Apr 19, 2006 | blog
Scoble (or was it Bubba?) had a post on Blogging and Careers yesterday. It started me thinking on how employees working for companies in the tech sector have more opportunity to blog during work. Some actually have it as part of their job – Robert Scoble for example. Others come to mind as well, mainly the A-Listers and so on, have more ability to blog during work and more importantly, to blog some of their work.
While I’m not ready to admit that I’m jealous, I do think that there is an important piece to blogging that many employers simply dismiss out of hand. The opportunity to blog about what you do and/or how you do it can help a blogger grow in their abilities. It can help expand a person’s writing style, imagination, and persistence. It will open doors that a person doesn’t even realize they have avaliable to them. Blogging does represent a window into a person’s character, and that is a good thing. In today’s environment where life is so fast-paced that people have trouble just keeping up with their work, blogging can offer an outlet for their ideas, passions and creativity.
Blogging can enhance your career in ways too numerous to ponder. One, for example is the simple availability to potential customers, and yes I view employers as customers. After all each of us have services to offer, and why not have a sample of these services and resources available to future customers?
There is more to blogging than many middle managers in corporate America understand at this time. It is a powerful tool for everyone, its as simple as that. Anyone can start and update a blog for free, and you can take it to many levels after that limited only by your own ambition. Blogging has not ‘peaked’ as some are trying to hint at – blogging has barely gotten started and will provide one of the best ways for those interested to promote themselves and their ideas. Come along for the ride and find out for yourself; your career and your personal life will be enriched.
Also, this article from The Boston Globe on the subject is a good read.
Apr 18, 2006 | blog
You know, I never intended to have more than a follow-up to this topic (How can I encourage corporate blogging? on my old blog, and Corporate Blogging – Part II), but it has become a topic of interest to me. There are times at work when I believe that new ideas are simply “lost in the fog” so to speak. There were a couple of good posts on the topic of risk aversion several weeks ago by Robert Scoble and Kathy Sierra, in both corporate environments and personal lives.
Many times new ideas and technologies get brushed or set aside for reasons other than the obvious. By obvious, I mean something that does not fit the company’s goals, budget, or needs. To be more clear, people are afraid of change. They get too comfortable, too ‘clingy’ to their way of doing things – that’s corporate mentality as well as personal mentality. Last week I was surprised to find an openness to the idea of blogging one of our Disaster Recovery exercises. Not only on my personal blog (which I struggled with), but also as an exercise in communication during the test itself.
Now that does not come along too often, where a virtually unknown, untested technology or idea is embraced without any upfront research and fact-finding. For a corporate IT geek like me, that simply stunned me, right down to my shoes. It was quite an exciting way to start the exercise to begin with, and more so to see many team members utilizing the tool, updating with content, status, news, successes, issues, etc… What I’m really interested in at this point is what the feedback on the idea will be at our post-test meeting next week. Simply getting feedback about how to do it better next time will be the reward I’m looking for, because a simple, free, easy-to-access blog is a great method of communicating information during an event like the one we tested for.
But what about day to day? Not every day is a disaster (thank God), and not everything is critical information that needs instant dissemination. However, the need for simple many-to-many information publication is needed nearly everywhere in a corporate environment. The idea of departments being able to provide information to each other in a more casual way can, in many instances, allow more detail to be incorporated, and more thought in the structure of what needs to be said.
One important lesson that nearly everyone in corporate America has learned, is that mass-mailed email is read by almost no one. We all find them irritating and unnecessary; often they have more in common with Junk Mail than anything useful. And that’s a sad thing – we all have important jobs, and work hard to communicate information to each other. And what is always the number one complaint? That none of us communicate as well as we could.
This is where corporate blogging could really shine. Every department should have a main blog, and probably many personal blogs under it, or that contribute to it. Similar to going to ZDNet or CNet and sorting through dozens of RSS feeds for news on this or that, each department should publish its own unique information. There is always someone in each group, team or department that can or would take an interest in writing up the status of the day and publishing it for the rest of the corporation. Blogs also bring a solution to the problem of corporate Junk Mail. Because you can peruse the information at your leisure, it no longer has to interrupt your work – you can plan to read the information when you are receptive to it: morning, lunch, breaks, whatever. That also means that when a mass email is sent, it would actually have meaning, and would be important enough to stop what you’re working on and read it.
So in the end, blogging in a corporate environment can provide a much more dynamic and streamlined method of publishing information to the users of that information. Keeping email for person-to-person communications, where you can be more specific in the communication. It also seperates out another communication tool that many in IT fear – Instant Messaging.
Technorati tags: corporate-blogging, instant-messaging
Apr 13, 2006 | blog
We’re off and running!
I have had some issues getting connected back into the office, I’m using my T-Mobile MDA to VPN into the office wirelessly. It is working, but not as fast as I had hoped. Speed is currently ranging from 60kbps to 80kpbs, so it is a bit slow. I’m still hoping to get better than 100kbps sometime during the test, though VPN over EDGE service is working!
Apr 12, 2006 | blog
Our Disaster Recovery test starts mid-morning tomorrow and runs for 48 hours, and I’m going to try to blog as much of it as I can. What I plan to record here are my experiences, observations, and opinions.
In addition to me blogging DR, we created a DR Blog for the team. Suffice it to say, we will be running the “DR Blog” as proof-of-concept, and will review the usefulness at a later date. Future endeavors will be determined by the positive/negative feedback that this last-minute “test” will provide. As our DR Team blog is unique to this test and is proprietary to my employer, I’ll not post the URL here, but I will blog here about that blogging exercise and my opinions of it.
To me this is a huge step for our IT team, its the first time we have used blogging for a specific purpose, and the neat thing about it is that it was able to be put into play with a suggestion and 30 minutes of effort on my part to set it up on one of my own blogging accounts out on the ‘net.
That really underlines the impact of a blog. You can set one up in minutes, and get an entire team organized and ready to provide feedback, take notes, record problems & resolution, communicate status, share jokes, ask questions… the list of course is infinite, only confined by ones creativity.
More to come…
Apr 11, 2006 | blog
Ugh! Somewhere I must have deleted a “/div” statement. The strange thing is that it shown up a few hours after I had done some editing of the index.php file, so it was hard to track down.
Thanks to the forums over at WordPress.org – they helped me find the simple things that most users miss when editing their layout files.
