RADIO USERLAND 8.0 USERLAND SOFTWARE www.userland.com $39.95

Do you have a creative side that doesn't get expressed enough at work? Regularly come up with ideas worth sharing but hesitate to send E-mail about every passing thought? Need to raise your profile?

Maybe it's time to start a Weblog. Tools to publish Weblogs, or blogs, developed by UserLand Software Inc. and others have gained traction among opinionated Internet users who use them to post no-holds-barred ideas, observations, and commentary for anyone to see. There are thousands of independently produced blogs, many hosted on sites such as Blogger and Movable Type.

The concept has been slower to catch on within companies where people are more circumspect about what they say, how they say it, and to whom. Yet some practitioners feel there's no reason blogs can't be used--albeit with some rules of etiquette--in business environments.

Indeed, a growing number of bloggers are professionals who maintain Web sites outside of work as a way to expand their horizons. They include Ken Bereskin, director of Mac OS worldwide product marketing with Apple Computer; Phillip Windley, CIO for the state of Utah; and Marcus Pierson, a doctor and regional VP of clinical information and special projects with St. Joseph Hospital/PeaceHealth, a hospital organization in the northwest United States.

UserLand's products make business blogs possible. The vendor's client software, Radio UserLand 8.0, can be used by individuals to design, publish, and maintain Weblogs. For IT departments, there's also a compatible content-management server, called Manila, and development environment, Frontier. In the grassroots tradition, a few experimental employees sometimes bring Radio into the workplace, and Manila sales follow. "Radio can sneak in the back door and get momentum," says John Robb, president and chief operating officer at UserLand.

At De Anza Community College, more than 150 faculty members have created blogs with UserLand's software. Initially, the goal was modest. "When we first started, we weren't necessarily interested in Weblogging. We were interested in using an inexpensive browser-based tool that allowed faculty to easily create, update, and maintain course-related Web sites," says Cindy Vinso, dean of learning technologies at the Foothill-De Anza Community College District in Los Altos Hills, Calif.

Within six weeks of launching the project, however, the richer possibilities of interactive learning became clear, and Weblogs took off. "I believe we're seeing a cultural shift in learning," Vinso says. "Increasing numbers of faculty are extending their classroom through their Web sites."--John Foley