Joseph Jaffe has written this useful blogpost this week outlining the reasons why, in a credit crunch, blogging can be useful for your career.
I agree with his assertions that blogging regularly about your profession:
If you are informative and keep a positive tone the risks of upsetting people should be small, unless they object to the very fact that you are blogging at all.
The key thing is to be sensible:
Assume that if you mention an individual or an organisation by name that they will find and read your post. Your organisation may not be interested in your blog but it is interested in its own name and its own brand. Most organisations and many individuals have searches set up that trawl the intranet for any recent mentions of their name.
These points apply not just to blogging but also to participation in any form of online forum or community. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard have posted up to their Digital Natives blog four tips on keeping private those opinions or pieces of information that you don't want to be widely available online.
They point out that it is in the interests of social networking sites like Facebook for the information you contribute to their sites to be as wideley accessible as possible. For this reason their default settings tend to favour openness over privacy. A good example of this was the case of the 18 year old Crystal Palace footballer footballer who was having a trial with rivals Fulham. He thought he was just telling his 198 Facebook friends about the trial but his message was actually accessible to his fellow 2.7 million members of the Facebook London network.
Blogging is now one of those generic communication skills, like presentation skills, and report-writing. You will be able to use it in different ways during your career. As an information professional you may find yourself in a job where you want to write an internal blog. This will enable you to give your colleagues the benefit of your insights into the information challenges your organisation is facing and the projects that you are working on.
More and more and more organisations are providing their employees wih the means to blog internally. Even if your organisation does not provide a specific blogging application to blog within the firewall, the latest version of SharePoint provides blogging functionality (albeit rather basic) as a standard part of each individual's SharePoint mysite.
I agree with his assertions that blogging regularly about your profession:
- forces you to stay up to date with your field
- helps build your network
- maintains your visibility in your profession
If you are informative and keep a positive tone the risks of upsetting people should be small, unless they object to the very fact that you are blogging at all.
The key thing is to be sensible:
- Don't say anything about an individual that you wouldn't say to their face
- don't say anything about your organisation that you wouldn't say to your HR officer in a loud voice on a crowded bus.
Assume that if you mention an individual or an organisation by name that they will find and read your post. Your organisation may not be interested in your blog but it is interested in its own name and its own brand. Most organisations and many individuals have searches set up that trawl the intranet for any recent mentions of their name.
These points apply not just to blogging but also to participation in any form of online forum or community. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard have posted up to their Digital Natives blog four tips on keeping private those opinions or pieces of information that you don't want to be widely available online.
They point out that it is in the interests of social networking sites like Facebook for the information you contribute to their sites to be as wideley accessible as possible. For this reason their default settings tend to favour openness over privacy. A good example of this was the case of the 18 year old Crystal Palace footballer footballer who was having a trial with rivals Fulham. He thought he was just telling his 198 Facebook friends about the trial but his message was actually accessible to his fellow 2.7 million members of the Facebook London network.
Blogging is now one of those generic communication skills, like presentation skills, and report-writing. You will be able to use it in different ways during your career. As an information professional you may find yourself in a job where you want to write an internal blog. This will enable you to give your colleagues the benefit of your insights into the information challenges your organisation is facing and the projects that you are working on.
More and more and more organisations are providing their employees wih the means to blog internally. Even if your organisation does not provide a specific blogging application to blog within the firewall, the latest version of SharePoint provides blogging functionality (albeit rather basic) as a standard part of each individual's SharePoint mysite.
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