In an August 11 post, Mark Pilgrim announced that he now has an official IBM corporate blog. On his corporate blog Mark is described as “an accessibility architect in the IBM Emerging Technologies Group. He is the author of Dive Into Accessibility, a free online tutorial on web accessibility, and Dive Into Python, which will be published this summer. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and his newborn son, where he spends his copious free time sunbathing, skydiving, and reading Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in the original Klingon.”
In his personal blog, Dive into Mark, he says that “a corporate blog is like a personal blog except that you cannot say “motherfucker” in the corporate blog.” (I checked with my boss who said it was okay to use the quote – but this was not the only time I talked to myself today.).
Mark goes on to list several other concerns beyond the use of certain terms not found in Webster’s Third International (I looked). But then he mentions that there is not pre-approval required on the IBM blog. It is a simply a matter of using common sense, which if you do not have, you should not be blogging anywhere.
It is interesting that as new communication media appear, people are always concern that they will get abused. I am sure someone was upset with the new clay tablets when they were first introduced. While it does happen, shutting down the new media does not prevent the bad behavior if you want to behave badly.
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