BLOGGING FOR FREEDOM |
ALLOWING YOUR EMPLOYEES TO BLOG |
Believe it or not, unwise blogging has derailed lives. At some point, the prevalence of blogging hit a tipping point and started a rash of job firings because of employee blogs. It’s not that blogging, per se, is illegal, but blogging is legally regarded as a public utterance. Therefore, saying the wrong things in a blog carries the same consequences as saying the wrong things in public or broadcasting the wrong things on a radio wave. Many companies have implicit or explicit agreements with their employees that regulate how employees may talk publicly about the workplace. Company secrets, for example, generally cannot be divulged in any medium. Libelous or just offensive remarks about the boss or co-workers can be harshly punished.
In fact, merely writing a blog could be against company policy, especially if the blog is about your job or your professional field. For various combinations of the above offenses, several individuals have achieved blogging fame, or sorts, by getting fired.
No matter what your blog is about, ask at work whether employees are permitted to have blogs. Few occupations actually forbid blogging, but ask anyway. Don’t blog in secret. Tell your boss. Even a personal-diary blog, which might seem to be none of your boss’s business, is bound to touch onwork. And that is your boss’s business. No matter how carefully you’ve prepared your supervisors and coworkers for your blog, do not amuse yourself by ratting them out in any way. Don’t voice your frustrations and dislikes in the blog. Any number of legal angles can lead to an individual or the company shutting you down or throwing you out.
It is a rare blog indeed that doesn’t offer a feed. The truth is, use of newsreaders is still not mainstream — but it is getting there fast and I’m comfortable predicting that eventually the newsreader will be as popular and necessary as the Web browser.In fact, the two functions browsing Web sites and browsing RSS feeds — are merging in programs suchas Firefox. At the more sophisticated end of blogging options (self-installed programs, hybrid services, and some hosted blog platforms), you have control over how much content goes into the RSS feed. Three choices are generally available:
You might think it’s frustrating to read a feed containing only partial entries or just headlines. Indeed, it can be frustrating. On the other hand, blog sites and news sites that typically run long entries or articles do their feed subscribers a favor by not stretching the feed to accommodate entire entries. In this light, a feed is like the crawl that cable news networks put on the bottom of the TV screen; it covers the highlights briefly. Readers of partial-entry feeds can click through any headline to the source site, where they can read the whole entry or article.
Imagine how RSS is affecting the online businesses of publishers that have spent years building their online editions into ad-supported
ventures. Suddenly RSS splashes on the scene, and readers start bundling all their news into a single newsreader window, with all ads, promotions, regis-
trations pages, graphics, and other revenue generators stripped out. At the time of this writing, advertising is starting to appear in RSS feeds (we use RSS
ads at Weblogs Inc.), and that trend will grow. But RSS readership is growing much faster than RSS revenue. To combat this trend, publications such as The New York Times use partial feeds and hope their headlines will bring readers back to the site; The New York Times feeds contain headlines plus the first sentence of its articles.