Scanning Google Reader this morning, I noticed "Corporate Blog" in one of my headlines, and I prepared myself for another usual bashing.

Fortunately, Don Reisinger's Mashable post accurately summarized my feelings on such blogs.

I wrote about some of the nuiances of operating a corporate in our first post, and since then, I've sometimes been frustrated with some of the limitations we assume when writting a corporate blog. And yes, I still cringe when I read corporate blogs that would be better off labeled "Press Release".

Still for those with even the slightest ability to take the good with the not so good, corporate blogs provide valuable insights into what the company's up to.

How else could I tell you that we are scrambling toward a big relaunch of Fan Profiles?

Also, as Reisinger points out, these blogs can give companies a face instead of being brick and mordar. We make a concerted effort to be honest and interactive. We've enjoyed going to conferences, working with developers in Google Groups and eleswhere.

I just hope we can get more involved and encourage more of the company to do so, too.

I recently sat in on part of ABC's two-day Digital Media Developer Summit.

Lex Sisney, CEO of ELC, which we teamed up with with for development and training, spoke about Agile and Iterative development, open source and how they could fit into ABC's developer stack.

Lex touched on three trends:

1) Success of agile/iterative project management
2) Emergence of developer friendly programming languages (specifically Ruby)
3) Commoditization of hosting (Amazon Web Services)

I spoke about how the ESPN Community Group utilizes these three trends for our development process. Oh, ESPN and ABC are part of Disney, which is why I got the invite in the first place.

We got a great reception from the various developers and managers there, which was great. These folks use the same proprietary technology and project management methods we used to use and I got the impression there is a lot of excitement for trying new technologies, methods and hosting solutions.

One of the best questions was what are the fringe benefits we've enjoyed from using all open source methods and technologies. As a manager and developer, I have noticed several:

1) Greater number of applicants for positions
2) Developers acquire skills more quickly
3) Developers acquire a much broader range of skills
4) Developers are more eager to improve their knowledge and skills (because they are acquiring marketable assets)
5) We have become part of a much larger community. Both in terms of taking and giving, we are active in the community through code sharing, Google Groups and much more.

Another great question regarded the combination of Test Driven Development, Agile Development and Ruby on Rails and if they can be separated.

I think Lex answered this best by saying TDD and Agile are methods and RoR is a great tool to use with these methods.

But it is interesting because Agile and TDD almost go hand-in-hand with Rails because the stack is so conducive to those methods that developers would almost have to fight against the methods NOT to use them with Rails.

Any language or stack (especially MVC stacks) can utilize TDD and Agile as processes, but both were baked in with Rails.

I can't think of any reason why that's bad, but I'd be interested to hear arguments on negatives to that.

The last big theme that I tried to stress is that we are not forcing or trying to force any one to adopt our methods or technologies, but merely present that, even in a large company with established methods and technologies, change still can happen, and languages, methods and hosting can be chosen to fit a particular application or product.

For example, I said that moving from Java to Ruby to do the heavy SAX-based parsing of statistical data feeds probably wouldn't be the best idea, but Ruby may be a much better solution for building a new social network.

So I am very glad Lex and got to share knowledge with developers from another part of the community. I hope the company as a whole embraces different solutions, so we can move beyond boundaries created by a particular technology and join a very smart and open community.

ESPN HQ in Bristol has 3 primary attributes: piercing cold, intimidating geese, and employees. Instead of covering my intense experiences with the former two, I'd like to talk about the latter and the cordiality and friendliness of the ESPN.com team. During my time in Bristol I met literally tens of people - many of whom I'd interviewed with the better part of a year ago. Some were famous (lookin at you Skip Bayless). Some were not (lookin at you Pat Alreth). Regardless, however, of their notoriety I definitely have a keener sense of how the .com group fits together as whole, including how .com fits under its parent group WDIG.

I met the majority of the staff of two major groups in Bristol: fantasy and the main site. After talking with Jaime Stella and Dave Weiner - the respective managers of these groups - and the producers and engineers they oversee I determined several points of integration with each. With the main site we could do a better job of promoting widgets, perhaps displaying actual widgets on index pages or adding a widget tab to player cards. With fantasy we should investigate the creation of an open social application so that users could display their fantasy sports data (rosters, results, etc.) on their favorite social networking sites.

Perhaps more important than all of that was my introduction to the glory, majesty, and brutality of Gator. Gator is a miracle. Created by Norse monks in the 12th century, it's a game that combines the best of soccer and handball in a chaotic and incomprehensible melee replete with bruised shins, pulled groins, and Cody throwdowns. Highlights include APs frisbee-sized bruise, my first Gator goal - a no-look, fake pass, leaping toss of epic might, and Schmidty admitting he's moving to Alabama. Roll Tide!

In conclusion,

Make way for geese.

I've set up countless WordPress blogs in my time.

The entire process took me about 30 minutes when I set up my first one a couple years back. And each time, through experience and code improvements, it was easier.

Until this time.

The difference was that this is an actual ESPN blog, created and maintained by actual ESPN employees.

The difference between a company blog and a personal blog is huge, especially, considering ESPN has never had a public-facing blog run by employees.

So, what will we write about here? I don't know. Pretty much anything related to sports, the Internet or working for ESPN.

A better question is what we won't write about here.

We won't cover any secrets. Sure, we'll talk about products we're working and are getting ready to launch, but we're not going to give away competitive advantages.

We'll also steer clear of any legal issues that have to do with ESPN that could potentially affect the company.

We won't flatly criticize ESPN. Think about it. When we criticize the company, we are criticizing SOMEONE or multiple someones we work with. It's just not cool to criticize a coworker in a public forum. If we want to talk about work done outside of this group, we'll try to interview the person or people responsible for the work and present their insight here.

We are developers and Internet fanatics who want to share our experiences and thoughts with The Community.

More specifically, we're Rails developers and Web 2.0 junkies. Oh, we're huge sports fans, too. So mostly, we'll be sticking to talking about our dealings with each and try to give you a feel for what it's like to work for ESPN.