Always interesting to hear that blogs will "succeed" Lotus Notes. Today there are hundreds of blogs published IN Lotus Notes, both internet and intranet. There's no reason to make it an either/or. See my blog as an example @ edbrill.com.
 

Interesting point, Ed, and nice blog. I suspect the point that Jim Blair and Jon Husband were making is that new personal and social authoring tools are making it easier for people to author in a common and collaborative environment, with far greater impact than Notes had in the early 90's. Notes was great stuff when it came out, but its proprietary nature limited its growth. Notes may have generated your weblog, but we don't read it in Notes. Admittedly some of the power of Notes has yet to be recreated in Web products, but we're getting there. Google Base is an interesting step in that direction.
 

Google Base? Very nice, but give me a break! It's a major big-deal on the web, getting lots of ooohs, and aaahs, and making Craig and others a bit nervous, and getting a lot of pundits talking about paradigm shifts... but it's not yet up to the capabilty of Notes 1.0, circa 1989! I'm sure it will get better, but let's be real when we say something is "getting there".

When Google lets me create my own item types and my own index layouts, using a wysiwyg editor... when they let me calculate field values using an extensive library of functions or by doing lookups from other indexes... when they let me apply read and write security restrictions to an entire index, to individual entries within an index, or to individual fields within a form... when they let me do do versioning and threading of items of different types within one index... when I can digitally sign an item... that's when they'll Google Base will be getting there. They'll still only be up to Notes 3.0 functionality, circa 1993, but they'll be getting there.

BTW: we don't read Ed's blog in Notes, but that's only because it's public. In a private intranet where Notes is already deployed, we couyld do so very easily.

I think the point here is this: in an environment where Notes is already deployed and used for a few, a few dozen, hundreds, or maybe even thousands of collaborative applications, what good reason is there to deploy a separate blogging tool? Because blogs have a "personal voice"? Nope! That's easily do-able in a Notes environment.

In a guest editorial in Lotus Advisor five or six years ago, I advocated
for the idea of establishing that personal voice by using Notes as a blogging tool -- though I had never heard the word "blog" at that point. I knew that Notes provides something called a "personal journal" template, and it also provides a subscription capability, and I advocated creating a journal on the server for each user. As far as I know nobody has ever done this in a large Notes environment.

Why not? First, it's because -- despite my persuasive powers in the editorial -- nobody saw the value in it. The blogosphere has emerged, gotten a lot of attention, and has done a good job of proving the case by now, so that obstacle isn't so much the problem any more. Secondly, though, disk space is an issue. A Notes implementation of blogging will take up a lot more disk space than a dedicated blogging tool, and that's a definite disadvantage. That disadvantage has to be balanced against the fact that integrating blogs with existing Notes applications can be a powerful benefit that makes a lot of sense if a company is already using Notes as the keystone of their collaboration strategy. And with several programmers having built full-featured open source blogging templates for Notes that go well beyond the basic capabilities of the standard personal journal template, I come back to what Ed said: there's no reason for blogs to "succeed" Lotus Notes or other types of collaboration that came before it. There's plenty of reason for blogging to _complement_ older collaboration techniques, that's largely what it is doing.
 

Richard,

Thanks for the post, having been involved in some sophisticated Lotus Notes programming many years ago I'd agree with many of your assessments. I'd also agree that the Notes paradigm fits what weblogs offer in many ways, as well as wikis, with more programmability and manageability. But here's the catch: as limited as Google Base is in its early Beta form, was Lotus Notes ever launched for hundreds of millions of people worldwide to do with as they pleased? There's definitely a place for sophisticated collaboration tools, as many KMers well know, but with a new weblog being launched every second, the question of what's better technology becomes somewhat moot. Bottom line, it's not about the technology, it's about the content.
 

Point well taken, John. Given the scale that GoogleBase is aimed at, even the limited functionality that they have is indeed impressive, and it deserves many of the accolades it is getting. I'm a big fan of both blogs and wikis, too.
 

Lotusphere / Lotus Connections 2007 gives these comments some additional relevant context, 15 months later