Preaching to the converted: Reading blogs at work

Original post from http://blog.e.govt.nz/index.php/2008/10/06/

While reading blogs at work last week, ironically, I read this article about reading blogs at work.

Now as you can guess, I’m converted: I think irrelevant of the medium, you should be keeping up with developments in your respective field. I would say that easily more than half of my research is done on regularly updated websites (whether they be wikis, blogs, or traditional websites with web feeds). If you’re reading this between 9am and 5pm Monday to Friday, we could speculate that you too are one of the converted. However an interesting question might be: does this really apply to all fields of work? Or perhaps which fields does this not apply to?

If we put our minds back in time to 2005, it was difficult to find much professionally relevant content on the blogosphere (population 10,000,000). Most of it was political punditry and “cat blogs”. Have things advanced sufficiently in 2008 (133,000,000 blogs created)? I think definitely in the field of ICT (and I am talking about both information

and communications); blogs are now the status quo. I do wonder if other fields are as advanced. In some ways the actual answer might be irrelevant, the trend is inevitable. Just as once people protested “we don’t need a website”, one day soon “we don’t need a regularly updated site that allows comments from outsiders and our own staff” may sound just as silly.
I would be most interested to hear from individuals who do read blogs at work, but do not work in communications, ICT, or anything else which relates directly to the medium of blogging itself. In addition, if New Zealand public sector are gathering information from blogs, which ones are they?