a shift from an industrial age to a "participation age," where instead of messaging we have narratives, instead of marketing we have conversations, and instead of consumerism we have participation.

In the participation age, the right way to tell people about how great your company is is to get the people who are making your company great to tell how they are doing it. So, the obvious thing to do is get your staff to tell their narratives from their perspectives, and that's what blogging is.

For Sun this has meant making the facility available for thousands of Sun employees to simply say how they see the world from day to day, and the result is that our customers, our suppliers, our competitors, and the media are all hearing the authentic voice of individuals talking about their daily lives. Whereas you can argue with spin and whereas you can refute marketing messaging, there is not much you can do when you hear the honest voice of hardworking, intelligent, creative individuals telling you how the world is.

TB: I think Simon is right on. I will add that although one thinks primarily of Web logging as a public platform for sending your stories to the world, it turns out that blogging also has another function that may be more important: It provides us with a really good way to listen to the world.

Say somebody out there in Cleveland or Shanghai has an idea about something Sun should do. Well, it's kind of hard to communicate with Sun as a company — we are a big company with over 30,000 employees. On the other hand, if they read a Sun blogger, it's easy to e-mail that person. It's rare that a week that goes by that I don't get one or two such e-mails from somebody out in the world telling me what they think Sun ought to do. Our effectiveness at knowing what our community is saying, and what our community wants and needs, has been improved immensely by the blogging process. And for my money that's actually the biggest win.

BH: No question that there are some great rewards from blogging, but what about the risk side, and what do you think about balancing the risks and rewards? Do you have some policy guidelines for readers who are blogging?

TB: Yes, there are potential risks. But at the moment, a year into this, I would say that we are seeing almost all reward and no downside, so whatever potential risks there are, none of them have come forth yet. As one of our smart legal staff pointed out when we were starting to work on the policies, if we had come to a lawyer 15 years ago and asked him what he thought about e-mails he would have been horrified at the idea!

We have a set of policies as a company of what is appropriate to say in public, and the fact is that blogging doesn't qualitatively change the picture — we want people to act reasonable and grown up. Having said that, we do have a set of policies that we published that includes some do's and don'ts and I think they have been quite useful in helping our people achieve good results and not get into trouble.

SP: Yes. You can find that policy by going on to Google and typing "Sun Policy" and that will take you straight to the point on Tim's Web log where that policy is published.

That itself is an expression of the sort of transparency that you get in an era where Web logging is a part of corporate communications. Nothing is changed by Web logging just as nothing is changed by having any other electronic medium for human communication. If we hire people who have poor judgment about revealing trade or financial secrets, and act in ways that are in breach of our business conduct guidelines, then those employees are going to probably cause a problem whether they are in a restaurant downtown or talking to a reporter or running a blog entry. We don't hire very many people like that and in an average year there are a very small number of employees who are terminated for breach of those guidelines. We expect the ratios to be just as small with the people who are blogging.

BH: All of us here operate in the world of high tech. What are some examples of successful bloggers in the tech world, both externally as well as inside Sun?

TB: Well, I have in front of me a list of the top 100 bloggers in the world, and it's dominated by blogs about sex and politics. Having said that, some of the most popular bloggers in technology are a fellow over at Microsoft named Robert Scoble who is getting in the news quite a bit, and a fellow named Jeffrey Zeldman, who is one of the world's most prestigious Web designers. There is a fellow called Joel Spolsky who has a small software company and writes terrific pieces about various aspects of software technology.

SP: There's also Adam Bosworth who used to be at Microsoft and is now at Google who writes less frequently but very insightfully. And there is also another category of people who are changing the structure of business through blogging, and into that category I would put the analysts from Redmonk, Stephen O'Grady and James Governor. They have very much embraced the idea of market conversations, and they are trailblazing in applying blogging to the business of being analysts.

BH: Jonathan Schwartz is probably the most visible blogger at Sun. Can you provide examples of bloggers inside Sun who are effectively communicating to our over 30,000 employees as well as the world outside of Sun?

SP: Well, I would have to say Tim because he routinely gets thousands of readers a day, and he actually outranks Jonathan in terms of traffic. Tim has been blogging for quite some time now, and when he put a blog entry up on his Web log about a year and a half ago saying that he was looking for a job, I had been avidly reading his blog so I mentioned him to John Fowler. We approached him, and offered him a job. So his blogging led to him getting the job he has at the moment!

TB: Simon is particularly influential in the area of intellectual property law, software patent issues, and licensing. A successful blogger is not necessarily one who has tens of thousands of readers; there are lots of successful bloggers who only have a hundred readers. What's important is that they are the right readers.

We have got a couple of people at Sun who blog about incredibly technical issues such as Java garbage collection or kernel level performance analysis, and there literally may be only 500 people in the world who can even understand what they are writing. But those 500 people are people who are really important to Sun and having them establish their position of thought leadership in that space is important.

In the area of kernel performance there is a guy called Bryan Cantrill who is one of the Solaris engineers who has been writing tremendous pieces on performance analysis. There is also a woman called Liane Praza who is the chief architect of the SMF facility in Solaris, and she has been writing some tremendously good stuff.

Over in the Java world, we have direct blogging by some of the thought leaders like James Gosling, Graham Hamilton, and Jim Waldo.

SP: We have a large number of Solaris bloggers who have been extremely influential in the rebirth of Solaris and the birth of OpenSolaris. There are also one or two key bloggers who are blogging faithfully every day with enthusiasm about things like OpenOffice.

TB: Considering that people would think of blogging as a marketing vehicle, we are actually very light on marketers. We have Mary Smaragdis who is notable, but if you look in the top list of bloggers (click on MaryMaryQuiteContrary), you will see that Mary is really the only marketing person in the top list there.

We had some key technical bloggers before Sun ever got into blogging officially. For example, Norm Walsh is responsible for DocBook and is a respected figure in the area of markup languages and XML now.

BH: And how many execs do we have blogging?

TB: Actually, we have a respectable number of VP's blogging. We have Glen Weinberg, VP of the Operating Platforms Group and we have Graham Hamilton, Java VP and Sun Fellow, and we obviously have Jonathan Schwartz, Sun president and COO.

BH: And Bill Vass, our CIO, is also busy blogging internally for Sun employees. So what are the tools of the trade of blogging?

SP: Fundamentally, an articulate mind and an observing set of eyes, and everything else is just simple technology.

TB: Basically you can do it all in a Web browser. There are some tools to make writing a little bit more efficient and effective. An area of tools that you don't need right away to blog, but can certainly help, are called aggregators like Technorati and PubSub and so on. These are tools that basically subscribe to all the blogs and can answer a very simple question: "Who is pointing to what I am writing?"

This is one of the key things that turns blogging from just a talk input to a conversation with the world. There is a thing called RSS which flags any new content on blogs or Web sites, and there are pieces of software called news readers or feed readers that allow you, without going and visiting all of the Web sites that you read, to just glimpse into a window and see whether it has changed.

For blogging, this is tremendously important because many bloggers don't blog everyday, and nobody has time to go and visit a bunch of Web sites everyday to see what's new. With RSS technology, you don't need to. You can simply glance in the morning and see which of the people you read have something new and it will give you a little summary and title, so if you choose to read it, you can.

To get an understanding for RSS, go log in at bloglines.com and spend 15 minutes. You can get yourself a free account and see how it works.

BH: You hear a lot about reader counts. You mentioned that at Sun, the objective isn't to have 10,000 readers, it's to have the right number of the right readers. So, let's talk about that — how accurate are the counting techniques?

TB: It's essentially impossible to have accurate accounts of how many people are reading, and as you know, the notion of counting actual visits to Web pages is fairly controversial and less than transparent. It's much worse in the case of blogging.

One thing that makes it hard is that many people read blogs not in their browser but in these news aggregators we were talking about. And the way these things typically work is if I am running a news reader, and I subscribe to 100 blogs, it goes to see every hour or every half hour, all day as long as long as I am logged in. And when it notices that something is new, it highlights it in my news reader window in case I want to read it. And so the number of times these are fetched is totally unrelated to the number of times something is actually read.

As Simon said, what matters is whether you have the right readers, because if there is a community of interest that's really sharing and interacting, that's where your value comes.

SP: That's absolutely right. It's clear that Microsoft has found a human face because of the activities of just a few of their bloggers. In the case of Sun, blogs.sun.com humanizes Sun Microsystems for the market. And I think that's actually what matters, much more than how many people are reading.

BH: What's your advice to a would-be blogger, and how does a person within an enterprise get started?

SP: Probably the most important thing for an enterprise is to create a policy. I think that it's extremely important that employees know that the employer wants them to tell the truth about their work. One of the first things we did for Sun in getting blogging accepted as a widespread medium was to have a meeting with some folks from legal and from PR and we worked through creating a new policy on public disclosure (that policy that I pointed you to earlier on Tim's Web site).

By creating that, we helped all Sun employees know that Sun actually wanted them to go and write about their lives. And I was quite flabbergasted by the number of people who registered on "blogs.sun.com" a few days after it opened. We had literally hundreds of people a day signing up for it, and we didn't announce it in anyway.

For individuals, you need to write something a couple of times a week, minimum. If you are not going to do that, then you need to think twice about whether you are going to enjoy blogging. Also, you need to be happy for people to read what you have written. That may sound strange, but not everyone wants people to read their prose. You have to be willing to take feedback. And you have to be willing to be seen in public representing a company. All that may not be for everybody.

TB: Well, first of all I encourage people to try it — it's free! I worry a little bit since I think that there are some people who are coming under pretty severe pressure from their management and peers to blog. And I don't think you should do it unless you want to do it. Somebody said that the only people who should be blogging are the people who can't not blog, the kind of people who would be constantly writing e-mails or posting something anyhow. I think that if you go and read our policy you will find some pretty good advice.

For example, before writing your opinion on something it's probably worth spending a little effort to see what people have already said to make sure you are not just echoing. Another piece of practical advice is to be very generous in inserting hyperlinks to other people, because that's how the Web grows and becomes interesting and what's more, those other people will probably notice and look back to you.

SP: The most important thing you can do as a blogger is to see who is pointing to you, because your community grows when people find you and link to you. And others link to you often when you link to them. So every day I read the listing that my blog tool makes for me telling me all of the Web sites that are linking to me. And I go read what they have written and why they are linked to me. And sometimes I send them an e-mail to thank them for it, sometimes I link back to them in the comments that I'm making. And likewise I look around and see what interesting things are going on in the world that I can link to. Blogging is all about linking — linking in and linking out — and if you don't do it, then you're not blogging.

BH: Any closing thoughts?

TB: Speaking on behalf of Sun, I would say that it has been an unmitigated win for the company and we should not for a second consider trying to go back.

SP: And I would say that people are too anxious and cautious in all these things. If you are succeeding in business, it's because you have the right people. Those people can speak for themselves: You trust them to do it in front of the customers every day, you trust them to do it in front of the media, you trust them to do it in meetings. And you know you can trust them to do it on the Internet, too.

Bill Howard
Chief CIO Advocate and Advisor to the CEO
Sun Microsystems, Inc.
cio@sun.com