While we were out of the office, BlogBackupOnline was identified as one of "25 Web Sites to Watch" by Preston Gralla in PCWorld Magazine.

Gralla had this to say about BlogBackupOnline:

"If you have a blog and you aren't sure that your blog provider will always have a backup in case of a crash, head over to BlogBackupOnline pronto. The site is straightforward: Log in, enter information about your blog, and the site diligently backs it up every day (provided that you use one of the 11 supported blogging services--Blogger, Friendster, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Multiply, Serendipity, Terapad, TypePad, Vox, Windows Live Space, or WordPress). The site is also a great tool if you ever decide to move your blog from one platform to another. After you've backed up your blog, BlogBackupOnline can bring all of your old entries into the new service."

It's great to continue to see people realizing the need to control and secure their blog's content, and Gralla's article is one heck of an endoresement. It's also great to be mentioned along with some of our other favorite products such as PBwiki, Pageflakes, and Swivel.

Thanks to everyone that continues to tell their friends about BlogBackupOnline, and please, stayed tuned, as we'll have a major announcement in the next day or two regarding a completely new service.

We recently became aware that Google has updated its Blogger API, and this was causing a few BlogBackupOnline users to have problems restoring their blogs. (Thanks to those that e-mailed us about the problem.)

The error appeared as:

Error: Could not load file or assembly 'Google.GData.Client, Version= 1.0.9.6, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=null' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040)

We've managed to locate the problem, and Steven got the fix up and running just a few moments ago. Restoring to Blogger should occur without any problems or errors. Thanks for your patience, and please contact us if you experience any additional errors.

Sue Hildreth writes in “Computer World” about the benefits of social media for large organizations, specifically wikis as long-term information repositories.

" ‘After he left, his replacement showed me a stock he thought was interesting. I said, 'Wait a minute; we already researched that stock.'" The analyst who had left had researched the stock thoroughly and developed a strategy about when to buy it. "But do you think we could find that work? No way," Herrmann says. 'It was nowhere to be found.’

Herrmann realized that a wiki — a collaborative Web site to which everyone can contribute content — might have prevented the loss.”

We’ve seen blogging infiltrate corporate structures, and now wikis are following suit. Social media are another means for organizations to increase employee efficiency. Instead of e-mailing project documents between employees, wikis can act as a central place to deposit and edit information, technical plans, and project specifications.

" 'We like it because it's a peer review system, not a hierarchical system. We work in teams, each covering a sector, so this makes it easier to collaborate,' says Herrmann. 'We also wanted to do a better job of documenting and saving things that don't get saved, as part of our legal obligations.'"

As Hermann mentions, there are a number of legal requirements surrounding communications that take place in corporate wikis and blogs. Record retention, e-discovery, and ensuring that sensitive information is not distributed are all issues that organizations must comply with when using wikis or blogs. Hildreth also comments:

“CIOs also have concerns about security, governance, IT support and integration of Web 2.0 applications with existing systems. And the very nature of Web 2.0 — distributed and egalitarian — makes some managers nervous. 'Web 2.0 is decentralized,' explains Schmelzer. ‘There’s no centralized authority to mandate or control.’”

Techrigy’s SM2 does just that. SM2 provides a central system to help enterprises discover which employees are using social media inside the organization and from home, record those communications for record retention and e-discovery, and monitor these communications to ensure that social media are complying with company policies and that liabilities and organizational risks are not being created. Hopefully, with SM2’s compliance management, organizations won’t be afraid of implementing blogs and wikis, and they’ll be able to take advantage of these fantastic technologies.