RoboGeek

Clogging?

I'll have to try this new title on.. am I a 'Clogger'? 

Kodak sucks the coolness from blogging discusses how Kodak has entered the brave new world of corporate blogging and has become so cool that they have a 'Chief Blogger'.

But along the way new terminology is proposed. Is "corporate blogging" any different than any other sort of blogging?

 That's a really curious thought, isn't it? Yes there are lots of corporate bloggers, we have a lot of them here at Sun. But is corporate blogging any different than regular blogging?  What would make a 'clog' different from a 'blog'?

One way would be those faux blogs which are really marketeer activities in disguise.  What makes a blog different from any other web site is the style of presentation and writing style.  Supposedly blogs are supposed to be direct and personal, a style that's foreign to most marketeer types.

 Besides that I do practice blogging differently on my personal blog(s) than on this site.  But that's simply so that I have more freedom to post whatever I want such as calling Pres. Bush a traitor and calling for his impeachment.  While that's supposedly within Sun's blogging guidelines I'd rather not tie those opinions to Sun and it's much more straightforward to make those postings on my own time on a hosting account where I pay the bill. 

 In other words -- to me, writing on a clog (corporate blog) makes me some kind of corporate spokesperson.  This corporate blog (clog) is on company property (blogs.sun.com) and written using company equipment and written on company time, so it seems fair to me to think of my clog postings as being tied to the corporation I work for.  If I have something to say which I think my company has no business saying, well, that's why I have my own blog sites.




 

(2008-04-03 15:43:28.0) Permalink

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(2007-04-12 10:41:54.0) Permalink

A look at another corporate blogging guideline in mid-development Here's an interesting peek into how another corporation is starting to encourage their employees to "blog".  Corporate Blogging Guidelines, Draft #2  What's most interesting is they apparently are revising their blogging guidelines based on input from the public.  If that's not an exercise in transparency, I don't know what is.  On the other hand it's clear they have a degree of the top-down approach to encouraging blogging, what with a BOC (Blogging Oversight Committee) made (it seems) of executives.

The guidelines themselves appear to be reasonable.  It does contain the typical double message of openness and transparency while guideline #7 admonishes the employee to "keep secrets".  Sigh.  Blogging and transparency are such a challenge to "business as usual" where BAU includes the corporation keeping most of its activities secret ...

I expect the employees reading those guidelines to be just as confused as I am ... just what items of information are we to keep secret, and which are free to be shared?  Confusion like this always comes when there's a double message.  The prototypical double message comes, for example, with your parents claiming "I love you" while at the same time spanking you.  In this case the employee is asked to be open and transparent, but if they're too transparent they'll get a modern corporate form of spanking, and compounding the problem is the line isn't terribly clear as to what's to be kept secret and what isn't.

The most interesting thing about their policy is something they aren't doing.  Rather than host the employee blogs as a company service, they ask the prospective blogging employee to set up a blog using a public blogging service.  Once they have it configured to their liking, they email the B.O.C. who will, if it meets the sniff test, enter it into the company blog aggregator. 

This greatly simplifies the company's  IT requirements, because blog aggregator software is simple to set up and it pretty much runs itself once it's going.  It puts a little burden on the employee, but probably not too great.  The blogging services do a great job of making it simple for people to get started in blogging.

It's an interesting form of outsourcing, isn't it?  They're pushing what could be a corporate expense over to third parties.  It's worth pondering for a few moments whether this (hosting the employees blogs) is an expense which the company should rightly spend, or whether it's "okay" for them to push it off to third parties.

The only solid result I come up with is the loss of inbound links.  As the company's employees make postings they will occasionally get links from elsewhere.  The technical term is "inbound links".  Inbound links help somewhat with search engine ranking.

By having the employee blogs hosted elsewhere the inbound links will help the search engine ranking of the blog host, and not the corporation.  If, instead, the corporation hosted the blog themselves, the inbound links would help the corporation.

Another solid idea that arises is, what happens when an employee leaves the company.  This question comes up from time to time on Sun's blogger email alias.  Do we remove the departed employees blog entirely?  Do we leave it there, but prevent further posting?  Do we allow the former employee to continue blogging?  And, finally, how can we robustly connect employment status with the above decisions?

By having the employee arrange hosting, the questions are simplified.  Clearly when an employee leaves the company they can be easily removed from the company aggregation.  The former employee can continue writing their existing blog without muss or fuss.  I'm wondering what the former employee should do with old postings about their old company?  Leave them there?  That's probably up to the individual, and it's clearly not covered in the policy.

The HR systems which register whether an individual is an employee, or not, may not be easy to connect with other systems.  In fact there may be laws preventing such connection.  How is the IT department to know when the employee has become a former employee?  Hence, when or how will IT know when to remove that former employee from the company blog aggregation?

UPDATE:  I forgot to include a thought.  Perhaps there's a worthy business to pursue in providing a complete corporate blogging service to corporations.  Setting up a blogging service is probably outside the competency of the typical corporate IT department.  Even though it's not terribly hard to get expertise in installing, configuring and maintaining a corporate blogging service, some corporations clearly will want to outsource it.



(2006-01-19 09:31:09.0) Permalink

Web 2.0 meme spreading The Web 2.0 Revolution Spawns Offshoots...  There's this "web 2.0" idea floating around.  A bunch of hype is being made.  It's another of these marketing-meme waves where a bunch of attention is built around some idea that generally isn't meaning much.  In the early 90's I remember hype around "object oriented operating systems" where one could never figure out what that really meant.  At least with the later wave of "push technology" for distributing content, you could see a practical demonstration with that screensaver product that was so popular in 1997.

The article linked above talks about how there's a movement to 2.0izing a bunch of things.  Like libraries or law.  Sigh.  Somehow he gets through that long blog posting without mentioning that "Business 2.0" magazine.

Speaking of that magazine... I think it predates the "web 2.0" meme, so why does he place the beginning of 2.0itis on the web2.0 wave?  That magazine was part of the .COM hype machine, so maybe he wants to forget it as a bad memory?

I think the idea has been with us for awhile ... why keep things the way they are?  Doesn't technology fundamentally change the way society should be arranged and operated?  Hmm... maybe it does, but for the fact that we are still people and react in human ways. 

So, what to make of this...?  Well, one thing is clear is the blog posting points to trends where the Web, rather than technology in general, is causing change in the areas he points to.  The example of "Law 2.0" is a Wiki sponsored by Cornell University whose topic and scope is Law.  I suppose the "Democracy 2.0" example might be exemplified by Howard Dean's use of web sites and blogging, and in general the rise of bloggers as a political force in 2004.


(2006-01-08 11:22:15.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Transparency and corporations and blogging, oh my Supposedly blogging is about transparency, transparency, and more transparency.  The people who invented blogging like transparency, and espouse that as a core virtue of blogging.  As I've written before, I contend that a blog is a web site and you can use the blog/web-site any which way you want. 

In any case Sun, with blogs.sun.com, is rather famously experimenting with transparency.  Supposedly this has made a great change in Sun's fortunes, as Jonathan Schwartz is quoted in this article: Transparency is the key.

I honestly don't know whether the result (Sun moving from 99th to 6th most popular server vendor) can be ascribed to the blogging, or the fact that we have a more interesting lineup of products.  I tend to think it's the latter.  On the other hand it's real interesting the quality of information we (Sun's blogging engineers) are able to publish.  Certainly we, Sun's blogging engineers, are passionate about Sun (we probably wouldn't still be here if we weren't passionate about Sun), and a core value of successful blogs is passion for what the blogger writes about.

I've been thinking a lot about corporate blogging, and one idea that comes up is how "Transparency" really conflicts with typical corporate procedure.

Typically corporations tell their employees "don't speak to the press", and to direct all press inquiries to the public relations department.  Presumably PR has some genetic mutation that gives them the required super powers to withstand the death ray emanated by the usual "press" person...?

(to any "press" people reading this - that was a joke)

(honest)

It appears the typical corporation practices secrecy.  There's a whole range of reasons for secrecy, such as preserving competitive advantage, the element of surprise, and so forth.  In some cases secrecy also allows the company to get away with illegal activities.

In the U.S. we have "Freedom of Speech" enshrined in the Constitution.  But once you sign an employment contract, your freedom of speech flies out the window.  I learned this one Sunday morning a year ago after writing a blog posting about a legal settlement Sun had lost.  A big-wig at Sun called me, at home, on a Sunday morning, about 30 minutes later saying I'd better take that posting down because it's against corporate policy to discuss ongoing legal proceedings.  Hmmm... but what about my freedom of speech rights?  Well, if I wanted to remain employeed I would abide by the policy, so I did, especially as the particular case wasn't worth fighting over.

That's corporate secrecy in action.

Another example is this new CPU chip with the cool threads technology and whatnot.  The first I heard of that chip was an internal presentation 2-3 years ago.  But could I talk about it to the public?  Nooo... corporate secrecy again.  In this case there's an interesting argument to make, in that as the chip is developed the plans and details might well change.  But if we were to disclose those plans to the public, then it would be harder to change them later.  That's beside the obvious competitive advantage angle, because if Intel or IBM or HP or whatnot company were to have known about the strategic move we're making to lower power density per server, the window of opportunity might shrink as the other companies would then have an ability to match their products with ours much earlier.

Is that transparency?  To keep certain plans secret until they're ready to be revealed?  Hmmm... 

What we're doing with blogs.sun.com is certainly a breath of fresh air.  When we shipped dtrace, for example, our bloggers were in full force writing about how to use it.  I'm sure that had a lot to do with perking interest in Solaris, and helping people learn to use dtrace.

But is what we're doing really transparent?  I don't think so.  A few months ago everybody was required to take a training in protecting "Intellectual Property".  For example there's a whole slew of information we generate inside Sun which aren't to be disclosed.  For example if we have a joint venture with another company, we're supposed to set up intellectual property procedures to ensure everybody in all associated companies are on the same page about keeping the whole ballowax confidential.  This is typical business-as-usual, and I don't see it as being transparent.

But the mere fact that I can be writing this, using company owned infrastructure, is an example of a shift of corporate consciousness.  And I believe this is a positive change.


(2006-01-07 17:15:45.0) Permalink

Blogging CEO's thenewpr.com has a list of Blogging CEO's, and corporations hosting blogs.  I'd also found a list of Fortune 500 companies who host blogs.

What's astonishing is the breadth of industries represented in these lists.  And Jonathan Schwartz was hardly the first CEO Blogger, even though he's most often pointed to as the primo example of blogging CEO's.

It would be one thing if it were just a small handful of geek companies doing this.  Y'know, like Sun or Microsoft or Adobe.  But it's not, it's more widespread as the above lists show.

Let's hope this transparency thing takes hold.  I think one thing that makes corporations seem like the enemy of the individual is the corporate secrecy.  How can you trust an entity that keeps so much secret like corporations typically do?

(2006-01-05 21:00:03.0) Permalink

Corporate blogging I've been blogging about corporate blogging on my personal web site, but I've decided to do the blogging on that topic here instead. 

When I opened this blog on blogs.sun.com, the significance of this didn't really sink.  I thought, "oh, cool, I can blog" but it wasn't until later it was clear what that meant as a culture-changing activity.  But in many ways this presents a challenge to the old norms of employee conduct, speech by employees, freedom of speech, etc.  On my personal site I've written a few thought pieces about this.

To help me see the state of "corporate blogging" I am using the planetplanet aggregator to watch the news (see corporate-blogging.7gen.com).  It's astonishing the quantity of activity on this topic.  There's a lot more "corporate blogging" going on out there than I'd thought.

What do I mean by "Corporate Blogging"?  I think of it as blogging, done by an employee of a corporation as part of their employee role.

In some cases it's very explicit, such as the blog site being run by Telstra (a telecom company in Australia).  My sense of that site when I looked at it last month is it's a great example of fake transparency.  Fake transparency being what happens when the Marketing department puts together a facade that's supposed to be the real thing.

(2006-01-05 20:28:09.0) Permalink