Ever since his arrival at Sun last month, Tim Bray has been supportive of blogging inside and outside of the company, and now a new aggregator, Planet Sun, seems already to reflect a rising tide of blogs devoted to the main technologies fostered by the Santa Clara headquarters, including Java.

One Australian developer, Richard Giles, perfectly summarizes the virtues of blogging, as follows:

"Blogging is finally getting a fair degree of traction within Sun, which from my point of view is fabulous. This may have something to do with Simon Phipps or Tim Bray, or perhaps it was bound to happen anyway. Whatever the case it has already started to help my work internally.

I live at the bum end of the world. That's not to say that it's a horrible place. Quite the opposite, that's why I live in Perth. However, we are an awful long way away from many people, physically and temporally, especially Sun's main office. So when it comes to networking and communicating with some of Sun's most influential it is near impossible.

Blogging on the other hand has done two things for me within Sun. I've made connections with people like David, Simon and Tim, where I would not have done before, simply because bloggers have their own community and exchange. This came in handy recently when Simon pointed me to the right people at Sun's Santa Clara campus who are now in the process of organising a meeting with a local Perth company that have developed a highly interesting application. Using local Australian contacts would have taken weeks to make the same progress that literally only took a couple of days. Which is impressive given the time difference between here and Santa Clara, an email exchange usually takes 24 hours because of the time difference.

The second thing that has only just started to happen is more internal information flowing from the U.S. to Perth. A few people have started internal blogs, including Tim and his boss John Fowler. This gives everyone access to information that is similar to water cooler or intra-meeting jabber.

I spent 6 weeks in the U.S. in 2000 working with our graphics product team. It was apparent very quickly, during a product meeting on the first day, just how out of touch we are outside the U.S., when the participants all used product code names that I'd never heard of. Internal blogs will give me access to information that usually only comes from informal discussions which are close to impossible to have from Perth."

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