Friday June 11, 2004

So here I am browsing through my blogs. I find it amazing how many people actually have read my blog. Am I really that interesting? That was a rhetorical question because I know the unfortunate answer :) I thought I would browse through my the referrer list to find out why so many were coming from osnews.com. I hit a link where one poster stated "Here is a Sun engineer talking about Zones and Resource management".

It hit me at that very moment the power, risk and responsibility of blogging on a corporate web site with my name plastered all over it. First, I have engineer in my title, that's true. I am a Pre-Sales Systems Engineer, which means I am really in sales, not engineering. my role is to help match Sun value to customer problems. I don't necessarily fault the "Engineer" status on the poster at osnews. They got valuable information and I thank them for taking the time to visit Sun's blogs. But I can easily see how unintentional interpretations can stray from reality (please read on before taking offense because its not intended to be offensive). For example, what if I had blogged "I had a problem with Solaris and couldn't get it fixed"? Someone could read my blog and say "Sun Engineer could't fix Solaris problem"? Wow, that would be bad, especially since I am not a Solaris kernel engineer. Perhaps it was a fixable problem and I missed the solution or I simply wasn't finished with the debugging process. If the problem was important enough I would, of course, involve a kernel engineer.

The power here is that I have already reached over 800 hits (100 or so are mine from mucking around). OK, 700 hits. That means ~700 people are listening to what I have to say. Being on blogs.sun.com means that I am representing Sun to some degree. I state in my introductory blog entry that these comments are mine and do not represent Sun Microsystems. But no matter how hard I press that my comments are my own, they will be associated with Sun Microsystems by the readers. This is where the risk and responsibility come in.

I am not perfect. I may misstate something unintentionally or my word things that may be interpreted in multiple ways. My greatest concern is that someday I will read on a web site "Sun official states ..." or "Sun Engineer states ...". While blogging I have learned I should probably be careful how I phrase my words. I must double and triple check my facts before posting, right?

Well, yes and no. I think being paranoid about these things defeats the value of blogging and can quickly become an inhibiter. I will, while blogging, do my best to get things right and leave it at that. Let common sense rule. Just keep in mind that, while I work for Sun Microsystems, my blogs are my own and represent my opinions, and that, well, I am only human.