IBM personal blogging move
That my employer appears to be asking me to blog externally is interesting, but seems a little risky personally. There may be guidelines, but they're just that...high level guides, which by necessity must leave a lot of room for interpretation and judgement. Guidelines or not, Google search results for "blogger fired" have to give one pause.
So to follow their suggestion: “The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.”
Not that any sentient being would have confused that. Maybe I should add a footnote somewhere on the page to reiterate that this page is mine personally?
And for the record, these days I'm working as a filesystem developer focused on IBM's SAN FS and GPFS products on linux.
I've been blogging here since October. Initially it was partly just to play around with some web app stuff on my server, but since my first web pages at CalPoly and the Uni Heidelberg ten years ago I've been wanting some sort of an online journal for keeping remote friends and family up to date on happenings. Those early web pages (long since gone..maybe stored somewhere in my house on a floppy?) were mostly just bookmark lists, but my blogs are feeling a little more like a mix of links, op-ed thougts and journal nowadays.
I also have a blog internally at work. I've kept a fairly strict separation between my blogs. It's tricky to do otherwise and I'm not sure I've had much reason to do otherwise generally. At work I tend to blog more about technology and ideas that I think should be gaining more traction in the company, ie: I use my internal work blog as a soapbox much more.
Also there's a certain hypocrisy in a company saying it wants employees to be external evangelists, yet having people stipulate they are not an official mouthpiece for the company. The company doesn't directly see or have the ability to search/archive what I casually say to those around me in real life, as opposed to on my blog. Given that difference, it's inevitable that I'd be more careful and self censor, lest a real censor knock on my cubicle wall. But what is the benefit to me personally to even wade into that mess? What reason would I have to even talk work on my personal blog?
I guess we'll see.
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