Like Dell and EDS, it has gone for a group blog with a number of authors. Other companies like Sun and Boeing have a senior executive in charge of the official blog, while the third approach, taken by companies like Microsoft and HP, is to have larger numbers of blogs from many product teams. My understanding is that Intel plans to introduce or make public other blogs over time.

As a reader, which is my only expertise in this matter, I tend to prefer single-author blogs. You get a sense of the personality behind the posts, their interests, enthusiasms and tics. There’s a sense in which you feel that you’ve got a relationship with the blogger. Team blogs can give the impression that you’re dealing with an institution rather than with people. From what I understand of blog writing, that’s true from the other side too. If it’s a solo affair, you start to develop a unique voice; you get to know your regulars; you start to work out what people are interested in that you can write about; and you start to really care about catering for your readership.

But Intel is doing a very good job so far, and know what they’re doing. Marty Menard, director for high performance computing, explains that their thinking was to create a convocation, “a group of people formally assembled for a special purpose”. If a single-author blog is analogous to going to dinner at their house, then the Intel blog is more like a seminar.

That’s not to say it’s delivered like a series of lectures. While they’re (rightly) trying to share what they do know, there’s an encouraging degree of humility, fragility and an avowed desire to learn. Marty Menard writes:

The intent of this blog and our writers is to create discussion; we intend to share what we know; and finally learn from others.

Jeff Moriarty, a Program Manager in the Enterprise Collaboration & Engineer group, says:

I’ll be honest, I’m worried about these blogs being able to succeed. I’ve worked on many official IT@Intel briefs and white papers, and the process of authoring these things and taking them through legal, and political review is not for the faint of heart. Everything must be squeaky clean and very precisely aligned. These blogs are a much more open avenue of communication, and do not quite agree with some of the more conservative aspects of Intel’s nature. Some people inside Intel flat out don’t “get blogs”, and like the idea at all. That’s where I smelled a challenge, and I was hooked.

In spite of this, or perhaps in defiance of it, the Intel blog welcomes comments and responds to them, also publishing excerpts from them in the sidebar. They also have a blogroll, and though I’m not on it yet, there are controversialists who are, not just corporate sites.

The big advantage of a group blog is that the quality level of contributions can be higher, as can their volume. Instead of one person racking their brains to come up with something worth saying, you’ve (hopefully) got a queue of people lined up to give their best thoughts. Intel certainly seem to be delivering this with posts on Measuring the Business Value of Information Technology and a series of posts about information overload, together with free downloads.

There are other advantages to a group blog, to do with costs and risks. People can do it as well as their normal work. So far as I can tell, all the contributors to the Intel blog also have day jobs. It also changes the way the company is represented. CEO blogs can be absolutely fascinating and develop a great following, but what happens when the CEO moves on or gets canned? A cult of personality around a charismatic leader is very powerful, but also a tad risky. You can see, for example, the wisdom of HP not using its board members as its blogging face.

Compared to the multiple blogs idea, too, there’s also less risk on legal and political levels. Everything published can be quite carefully monitored. That’s something that will be pretty high on Intel’s agenda, unless it has changed a great deal over the last couple of years — perhaps Jeff Moriarty was testing the limits of that with his words.

At the risk of offending the CoMagz army, who may well be legion, it doesn’t seem to work, at least for me. The same stories are on the front page for weeks at a time. Company press releases are cut and pasted into stories. As I write, the current top story on the site is a press release from Intel that was news a couple of weeks ago. And the resulting webzine ends up lacking a theme. There are a lot of technology stories, like there are a lot of places on the web, but also a lot of mush. What’s the problem here? One issue, I imagine, is that it’s a lot less easy to submit an entire news story, with pictures, than it is to submit a link with a sentence of explanatory text, like digg.

The other issue is, if you’re an aspiring writer, why not just sign up for a blogger account and get an entire site for yourself? And if you are very good, why not submit your work to a magazine that will pay you? The voting aspect is also problematic. If you write something, do you really want your peers to then vote on whether it’s any good? It doesn’t matter if a site you’ve ‘dugg’ doesn’t make the front page — that was the site’s fault, not yours. Lastly, most writers are happy to get constructive feedback, but the bottom line given by ComMagz of a mark out of five can’t really do that, especially at the low end of the scale.

If I were feeling very pessimistic, this might lead me to believe that the web population is (a) lazy, (b) self-promoting and © insecure. Thankfully, I can always go back to flickr, YouTube, wickipedia and the hundred or so blogs I read on a regular basis to start feeling hopeful again.