Now everybody wants to blog!

If you can identify collective silliness, I am sure you would have spotted it by now. It's this blog phenomenon that has taken the Malaysian cyberspace by storm. What used to be taboo is today worshipped upon.

The latest being the Information Ministry that wants to use blogs to disseminate information.

Excerpt:

Information Ministry Plans Blog To Disseminate Information


KUALA LUMPUR, May 6 (Bernama) -- The Information Ministry is planning to use blogs as a medium to disseminate information to the people, its Minister Ahmad Shabery Cheek said.

"The ministry is planning on using blogs as a bridge to provide information and solicit views on issues raised," he said in reply to a question by Datuk Seri Dr Fong Chan Onn (BN-Alor Gajah) during the Dewan Rakyat session, here today.

Ahmad Shabery said he already had discussions with several bloggers to get their views.

If in the 70s the ministry used Land Rovers with hailers mounted atop, today it wants to use blogs. But why blogs?

Doesn't a website serve a similar purpose? Can't website do the same work if you maintain it with regular content updates as you would blogs? Didn't you know that websites can have categories and RSS features like blogs? Just how difficult it is do disseminate information through websites than it is through blogs? Just ponder a moment.

Many websites can be run using content management softwares like Joomla or Drupal and these do allow blog-like features to be put out. Not only that - extend its reaches with other tools including video and audio embedding. Some of the features are much better than traditional blog engines and improved with sheer technical knowledge.

Blogs are for individuals to pen their thoughts and views, and at the worst extreme, ready to be criticised, and even sued and jailed. Some of these serve a purpose to organisations or groups, allowing collective views to be shared on a single platform manned by several like-minded bloggers.

For ministries, I think it is better to stick to the current websites. Just maintain them as you would blogs and add in the diseminative features such as Email, RSS, Categories, Tags, etc. Either send your traditional webmasters to courses on blogging and how to use the social media tools or employ tech savvy new ones out there - if you can do away with the red tape and get them on Government payroll.

Another reason is, your organisational URL is already well-known by the bots and mainstream search engines have already indexed most. In case you don't know, a new blog URL takes time to be discovered and taken out of the sandbox. You think it is easy to blog and diseminate informtion? Think again.