Investigating weblogs in small and medium enterprises: An exploratory case study

Abstract

Contrary to a Wiki where the opinion of the individual user disappears in favor of a more impartial 'collective intelligence', a weblog is author-centered, expressing the author's subjective point of view. This particular property of weblogs played a fundamental role for the popularity weblogs gained for making implicit knowledge explicit in an unsolicited, self-organized way. However, empirical studies from academia exploring internal corporate weblogs remain scarce, especially when they focus on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) which make up the majority of all enterprises worldwide. To counteract this lack of research, we investigate an internal corporate weblog in an ICT SME from a knowledge management perspective. We derive both research questions and hypotheses to test within future studies. Furthermore, we consider already gained findings from corporate weblog research and investigate their immediate applicability in the context of SMEs.