You're probably familiar with the concept of weblogging or "blogging"—Web sites characterized by tons of hyperlinks and entries logged by date. Blogs have been popularized by political columnists and pop-culture figures who chime in daily, all over the Web. From Salon to Slate to LiveJournal.com, blogs feature anything from links and commentary on the day's news to discussions of video games, dating problems and arguments over sci-fi movies.

So far, maybe it hasn't seems like there's much room for blogging in your company or work group. But that's actually one area where blogs can really offer excellent results, for two reasons. First, most blogs are interactive--they offer a "comment" function that enables people to respond to the blog. Second, blogs are handy as permanent records of conversations and brainstorming sessions, which can be easily archived and referenced by date or, in most cases, by a keyword search.

A blog is a great interactive tool for situations where your organization's Web visitors--whether customers, workers or volunteers--aren't all that likely to participate in a Java-based chat or a typical Web forum. Because a blog uses a more familiar Web page-based metaphor (instead of a chat or forum software interface), a blog can be a great way to bring employees or customers into the conversation who are less Internet savvy. Simply click in the story's comment box, enter your comment, click a button—and the comment is posted.

The nature of the blog--a "story" is posted, often on its own page, followed up by comments at the bottom of the page--also makes a blog a little more top-down hierarchical (and slightly less democratic) than a Web forum. That can make it handy for organizational use. Perhaps you want to grant only certain people the right to post entries, while allowing others to post their comments. A blog is a natural tool for that approach. Yes, you can offer the same restrictions in a Web forum, but the story-and-comments (blog) approach vs. the post-and-replies (forum) approach can give the appearance of a little more authority and control for, say, project management or training.

Finally, most off-the-shelf blogging software can do something that's great for organizations--each entry is logged by time and date and, in most cases, is searchable. That's a great way to manage brainstorming sessions, Web-based virtual meetings or any sort of knowledge sharing for a business or charity. At any moment, an individual can search the blog and find dated entries showing a previous "conversation" on a topic. This can be helpful for documenting a project's progress, getting a new employee up to speed or parsing an old brainstorming session to see who gets the credit for a new idea. What's more, the entire online conversation can be archived easily. That isn't possible with the default method most of us use for this type of communication--forwarding around a bunch of e-mails with long "quote trails."

Indeed, the blog approach is the near-perfect substitute for long e-mail conversations. Instead of sending out a message to your group, you post it to the blog. (You can even post images and links to downloadable files, depending on the blog's configuration.) Now, responses and comments can happen in the blog, instead of in a massive round of forwarded e-mail. You then have a permanent, searchable, dated record of the discussion, a less cluttered e-mail inbox and you can use e-mail for more immediate, one-on-one communications.