There are many different reasons people blog — reflecting more and learning are good examples of common reasons to blog. A few weeks ago, I was listening to a (pre-recorded) session where Debbie Weil, author of The Corporate Blogging Book, was talking about time-limited blogs.

While the session was about a year old, I was still very surprised at the number of people (and these are people who would participate in a session about blogging) still didn’t really understand the difference between forums and blogs. As is usually the case with communication, it’s easy to blame those being communciated to for not understanding.

But I’d say the lack of understanding probably comes more from a lack of clear communication on what a blog actually is (versus a forum, or a non-blog site). Personally, I very rarely refer to my site as a blog — I don’t often find that there’s a useful difference by distinguishing it as a blog.

What really caugth my interest in Debbie’s talk though, was the growing interest she had identified in time-limited corporate blogging. This is where a company takes a specific issue or event and creates a blog around it that only lasts for a given amount of time (which could be anywhere from a few weeks to a year or more).

While there’s certainly no shortage of blogs that eventually just die off (which usually happens with a whimper, rather than a bang) — these blogs are intentionally set to self-destruct.

My initial thoughts was that this must be such a let-down for people who subscribe to the site — knowing that one day a site you enjoy reading is going to be gone.

But when I thought about this some more, rather than setting your readers up for disappointment, you’re actually setting realistic expectations. Being a content creator is tough (even in the short time I’ve been writing, I’ve found it tough to stick to a regular posting schedule).

By establishing realistic expectations with your readers, they’ll come back when you launch your next issue- or event-specific blog. This way, you keep the focus of your blog targeted and specific, rather than just dumping content into a site because you feel you have to.

I was speaking to a good friend of mine a few days ago, who was busy trying to juggle demands from a few people who wanted an organizational chart completed of their entire organization. We’re not talking about a small company — it’s a mid- to large-sized multinational company.

Taken to the next level, there are immense potential benefits for relationship/network mapping, as well as mapping people to some of the terms that you might create in a taxonomy or controlled vocabulary.

This reminded me of something I read in KM World a while back (I’d link to it, but it was in paper) about how social networks need to replace organizational hierarchies. So wouldn’t it be cool to create some kind of human ontology where people are not only related to each other, but also to services, departments and job functions (by the way, ontologies and taxonomies have been explained in some really interesting ways, in case you’re curious)?

My excitement at having thought of this was quickly quashed by my friend’s reaction. “We can’t even create an organizational chart, let alone map out all these other relationships. We can’t even keep up with who reports to whom,” she informed me.

So what’s the answer? Should networks really replace the organizational chart as the way to represent how the organization is structured? Or do you first need to create a hierarchical organizational chart and then build out non-hierarchical relationships from those?

It would seem to me that while networks replacing organizational charts sounds really great — in reality, it’s not very practical. There will always be a place for hierarchical relationships between things and people. Social network mapping is an extremely useful tool, but an organizational chart represents a particular set of relationships and a specific structure that a social network map does not.

What do you think? Can social network mapping and organizational charting (I just made up that term, it sounds a bit nautical) co-exist? Or does one necessarily have to destroy or replace the other?