Joe Wikert was cited in an article on the front page of yesterday's Indianapolis Star business section. Woo-hoo Joe!
Unfortunately, the large article on blogging is yet another "fear the blog" article that focuses 90% or more of the space on not getting fired and companies that don't want their employees blogging about work.
In the entire article, Joe's quote:
"It has brought us new author candidates and publishing projects we probably wouldn't have connected with before," he said.
was really the only positive spin on blogging. The story did conclude with a "balancing act" blurb about Microsoft stating that they have 3000+ bloggers and that they encourage blogging but wouldn't comment on the 1 blogger (of 3000+) who got fired for blogging. It always comes back that doesn't it.
Shel and Robert stressed the positive aspects of business blogging in Naked Conversations, while not being oblivious to the dangers. And during the development of the book, we debated which industries might be most reticent about blogging. My two examples during that debate, big pharma and financial services, play big in the Star article with "danger danger" quotes from Lilly and Chase. No surprises there.
Jim,
The Indianapolis Star seems to be about one year behind the times. Last year, when we were still writing the book, traditional media was heavily slamming bloggers with often silly "fear of God" warnings. This seemed to have culminated with the Forbes article, depicted 30 million bloggers worldwide as a monolithic mob searching out victims to lynch. The article was so inane and slanted, that it seemed to me that the media shrunk from that genre and started moving toward a more balanced position. Also, more and more reporters are now blogging because they see it in their futures, and I think they are right.
That one blogger at MS, BTW, was a consultantwho broke NDA and went out of his was in an attempt to embarrass Microsoft.He was terminated and rightfully so.
But to my knowledge, no employee has been fired for blogging at Microsoft.
Posted by: shel israel | August 07, 2006 at 01:02 PM