Blogging

There are so many reasons people love their Twitter. Even when there is a fail whale. Hey, we all have our days.

Twitter love song

As long as I have been blogging, I have considered this venue/blog/web site a personal project. I am aware that anyone can find it. My name is all over it. If information about me is being sought, it’s likely this content will be located.

However, it is positioned as a personal space.

Since I’ve recently become an independent contractor, it is now by necessity, professional space as well. At least for blogging. When I worked at Sun, I had a professional blog, I named the blog, “Organizing Principles”. It included all of my big thoughts on IA, Social Media and the future of the Internet. I continued that tradition when I moved to EatonGolden and was the head of IA & Social Media. It was important to me to be professionally blogging as someone who held the title Director of Information Architecture & Social Media. So my professional insights about UX and the web 2.0 world lived there.

Now it is me. I am personal and I am professional. It’s all the same anyway because on the Internet, you can search.

Now brought to you by Jennifer Bohmbach, evoljennifer, evoljen, jb, jbohm, evol:

My Holistic Blog

It’s my next social media experiment.

Professional

Personal

It’s all mixed together in this crazy Cut & Paste world we live in now.

I found this video via Jeremiah’s twitter. It’s a quick and simple explaination of what a blog is called, ‘Blogs in Plain English.’

Thanks to CommonCraft for producing ’sense-making’ stories in a complex world.

I recently discovered that many people are not as savvy about the Internet as you would think. When you post something in your blog. The whole world can see it. You have entered into a public space and everything you post is ‘out there’. Not only is it ‘out there’, it is searchable. So, it’s not like it’s just a big pile of your old papers sitting in your house, it’s a billboard that is not fixed in time or space so it can show up anywhere.

This should be of particular concern for parents today. I remember some of the things I wrote in my journals growing up and I feel very lucky that those things were not typed up and published to the Internet.  It’s a new world and we all have to wake up to the reality of how things have changed and be aware of how all of these new technologies work so we don’t harm ourselves.

So the post about how advertising can help save you from the big bad Michael Moore at Google was retracted. (sort of)

She says, “…some readers thought the opinion I expressed about the movie Sicko was actually Google’s opinion. It’s easy to understand why it might have seemed that way, because after all, this is a corporate blog. So that was my mistake — I understand why it caused some confusion.”

No, I wasn’t confused. I knew it was her opinion and not Google’s. However, she needs to take a course in how to not be professionally unwise. In her position, it was unwise of her to say anything about the movie or risk being ‘misinterpreted’.

No, I got you loud and clear, you want money and you intend to get it by using advertising. She goes on to clarify her point from the first blog post…

“But the more important point, since I doubt that too many people care about my personal opinion, is that advertising is an effective medium for handling challenges that a company or industry might have. You could even argue that it’s especially appropriate for a public policy issue like healthcare. Whether the healthcare industry wants to rebut charges in Mr. Moore’s movie, or whether Mr. Moore wants to challenge the healthcare industry, advertising is a very democratic and effective way to participate in a public dialogue.”

Advertising is democratic? (insert jon stewart ‘Whaaaaaaa?’)

Advertising is not an effective medium for public policy issues like healthcare. Advertising is trying to sell you something. Always. Now, that’s not the worst thing in the world, we are a capitalist society so we’ve got advertising, that’s part of the deal. Google even makes it relevant, which is great.

The problem is that she is saying it’s democratic. I don’t think she is quite clear on what that word means. You don’t ‘pay’ for democracy nor is advertising a place for public debate unless you’ve got some pretty deep pockets.

This is a perfect Blogging 101 lesson. When you blog for your company on said companies blog site, it’s best to keep the politics out of it. She could have sent that first blog post to all the clients she was trying to reach as an EMAIL. That’s who she was targeting her message at and it probably would have been very effective. Instead, she garnered a bunch of blog o sphere negativity and probably didn’t make anybody internally @ Google excited about having employees blog if they are going to say things like that.

Late breaking news, there is an ‘official apology/retraction’ on the blog now.

Let me be clear. I do not blame Google for this. I blame Lauren. If Google’s policy was more like my employer’s blogging policy, maybe she would have thought harder about the ‘think about consequences’ part.

Google mentions that they review every blog post. This puts them in a position of responsibilty for every single post. We don’t do that at my company which makes the individuals responsible and not the company. I believe strongly that this forces people to think harder about what they put out there. If the company is approving my post, I may not be as careful. If Google wants to encourage coporate blogging, they might want to think about getting out of the way.

I’m giving a talk tomorrow about Blogs, Podcasting and RSS. I’m speaking to the MN Women in Communications organization. Here’s the info.

I’m actually really excited to be sharing this topic, one that I’m very passionate about, with a group of people that want to utilize these tools in their work. I’ll be talking about the context of social media and why it brings these delivery mechanisms (blogs and podcasts) to the fore in terms of their power and effectiveness.

The good news is that with this spamattack, I got upgraded. I’m trying out the new in post upload file functionality with this post.

The spam evilbots attacked my blog’s home and it had to take a little mini break. My awesome techie support (my husband) got me back up and running just in time for my big trip to San Fransisco. I’m heading to the Adaptive Path Managing User Experience conference and several of my co-workers are going as well. This is a special treat as I work remotely so seeing them and learning about ways to improve our craft is a double bonus. I’m still packing now, sometimes it takes way too long to pack.

I’m staying at the Sir Francis Drake hotel in downtown San Fransisco. This is neat because when I go to California for work trips I usually spend my time in the Valley. This will be a nice week in the city by the bay.

Stay tuned.

I’m on vacation. It’s one of those stay at home vacations and do what you feel like doing kind of weeks. It’s been crammed with activity and non-activity. One thing I’m finding is that my darn Catholic guilt from childhood keeps creeping in making it hard to relax. I think I managed to finally feel relaxed mid yesterday. I know-it’s really sad. We all have our burdens, this one isn’t the worst I can think of……but it can be really annoying to feel that you must be productive at all times. I’m working on getting over that.

Now for the activity part.

I did get out this weekend. Went to see the Skullcranes on Saturday night at the NE Minneapolis venue Club Underground in the basement of the Spring Street Tavern. The Skullcranes have an album coming out soon. I’ll make sure to announce it here on the blog as it will have a photo or two of mine in it. I also checked out the first NorthStar Roller Girls match. Two of my friends are in it and they kicked some A**. Saturday night was full.

Sunday began with a family brunch. After brunch and gift opening (our anniversary is on Halloween) we went home and continuted on our journey of watching all the Battlestar Galactica’s. It’s in season three and we’d only watched the mini series so we still have catching up to do. The evening plans included a night of music as we headed to the Bob Dylan concert with acoustic Foo Fighters opening. Oh the Foo Fighters. Even in acoustic mode they ROCK HARD. I love you Dave Grohl. He’s so funny, talented, confident and relaxed. It was an incredibly intimate show even though it was at the xCel energy center in St. Paul, MN. It was my first Bob Dylan show and I wasn’t so sure about Bob and his band until about 6 or 7 songs in. They were really stiff at first and of course there was the annoying crowd surrounding me which didn’t help. After that 6th or 7th song though, they relaxed and actually looked like they were having a little fun and then it got much better.

Monday was a day of sloth and watching an awful MN Vikings game. That darn Tom Brady always seems to smush us hard. Of course I felt guilty but I did accomplish some sloth.

Tuesday, Halloween, was our 9th anniversary. We had a slow, restful day. We had two meals out. Salad for lunch and the fancy and wonderful Ruth’s Chris steakhouse for dinner. This year the service lacked punctuality. It felt like the meal was in slow motion. I tried to not let it get to me, but alas, I think I was a little too affected by the lack of perfection. I’ve been so impressed every time I’ve dined there, this time they didn’t live up to those past expectations they had set. And there were lots of old people there in sweats. That didn’t help the ambience.

And Wednesday, yesterday, was another day of relative sloth. My husband accomplished ethernet connection in our sun room, but I didn’t do as much. Oh well, gotta get over that guilt for not getting anything done. I’m always getting stuff done. Sometimes it’s ok to be a slacker.

On that note, I’m headed off to enjoying the rest of my vacation and hopefully not accomplishing much more except relaxing and playing.

Last week I partipated in a Summit at work to discuss the future of how we enable online social interaction with our company. One of the authors of the book Naked Conversations, Shel Israel, joined us for part of it. He even took a picture, that’s my arm, my computer, my water and my coffee!