Welcome to the LevelTen In-Site blog.

LevelTen already has forums and a knowledge base, so why are we blogging? To be perfectly honest because I don't get blogs. My first real exposure to blogging came from auspicious beginnings. Last Labor Day weekend, I got back to the office to find my e-mail stuffed with hate mail from bloggers. It took me a little while to figure out why. Apparently somebody had released a comment spam bot using the first paragraph from our home page and linking to us so it looked like we were intentionally spamming comments. Fortunately the spamming was so a-typical and aggressive (posting the same comments hundreds of times on the same post) the vast majority of bloggers concluded that it was a ploy/prank launched by a 3rd party. (It is scary how easy it is to do something like that and how quick vigilantly justice is on the web.) The experience did lead me to really look at blogs for the first time. I initially had two thoughts: 1. I was surprised by how much of a following some blogs had. 2. Why would anyone allow open comments? I concluded from the open comments part, that blogs were toy versions of forums, and since we already had forums I did not see the need for us to have a blog and invite more moderation headaches. In the following months it seemed the articles about the need to blog dramatically increased in the web development and marketing newsletters I read. So I decided to take another look at blogs. I read a dozen articles, and still didn't get what all the hub-bub was about. So I decided to buy some research about blogs. Still didn't really get it. I did learn from the research that we should be blogging but I don't really understand why blogs are any different than forums where the first post is made by our staff. So I decided to launch this blog experiment. In the end, this is why we are blogging: 1. A lot of people say that we should be blogging (I hope next month they don't say we should jump off a cliff) 2. I think a blog can be a great way for our staff to share knowledge. I love anything that facilitates a learning culture. 3. To figure out why we should be blogging I would love to say we are experts at everything web, but we aren't - at least I'm being honest. Much of what we know we learned by doing and it is time for us to understand blogs.