It’s been running for some time, and it’s stable enough now to talk about in public: blogs.sun.com is a space that anyone at Sun can use to write about whatever they want. The people there now are early adopters; there’s an internal email going out to the whole company Monday officially reinforcing that blogging policy, encouraging everyone to write, and pointing them at blogs.sun.com. Herewith a few remarks on the setup and process.

Where · At that meeting back in April where we officially decided that this was A Good Thing and people should be turned loose, there was this guy sitting in the back who didn’t say much, but he got in touch after and said “Hi, I’m Will Snow, I run sun.com and we have lots of bandwidth and horsepower, how would we set up a blogging facility?”

How · It’s based on Roller, which seems pretty good so far except for some of the URIs are kind of lame and it seems hard to fix them.

All the blogs have RSS feeds and there’s a joint feed but it’s not that great; I’m assuming that all these things are going to get rolled into Planet Sun which is much better and I think is probably going to get moved onto the same host (er, right Dave?).

Who · Of the people posting already, a couple to watch are Our Host Will (in particular dig this one), MaryMaryQuiteContrary on the grounds of sheer enthusiasm, GonzoMofo (I know who he is but maybe I’m not supposed to tell), and Duke Speaks!; his recent bit about having your compiler talk to you made my blood run cold, if this started happening around me there’d be one smashed computer I can tell you, but accessibility is good.

What Next? · Beats me. We built it (thanks to Will and his heinous henchmen), now will they come? I should mention that the blogs over at Java.net aren’t going away (some of them by non-Sun people), and then there’s the OpenOffice.org blogging cabal, and well, hey, we’re a big company. This should be fun to watch.


author · Dad
colophon · rights
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June 06, 2004
· Business (126 fragments)
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