Monday, April 25, 2005

No easy answers: Getting management buy-in for Blogs (part 3)

I'm posting like there's no Tomorrow* 'cos I'm going off to a week-long training course. So... this follows part 1 and part 2:

I'm watching the development of a "private discussion in a public square"(Vic Gundotra). Very interesting. I picked it up from Scoble (btw, Scoble was hired into Microsoft by Gundotra).

As far as I can tell, it goes something like this (from Scoble's blog):
  1. Steve Ballmer writes to Microsoft's employees over anti-discrimination bill (Steve Ballmer is Microsoft CEO)
  2. Steve Ballmer's memo posted, my reply
  3. My boss's boss responds to my earlier post about Ballmer's response
  4. Adam Barr sees suspicious part in Ballmer's memo
  5. Vic wonders about arguing corporate issues in public
And the story will continue... We had Reality-TV. And now, welcome to Reality-Blogs! Geek-soap opera in the making.

And what's the relevance to my "Getting Management Buy-in" post? For one, I'd say the above example represents the very extreme of a "organisational blogging culture".

I don't see such microsoft-like openess happening in Singapore in the near future. For government agencies, we definitely can't be as liberal like what Microsoft is doing. Employees might get carried away and blog about information that might say, give a potential vendor unfair advantage in pricing its products or services. Information is potential power. The line can be grey.

Maybe such openess would be the norm in 5 - 8 years time. But by then, people may find it no longer a novelty, especially when every company is doing it.

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* But there is! And here's Tomorrow (a SG blogger community effort. How can the library get into the act, I wonder?)

[Tag:]

2 comments:

  1. Well, I guess as long as we need to watch our back when blogging (so as not to be sued), it's always difficult to have free blogging in Sg. :(

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi there,
    I don't know what you mean about difficulties in blogging freely in Signapore.

    I've blogged rather freely for the whole time, in my opinion :)

    If you mean that there are certain things we can't write -- well, there are certain things I won't tell my wife or my friends or my parents. Are we any less free? I think not.

    ReplyDelete

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