To kick off discussion on the use of blogs for business and/or professional purposes, I would like to characterize Doc’s Blog on those terms. Although my initial intention was to use this blog for promoting discussion on the broad topic of innovation (my principal research interest as an academic), I soon realized how useful the blog journaling and discussion could be for my e-learning and IT consulting business as well.
There – I said it. Blogs are inherently promotional – and can even be shamelessly self-promotional (SSP). Through the intrinsic push and pull of feeds, tracebacks, and links that are the stuff of an empowering “syndication” technology, blogs get your ideas out “there” and bring other people and their ideas “here.”
While it’s true that many blogs are created purely for social reasons and just plain fun, just as many seem to have some professional or business purposes – whether or not those are prominently stated.
With their ease of use and syndication technology, blogs seem ideal for many business and professional purposes: from marketing, customer support, and training to online resumes and self-contained professional Web sites. That brings me to my questions at this point.
How do you see blogs being used for business?
In what business or professional context would/do you use blogs?
Are there some business or professional activities for which blogs are not appropriate?
I welcome your answers to these questions and your ideas on this broad topic area,
Doc
the specter of moderation
As I considered the nature of this blog, I was immediately confronted with the big question for anyone who ventures into the “read-write Web” and its ability to allow others to write to your Web pages: to what degree should I allow annotation in the form of comments to my blog posts?
The first word that comes to mind is “moderation” – not so much a statement of degree, but rather control – in this case of the posted comments by those who visit this blog. This term has a long history in the relatively short history of the Internet. Think moderators and moderated posts in newsgroups, e-mail lists, and later in their Web-based kin (bulletin-boards and discussion forums).
Let me say that I welcome the ideas of others and know that this would merely be a useless exercise in self-reflection or self-promotion without that dialog. However, having opened up discussion in several areas of my Web site over the years, I have learned what moderation (of discussion) means in practical terms.
For example, on my Palimpsest article, there once was unrestricted access to posting comments in an “Idea Post” bulletin-board, but it became bombarded with spam and links to porno sites. I had quickly discovered how chaotic and sometimes offensive un-moderated posting can be to the unaware, so I restricted it with password-protection access. This lowered the flow of posts, so it was not an ideal solution. However, now I can use a category of posts in this blog (Palimpsest) to fit each topic in that article and allow for less restricted access to posting comments again.
For this blog, I have opted for moderating comments before they are posted to the blog, but not requesting blog registration (i.e., initially providing a name and email address to which a login password is sent).
Is this reasonable? I can only say that for now, it seems that way to me, but I am open to ideas on how to balance convenient access and freedom to “publish” comments with the more negative outcomes that I have described. I believe that is why I used the word “specter” in my subject for this post. I have an un-easy sense of compromise in my initial position on this issue.
Thus, I welcome your comments on the issue in this post and on any ideas you would like to share on the theme of this site.