Blogging seems to be increasing at an unprecedented rate. Jeffrey Henning describes this leap in his new study The Blogging Geyser, surveying the field as it stands now and predicting a total of 53.4 million blogs by year's end. He estimates that there are 31.6 million hosted blogs on twenty services. LiveJournal alone has 1.6 million teen blogs.
IBM is encouraging their employees to blog, but at the same time telling them employees to blog with care, laying down the rules about company expectations.
"The core principles are designed to guide IBMers as they figure out what they're going to blog about so that don't end up like certain notable ex-employees of certain other notable companies," the post states.
IBM says employees should post a disclaimer that states the author is an employee of IBM but the opinions contained in the blog are solely the author's. In addition, company proprietary information is off limits to bloggers and clients, partners and suppliers should not be referenced without their opinion.
"If you are blogging about your work for IBM, we encourage you to use your real name, be clear who you are and identify you work for IBM," Snell wrote.
"Nothing gains you notice in the blogosphere more than honesty -- or dishonesty."
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I've read similar disclaimers on blogging sites, surely everyone knows a blog is the writer's personal opinions. These days there are so many disclaimers and terms of use pages; in a decent world this would be so unnecessary. (Shoot all the lawyers, predators, con-men, virus writers, spammers?) I won't get started on that subject.
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