Random Thoughts from a CTO has a post on the State of the Blogosphere pointing to David Sifry's (Founder & CEO of Technorati) post State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth. Among other things, "a new blog is created every second of every day..." and the blogosphere is "60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago". Those are staggering statistics.
Then, this morning, I went to the excellent Workplace Prof Blog and saw their post Employee Bloggers and Employer Blogging Policies that mentions this survey by the Employment Law Alliance. As Professor Segunda notes, the survey leaves allot of complex questions unanswered. What it does answer (and this should come as no surprise), is that the chances are extremely good good that your employees or some of them are blogging.
I have written and been interviewed about this so many times. You can check out some of the posts from 2005 here, here, here, here, and here. The issue was also raised in an interview that appears in the January 2006 issue of Canadian Lawyer magazine (The risks and rewards of ‘blawging’ by Kevin Maron)
I guess my point is that blogging is another form of communication, and employees are engaging in this form of communication. For my part, this will come as no surprise, I think employers should embrace technology including blogging. But, like any form of technology, or communication for that matter, blogging is subject to abuse (however one defines "abuse", and that is also a complex issue). We see cases, for example,, where the Internet and employer computer system is used for improper purposes (i.e. to access inappropriate websites, downloading inappropriate or illegal material from the Internet, infringing confidentiality obligations).
The question for each organization is what, if anything, should be done about employee blogging? This is not an easy question to answer, and each company will have to answer it having regard to, among other things, its unique corporate culture. Some organizations will do nothing others will adopt "blogging policies" and, still others, will modify existing policies (such as confidentiality and computer use policies), to wrap in "blogging". I'm not advocating any of these - you'll have to sort that one out. To the extent I have a point it's simply that employee blogging is going on, and employers should turn their minds to the issue and decide for themselves what, if anything, they will do about it. The answer might be "nothing" and that's okay, of course, but at least the issue was given the due consideration that it deserves.
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