Jiri’s Notepad

Joshua Allen nails down what many of us blogging from within a large organisation are painfully aware of:

“You see, even if you keep your blogging very personal, like chatting with your neighbors, that’s not necessarily the way that a risk-averse large organization will look at it.  Is HR reading your blog because they are interested in you as a person, or because they are about to add an ”official blogging policy” to the company handbook?  Is marketing reading your blog because they like what you have to say, or because they see blogs as a general threat to their control over your company’s image and want to shut down the blogs?  Within any large organization, there are countless turf boundaries and political motivations that are completely at odds with the spirit of blogging.  Large organizations are risk-averse, and to the extent that blogs are still fairly new and not well-understood, they represent risk.  This is just the way large organizations work, and the smart blogger is respectful of this.”

This is a con side to pro opinions of people like Dave Winer or the Cluetrain contingent. Joshua is probably not on the top of the A list, but what he says is painfully true. The fact is that most of the ‘knowledge work’ involves as much intellectual work as social interactons. Social interactions breed politics and politics lead to decreased openness - in the end, whatever one says on the weblog can be used against him. This probably does not mean total stranglehold on blogging, but more of natural limits of what is possible and what not.