In my The Play Ethic at Work post, Rags from Un papier, commented on blogging at work and also wrote the following post. I want to respond accordingly because he brings up some important policy related topics.

Rags writes "Regarding Blogging at work Miller of The Seventh Suite wrote to me saying "yes I believe lots of people are blogging at work - all the more reason to give employees the chance to blog like Sun, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, etc...".

Rags goes on to say "I think blogging at work and employers allowing blogging is not an easy black and white decision. I think I am somewhat cynical about people blogging at work. A disclaimer, " No I am not part of the management, I am just another peon". According to Technorati's numbers the first thing people seem to be doing at work is to post a blog article. This probably is on top of the usual surfing activities like reading personal mails and news. Now one should also assume that the blog posters spend time reading other blogs as well."

Rags poses the following seven questions. Here are some of my initial thoughts on this.

1. Is it reasonable to say that posting to blogs takes time away from productive work?

RM: Not necessarily. If someone has a deadline to meet and posting to a blog isn't part of the requirement of that deadline, then maybe it wouldn't be a good time to blog at work. Nor would it be a good time to run out of the office and pick up your dry cleaning.

2. Is blogging a form of productive work?

RM: Oh yes. Blogging can be very productive work. Writing a post can be a way of working through your thinking on a topic. Getting comments and feedback can help shed some light on wicked problems. Writing blogs also causes you to do some research via linking to others thoughts, ideas, etc. on the topic. (We used to call that benchmarking!) Also, maybe just maybe there is an element of "play" in the notion of practice of blogging at work. It is about communication and developing communities of understanding and this is important at work.

3. How do you then distinguish between two posters? Is posting technical matters productive and allowed but not on politics?

RM: Hmmm...I think if you look at all the companies who have employees who blog they blog on a variety of topics. There doesn't seem to be a distinction on the type of content people can blog on. (People usually have a focus and a point of view that comes out whether they are blogging about technical or political topics.

4. Miller mentions blogs at Sun, IBM, Intel and Microsoft. This is a little different in that the employers set up a corporate blog and encourage posting. These blogs are public and uncensored as well. Do they expect now every employee to be the spokesperson for the company?

RM: I don't think so...Here is Sun's Policy on Public Discourse. If you look at the employee blog at Sun for example you will see that there definitely is a range of topics - radio stations, dilbert, etc. These don't appear to be spokesperson type blogs to me. There are some that discuss products and implications and issues important to stakeholders. There is a range. I see that on Scoble's blog as well.

5. If employees are already posting to their own blogs hosted elsewhere, when an employer supports in-house blogging will these bloggers give up on their external blogging or add corporate blogging on top?

Maybe. Many bloggers write and contribute to other blogs. It is a choice.

6. In a Business Week article on The Business of Blogging they quoted that Sun's Sales people were able to close a deal whenever Jonathan Schwartz their COO posted to the Sun blog. Can we say that about blogs of
every other Sun engineer and manager? What useful content are most of Sun bloggers providing anyway?

Maybe you should read some of Sun's employee blogs. One of our very own bloggers at Future Tense Dave DesForge works at Sun and he writes about distributed work and the implications for offices of the future. The thing about blogging is that "useful content" is such a relative thing isn't it. It usually is most important to the people who are interested in that topic, company, and the ideas, info, and/or content being provided by the blogger.

7. While it seems it is acceptable for an High-Tech employee to be blogging at work, what would you say about the company's low-tech employees ? Is there fairness?

Yes, in most companies that allow blogging anybody can write about anything. The thing about it is is this - bloggers are people who have something to say so whether you are high-tech or not, high-level or not, if you have something to say and use good judgement which is what most corporate policies require, then there is fairness.

I wrote this post a while back and it contains some helpful links regarding corporate blogging policies, etc. for future reference.