Blogging Etiquette

Matt Deacon — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 06:10:00 GMT

During the Web 2.0 goldfish bowl I was cornered on the blogging policy at Microsoft to which I answered that while we are in no way scensored on what we talk about at the end of the day by blogging we represent our organisation and therefore should not use it as a mechanism to disparage or contradict the general views of the organisation. It is a situation that I am personally more than happy with. We discussed much more than this regards blogging that will be published on the SPA site shortly.

However, today I received an email from a person I know asking if I’d seen his recent entry where he has apparently reviewed and compared several vendors. To be honest I was quite shocked by what I saw and immediately thought back to the goldfish session earlier this week. This person is a highly respected individual in the Industry and a senior representative of his organisation and has published some very damming material without justification or any corroborating evidence. I will be interested to see how things pan out because, although he states that these are his own opinion I am not so sure he can divorce himself so easily from the organisation he represents and I am sure his organisation will be unable to endorse his actions nor be willing to underwrite his findings.

To me blogging is about four basic tenets:

1. Sharing opinion/insight

2. Linking knowledge

3. Increasing awareness

4. Personal record or log

I think these are pretty self explanatory and there are bound to be others and feedback is welcome, but it’s late.

However, there is one thing I believe the blog is not good for and that is about the publishing of analysis such as in the case above. By all means link to works of analysis from blogs (2) but do not publish it here. Blogs are a short cutting and linking mechanism that point you to information, they should not form the source of information itself.

Right, so that off my chest I’m going to see whether I can be a bit more productive in the sleep

Matt Deacon's digestive blog : blogging

Blogging Etiquette