Boring is Good
I haven't been writing much here lately. There are a few reasons for that, one of which is that a couple of weeks ago, we started using an internal weblog at work to communicate status to each other. We all work out of our homes, and while the old-timers are used to this style of work, the development team has tripled in size this year, and we were running into problems with feeling disconnected.
One solution was to start up weblogs for the development group. The solution we arrived at was to use Subtext, which allows for individual weblogs and also provides an aggregated feed of all the weblogs. Each developer just subscribes to the aggregated feed.
One thing that's fallen out of this is that people tend to do a "standup" first thing in the morning, just like an agile project's standup meeting: what I did yesterday, what I plan on doing today, other issues. It goes really well. My past experience with standup meetings is that they really have a tendency to go off the rails, but when you're writing your standup, it tends to be pretty concise, while letting me know what the other devs are doing. I tend to do a lot more link blogging as well, along with detailed posts every few days about some issue that I've solved, or something that I've learned that I feel would be useful. I don't know how many people read that stuff, but I feel better for having put it out there.
In a way, it's kind of boring to talk about: "development team starts blogging, everybody's happy". Sometimes, boring is good.