Next week, I'll be part of a blogging panel at the Ragan conference, "The Role of Communications in Creating Best Places to Work." I'm on the panel with colleagues David Biesack, Chris Hemedinger and Becky Graebe, and we'll primarily be talking about our internal blog program on the SAS intranet, where we all have blogs.

A small part of the conversation will cross into a discussion of the external blog program - and how our internal blogs have influenced and inspired our external blogs at SAS. Chris has long been our most popular blogger at blogs.sas.com, and David is one of the newest. Both are employees in our R&D division, where Chris focuses on customer support and David focuses on efficient software development. You'll see when you read their blogs why one of my goals for next year is to make it easier for more R&D employees to blog.

Our panel is part of the Internal Communications Track, but I'm hoping to attend a lot of presentations in the Marketing & PR Track as well. You should expect to find me live blogging a few of the sessions here on this blog next week, and linking to some videos later in the month.

If you have questions for the panel or for any of the other presenters, let me know and I'll try to get them answered for you while I'm there.