Employee free speech, and a VA nurse being investigated for Sedition

In September 2005 a pair of hurricanes hit New Orleans and the surrounding land. As a result much of New Orleans has effectively been destroyed. The government response to help the people of New Orleans and the surrounding land has been egregiously bad.

Shortly after the hurricane, a VA nurse in Albuquerque wrote a letter to her local newspaper complaining of the bad government response to the hurricane. Immediately afterward she was referred to the FBI and since then has come under investigation by the FBI for "sedition". Sedition being the legal word for advocating the forceful, violent overthrow of the government.

The story is here: V.A. Nurse Accused of Sedition After Publishing Letter Critical of Bush on Katrina, Iraq (as presented on Democracy Now)

The story is astonishing and alarming. The nurse, Laura Berg, acted under belief she was protected by the First Ammendment gaurantee of freedom of speech. In the interview she reiterates her claim of first ammendment gaurantees of freedom of speech.

The government is threatening her with years of jail time, the sentence for "Sedition". But how could her letter to the editor be taken as advocating violent overthrow of the government? This is the U.S. and we have a long history of the right of citizens to criticize their government.

As she says:

LAURA BERG: Amy, I did not sign away my First Amendment rights as a citizen, you know, by choosing to serve in the federal government and choosing to serve veterans and care for people that have been wounded like this, you know. And this letter sounds like something from a totalitarian regime, you know, that we are supposedly going in and share our democracy. This is way out of line. This was way out line. I have a right to speak my opinion. I have a right to say I'm a V.A. nurse. I do not speak for the V.A. I speak as a public citizen....

In my mind the case is open and shut, but for one thing.

Blogging may be hazardous to your job - The Clarion-Ledger

Should your company have a corporate blogging policy?

FOX Sics its Dogs on "Un-American" Professors

The general principle in the articles I've linked is -- employers have the right and ability to restrict the speech of their employees.

How so? For example, what is proprietary information? It's information a corporation wants to keep secret, that gives the corporation competitive advantage, and if an employee is caught revealing proprietary information the employee can very likely be fired for having done so.

That's just one example of many sorts of ways an employer can limit what an employee says.

There have been instances of people being fired for blogging about aspects of their job, even when doing that blogging from home on their own computer onto their own blogging account. For example a teacher with DeVry was fired over comments she blogged about her students. Someone else, who worked in a customer support job, was fired for derogatory comments she wrote on a blog talking about the people who came to her for support were dweebs etc.

The issue with Laura Berg is that her employer is the U.S. government. Specifically, the Veterans Administration. The U.S. government has more options at its disposal for threatening its employees. e.g. trumping up charges of Sedition.

With the tradition of employers being able to control the speech of their employees, what happens when that employer is the U.S. government?

And, I think the bigger question is, why is there such a blanket acceptance of employers controlling the speech of employees? Clearly it represents a huge blanket of suppressed rights to free speech.

Blogging may be hazardous to your job - The Clarion-Ledger

If blogging can be hazardous to your job (as this article says: Blogging may be hazardous to your job By Amy Rosewater, The Baltimore Sun) just how is that so? And, don't we have freedom of speech engraved in the U.S. Constitution?

What the article talks about is bitching about co-workers etc on the blog. That people get fired over that.

Well... okay...

A lot of people feel irritated etc over their job. No doubt bitching about your boss or coworkers has happened throughout history. Maybe that's why Judas turned Jesus in to the authorities?

Seriously, what's important is to consider how you handle the inevitable irritation you have over co-workers and your boss. For example, therapy? There's a zillion ways of working through emotional duress that don't involve bitching in public.

When you're writing a blog it may seem you're in private. Maybe you've locked the door to the room, it's late at night, etc and nobody is around and you can pour out your deepest thoughts. But, really, who is your audience? Once that blog posting hits the web, it's public.

If you want to use writing as therapy, get one of those blank journaling books.

Do you really want to post your therapeutic writing for the whole world to see?

Hyped up panic on Jeremy Hermanns dot org about Alaska Flight #536 - Rapid De-Pressurization and Panic at 30K Feet

Boy what a mountain formed out of this mole-hill. Jeremy Hermans was on an Alaska Airlines flight that experienced sudden cabin depressurization shortly after takeoff and made an emergency landing safely without anybody being hurt. But what made this emergency different is that Jeremy took a few pictures and wrote about it on his blog. His blog posting is full of emotion we who weren't there can only guess at. If we haven't been through something similar, how can we gauge the validity of his emotions? In any case a stir of controversy is swirling around this blog posting, and a couple professional advisors of business blogging have weighed in.

From Dave Taylor we have: Alaska Airlines and the death of truth and from Teresa Valdez Klein we have: Alaska Airlines Attacked by Blog Mob with Pitchforks and Torches ... the two of them seem to be their own mini-echo-chamber.

What I see in the responses by Dave Taylor and Teresa Klein is a nutty attempt to corral bloggers into a journalistic mold. Say what? Blogging is an individual thing and is practiced by each blogger in their own way. Blogging does not have to be a journalistic endeavor, but someone can certainly approach blogging in that way.

For example they talk about fact checking. You expect professional journalists to do fact checking, but that's too much to expect of bloggers. If there's any commonality to the practice of blogging, it's that a blog posting is very much about what's known in the present moment. One of the commenters to Dave Taylors posting said it very well:

Debbie seems to be suggesting that bloggers have some sort of obligation to contact companies to get their side of the story, but I don't think that flys very far in the blogosphere. For most of us, Blogging is 110% about expressing our *own* opinions. If we *happen* to mention a few odd facts interspersed in our opinions, then of course we should do a diligent job of verifying facts, to the extent that it is easily within our means. But if time or other constraints preclude a thorough vetting on facts vs. suspicions, we do the best we can. That's a key difference between blogging and journalism, regardless of whether you consider either to be a professional or amaeur activity.

Another meme being tossed around is about "the credibility of the blogosphere is lowered a couple of notches". That's treating the "blogosphere" as one whole, and expecting all bloggers to be tarnished or polished the same way. But blogging is practiced (generally) by individuals acting on their own. Each individual blogger has their own reputation and approach to truth. How can there be a "credibility of the blogosphere" when it's a mass of individuals?

An example rumbling in my head is one which Dave is going to be very aware of. I know of Dave from his Usenet background (especially on soc.singles) and have met him once many years ago at a soc.singles event in the Bay Area. The point is I know that Dave is very intimately familiar with Usenet history, if only because he had a big role in making part of that history.

Jeremy's blog posting just reminds me of the same kind of rambling threads of discussion. One persons posting might somehow incite a long thread of followups, debating fine points of the truth of the original posting, devolving into name calling, or nitpicking over spelling, or accusing each other of being a shill, etc. It was typical of Usenet, and it is very interesting seeing it all distilled into one page like this. In a way Blogs are to this Internet era what Usenet was to the 80's version of the Internet.

Having lived through the 80's and some of the 90's on Usenet (I used to be in the Usenet backbone committee), I'm sure there's something about human psychological processes that make this kind of discussion thread. To wish that the public would act in a more truth-centered fact-checking mode is like pissing into the wind, or like that apocryphal story of the old King of Norway (Canute?) yelling at the ocean waves to be quiet.

Dave Taylor, with your Usenet history, you should know better. But maybe you were one of those who always took the fact-checking-demander-of-citations side of the argument?

One of the frequent debate techniques on Usenet was for someone to demand "what is the citation that justifies the assertion you made"? Usenet, like blogging, is more akin to people chatting in the hallway. Since when do people chatting in the hallway give citations?

On the other hand some bloggers clearly try to be journalists. Again, we all approach our blogging in different ways.

Job descriptions add ability to blog, aid PR

Corporate blogging is on the rise. The big sign given in this article is that some job postings are now asking for an "ability to blog". That's certainly a sign ... Job descriptions add ability to blog, aid PR (Mary Jacobs, Dallas Morning News, Dec. 31, 2005 12:00 AM) The way Mary Jacobs spins this story, bloggers have been beating up on corporations for so long, and now it's time for corporations to bring some of them inside the corporate walls and use their knowledge of blogging practices for corporate benefit.

"Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective," a recent BusinessWeek article declared. "They're a prerequisite."

... "A company that gets a blog needs to know that it's informal and involves give-and-take," said Tom Mighell, a veteran blogger who is senior counsel and litigation technology support coordinator at Cowles & Thompson in Dallas.

"You need to be willing to push the envelope a little bit and show that you're willing to share with your public."

... Currently, only 4 percent of major U.S. corporations offer public blogs, according to a survey by New York research firm eMarketer. Still, ads for blogging jobs are turning up on online job boards, and many expect the field to grow.

Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki - Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki

Here's a useful resource to help understand the scope of blogging by corporations. Corporate blogging is distinct from personal blogging in that the blogger is writing for the benefit of the corporation. Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki This is a list of the Fortune 500 companies who have blogging activities.

Corporations podcast their marketing nets

It's not just corporations adopting blogging, but some are toying with podcasting. Large corporations generally have some audio or video production crews already, so it's a natural extension for the output those crews make to be distributed on the Internet using the podcasting mechanism.

In Corporations podcast their marketing nets we see an overview of what's going on with corporate podcasting. It really runs the gamut.

It names Johns Hopkins Medicine, General Motors, IBM Investor Relations, Sun Microsystems, The BBC, President Bush, and Senator Barak Obama.

The article also discusses how some attempts, e.g. GM's, have come across as too much like a cheesy marketing piece rather than an authentic podcast. Okay, fine, whatever. Podcasting is just a medium for distributing content, and that medium can be used for whatever some webmaster wants to use it for.

I suppose the point is that for someone to listen to a podcast they have to find it useful. Would you want to listen to many minutes of marketing schlop? Well, okay, I think the answer might be in all those infomercial programs on television. For some reason people watch them even though they're obviously biased.

Telstra has begun corporate blogs

Telstra is a large telecommunications company in Australia. I guess it's the Australian equivalent to what AT&T used to be in the U.S. Anyway, they've joined the ranks of companies that are blogging.

The web site is here: http://www.nowwearetalking.com.au/ ... sigh, what a goofy name ... but then the goofy name just matches the goofy web site.

On the web site they promise "We want you to have a say in Australia's telecommunications future. This site is about giving you information and letting you tell us, and others, exactly what you think..."

That's a nice goal, but I hardly think they're accomplishing it. That's because the site looks like it was created by the marketing department. The main clue to this is on the list of blogs. For a company which ought to be employing 10's of thousands of people, they can only sponsor 11 blogs?

Another tweaky thing is in their discussion guidelines they say they're interested in an open dialog, but there are moderators on hand to delete postings. The moderators will do much more than delete postings, but they're free to edit postings, rename postings, cut postings into pieces, etc. Obviously they're trying to avoid SPAM and flamewars, and I don't blame them. At the same time the rules allow them to be big brother and only to skew the topics and discussion into directions their agenda says it should go.

It appears to be a new site. It looks pretty, but I think pretty looks doesn't guarantee success for a site. What I've always noted about online community is it needs enough people to form a critical mass. Once the critical mass threshold is reached, there's enough inertia to keep the discussion going. Less than the threshold and the discussion will eventually die. More than the threshold and you just have noise. It appears to me this site is well below critical mass. This is especially true as there are no RSS feeds to be found -- having RSS feeds brings people back to the site.

For a telecomm company to make such a thumb-fingered blunderous site as this is astonishing.

BBC Getting into Blogging

Another large organization is tentatively trying out the blogging waters: BBC Getting Into Blogging (Neville Hobson, Expert Author, Published: 2005-12-09)

The blog is located here: http://blogs.bbc.co.uk/nickrobinson/

From the domain name one can conclude it's going to be a general blog operation used by the BBC. However at the moment Nick Robinson is the only blogger and he says this is a tentative experiment.

The webpronews.com article points out the BBC had someone blogging earlier in the year, but not on a BBC-owned site.

Los Angeles Fire Department blog is one year old

LAFD - First Year of Blogging on the Map: Congradulations are in order to the LAFD for being a trendsetter in your field.

Re: Federal law may make blogging at work illegal

I have in front of me an article with a misleading title, but talking about something with wide ranging consequences. The U.S. Federal Election Commission oversees the conduct of U.S. elections. Over the last year or two they've been mulling the role of blogging in politics, and some bloggers have been really concerned over whether a bungling government agency might accidently strangle blogging.

See, it's clear that some political bloggers are being paid under the covers to promote political agendas. You might think that falls under "free speach", but it's really paid advertising. There's an existing rule that paid political advertising needs to be declared to the FEC and also carry notices as to who placed the advertising. This helps the public in interpreting the message.

Federal law may make blogging at work illegal Law falls under campaign-finance reform (By: Justin Malvin, California Aggie, December 9, 2005)

The article refers to this blog posting: The Reformers' Trojan Horse: Killing the Office Blogger ... and I think it's fair to summarize that blog posting as one mans theory and personal interpretation of a rule proposal being made by the FEC.

The danger proposed is this ... the FEC proposed rule that is cited limits an employee of a company to blogging (on company time, using company equipment) for more than an hour per week. According to a quote in the California Aggie article, this is just an extension of an existing rule about employee use of company time and equipment. And, to my eye this is a very benign rule as one would expect employers to be really concerned about employees blogging while on the clock.

To my eye they're making a mountain out of a molehill, and along the way trying to smear the FEC for some reason.

It's clear that while an employee is "on the clock" and using company equipment, they should be performing their job. What's the big deal?

Especially as one big concern in election law is a corporation using their employees as political activists. Suppose a company wanted to influence an election? One way is to tell your employees "blog supportively of candidate X" and lead them to believe candidate X will be good for their jobs. For example a few years ago when the push to expense stock options was being made, Scott McNealy sent an email to Sun's employees (where I work) exhorting us to support efforts to prevent that rule from being enacted. He claimed it was an important part of how we get paid, but I wonder also just how much his personal interest swayed his opinion (as a huge part of his "salary" is stock options).

I think political blogging does need some attention by the regulators. There is a huge amount of room for political blogging to affect elections. The 2004 election cycle was a prime example with bloggers playing a big role in taking down several big figures, and in general playing a big role in shaping the debate. I think that bloggers who are being paid by a political organization to blog need to declare it both to the FEC and in a banner on their blog, and that doing so would be a simple extension of existing laws.

At the same time there's a vast quantity of blogging which isn't political and doesn't need FEC regulations. So I expect the FEC to be careful in defining just what blogging the rules apply to.

An interesting vision of how blog technology can save newspapers

This piece was posted on slashdot, one of the biggest blog sites of them all, and written by a longtime writer for slashdot and its parent company. He has a lot of experience with online journalism and building online community sites, and has a big suggestion for the newspapers of the world. See, in the face of TV and Internet the typical newspaper circulation is shrinking. It seems the newspaper teams are not grokking the online world and how to best ride the tiger to their success, which is a shame because there's a natural fit between newspapers and localized online community.

A Recipe for Newspaper Survival in the Internet Age (Posted by Roblimo @ slashdot on Wednesday November 30, 2005 @11:28AM)

He says a lot of very interesting things ... which I don't want to repeat .. instead I'm going to hit on the high points.

First, newspapers have a potential role that's a natural fit for them. They could easily be a hub for a local interactive community website. They just have to marry articles with user comments in a strong way. And newspapers could easily tap on locals to do some of the writing.

Instead when newspapers allow user comments it's usually buried in a web forum elsewhere on the site, not connected with the articles, and perhaps requiring a separate login from the newspaper. This is probably a technology problem in that the newspaper content management system probably doesn't allow for comments, and so to provide a space for reader discussion they tack on a bulletin board on the side but then it might be difficult or impossible for both software packages to use the same user identity database.

It's also related to an article I posted here yesterday. Namely, in the past corporations have seen blogging as a PR nightmare waiting to happen. Newspapers probably see user comments in the same light, and in Roblimo's post he does go over several classes of users and how some of them will post problematic comments. That just means having a good moderation system to handle problematic comments.

Second, he has a strong statement about newspapers and their "local" roles. That's an interesting thought, since by their nature newspapers serve a specific area. There clearly is a need for local coverage of local matters. But what one gets from viewing most news media is that the only important activity that happens is in Washington DC, New York or Los Angeles. Well, excuse me, but what about the rest of the country?

There clearly is a need for news media that covers the national scene, just as there's a need for news media that covers the local scene.

I think one problem is that newspapers are not local any longer. Instead the management is through national chains. There might be reporters and editors hired in each local place, but the managerial tone is set from the national office. In particular the national chain might be providing the bulk of the news through their national news desks in NYC, DC and LA and the local outlets are simply supposed to reprint whatever the national chain sends them.

Third, he has a revolutionary concept of the way to produce the newspaper.

Eventually, I expect print newspapers to become "snapshots" of their Web editions taken at 1 a.m. or another arbitrary time, poured into page templates and massaged a little by layout people, then sent to the printing presses, a pattern that has potential for significant production cost reductions if handled adroitly. From that point on, their paper editions will be distributed the same way newspapers are now.

This is rather a large departure from how newspapers function today, so it's worth delving into this a little.

The paradigm he spins is that the newspaper site would be the primary repository of content. The content (articles) comes from a mix of hired reporters, user comments, and locals who provide either story leads or full articles. The latter, locals who can provide a full article that's good enough to run with little editing, might get paid on a per-article basis. I think they could be called a "stringer", right?

The web site would get continually moderated and edited throughout the day. Hence the news organization still needs editors to oversee the articles for quality. It's just that when the editor is finished editing the article, it can be directly published to the web site right away.

The last step is what he describes ... laying out a printed edition can be easily done automatically with software. As he says, the software would take a snapshot of the web site at a given time, automatically do layout and formatting, perhaps with a little human tweaking, and send it to the printers. There's even a potential advantage in that the software can select advertising based on keywords and suddenly print media could have relevant advertising just as we enjoy today with AdSense based advertising on web sites.

'Embrace blogging' says Harvard Business School

This story is in line with the ones I posted yesterday: 'Embrace blogging' Harvard tells businesses But do it properly... or not at all (By Will Sturgeon, Published: Wednesday 30 November 2005)

There's a growing realization that blogs by corporations aren't necessarily a corporate PR disaster waiting to happen. Rather that they can help a company shape the public perception of the company and shape the public conversation about a company.

Transparency, blogging and corporate blogs

One of the supposed advantages to blogging is that it's supposedly transparent. By posting your thoughts openly, freely, in a personal voice, etc, that somehow makes the process transparent. Hmmm... I'm not sure.

Transparency, How Far Do We Go?

Blog transparency -- synthetic or authentic?

Corporate Blogging as Synthetic Transparency?

Using ‘Synthetic Transparency’ to set Expectations on the level Transparency Found on your Corporate Blog

The "synthetic transparency" line is a kind of false transparency that is consciously or unconsciously put into the blog. The blogging paradigm is to strive for transparency, but you can talk the talk without walking the walk.

The thing I take from the above blog postings is about the expectations you make by how the blog site is constructed. For example the typical blog software package allows the readers to make comments, so if in the installation you leave commenting enabled then the users will expect to have a conversation with you through your comments. That's pretty clear.

Alternatively if you aren't going to reply to comments, and you turn off commenting the question is will the users feel frustrated at being unable to comment? Is their default expectation to make comments? Or do they see the "comment" button and have a Pavlovian response and later have frustration when they find it's all a façade?

I sure don't know the answer to those questions, but aren't they interesting?

My opinion is that a blog is a web site, and the owner of the web site can conduct that web site however they wish. If they wish to just use it for news releases, then more power to them. It's just a web site, and the functionality of blog software makes it very suitable for press releases. If they wish to just post sales gimmicks, then more power to them. It's their web site and it's up to them how they use it.

If the web site owner wants to use their blog software to conduct a typical blog, then sure of course they should consider following the usual norms of blogging. That's called living up to the expectations they set.

Clearly if the web site owner wants to use blog software to post news releases, they probably don't want people making comments on them, so of course they should turn off the comment and trackback features of their blog software. Further they should work on the site templates to remove any hints that it's a blog. Again that's about properly setting expectations, this time ensuring that people don't get triggered into a pavlovian response and expectations of being able to comment when comments are not allowed.

Blogging customer relations - handling customer comments

John Cass (?) from Backbone Media has an interesting post about handling customer relations in corporate blogs. He starts by describing the expectation in blogging, that the readers should be free to make comments and that by posting a blog it's best to expect and foster a conversation on that blog.

This works great in various blogs ... slashdot is notorious for postings that garner hundreds of comments. However it doesn't always follow that by posting a blog you're going to get comments. On this site here I don't get many comments. I do require that people "register" with the site before making comments, but that's to keep spammers away. Seeing the amount of trackback spam attempts I get, I'm justified in placing a hurdle in front of potential commentors.

Here's the post: The GM Blog: Lessons For Customer Blogging Relations (September 2, 2005, John Cass)

For his discussion he takes interviews he conducted with two GM customers who had made comments on GM's FastLane blog site. Apparently GM has a policy of not replying to blog comments, their excuse being a lack of resources to do so. The funny thing is that while he posts their names and that they had made comments on GM's blogs, he doesn't give a synopsis of their feelings about not having received replies to their comments.

Instead he goes into a long lecture in the value of following through with the expectations you set by building a blog site.

That is, he says, the populace of blog users are accustomed to having comments on a blog turn into conversations with the blog author. That's true even if it's a CEO who makes the blog posting. Hence, his argument is that the public has an expectation that if they make a comment they'll receive a reply. Enough comments and replies and pretty soon you have yourselves a conversation (of sorts).

In my day job I am a Sun employee and one of the bloggers feeding both blogs.sun.com and java.net. Funny thing is, I don't remember there being a statement in Sun's blogging policy that we should reply to all comments.

I think in general that is a good policy. However there are some exceptions I see which are honed from a couple decades doing Usenet, Mailing Lists, message boards and blogging on the Internet.

What about trolls? What about spammers? What about flamers? What about the confused? They all exist, and they can easily take residence on your blog. If you have a policy of always replying to their comments you could easily be caught feeding the troll, which we all know just makes the troll bigger and nastier.

Some comments are better left unreplied.

For example, the perennial issue with Java is there's a lot of people who want Sun to open source our implementation. Sun has repeatedly said "no" and explained why we say no, and that hasn't satisfied them. Regularly on my java.sun.com or java.net blogs a commenter takes up residence subtly, or not so subtly, discussing open/free software and making it clear he's got an agenda to prove some point about why Sun is evil for not open sourcing Java. It's clear that they've already made up their mind, and I am not allowed to say anything other than the company line, so therefore it isn't useful for me to make further replies to their baiting comments. Hence, I ignore them.

The flamers are in almost the same boat. I don't understand flamers, why would they rove the network looking for places to spew? The spammers are not even worthy of making comments, they're only worthy of having their comments deleted or placing roadblocks up so they can't make their comment postings at all.

The confused? What I mean are the people who think they understand, and go off in a tangent not making sense all the way. More often than not your attempts to set them straight will only make them more confused. It's sad, and it's probably worthwhile making a couple replies to attempt to set them straight, but they can become a time sink that isn't worth pursuing.

Who should be making the replies to the comments? I say it is the poster of the blog entry who should field the conversation. To do any less undermines the transparency and authenticity of the blog.

The CIA and Open Source and Blogging, oh my

Boy, this is strange. I suppose Corporate Transparency as a meme is traversing into all corners of society, including the CIA. You think of the CIA as the poster child of secrecy and closed access. Well, actually, I'd think the NSA is even more the poster child, but then the NSA is so secretive nobody knows much about them, unlike the CIA.

Anyway, here's the deal:

CIA using its own blogs to gather, analyze information (By Susan B. Glasser, The Washington Post, November 27, 2005)

The article says the CIA has a blogging website. It's tasked with publishing news tidbits from around the world. It is called the "Open Source Center" and began life in 1941 as the Foreign Broadcast Information Service. The tasking then was the monitoring and translation of "media" from around the world.

Given the discussion in the article, they've changed focus somewhat. They're continuing to monitor and translate media but broadened the media to include the newfangled stuff on the Internet. For example, the article says they have a blog on blogging, that is, studying the blogging scene on the Internet.

The site is here: https://www.fbis.gov/

Curiously on my way into the site was a dialog saying my browser couldn't verify the identity of the site. You'd think the CIA with the full power and weight of the U.S. government behind it ought to be able to have a properly registered HTTPS certificate, yes?

To see them use the phrase "Open Source Center" tweaks me as it does timboucher.com. To me, one who works in the computer industry, "Open Source" has a specific meaning. Namely, an object developed in the open, whose documentation, workings, implementation, and more are available to anybody, can be copied and modified by anybody. The term originated with computer software, but the process can be applied to anything.

I suspect the CIA has a different meaning in mind. I suspect for them "Source" means their Intelligence Sources, hence an "Open Source" might be a source from the open communications in the world such as news media or blogs. Hence a "Closed Source" might require the typical cloak-and-dagger operations you typically associate with the CIA.

In any case, the website has a banner saying

Welcome to the website of the Open Source Center. OSC provides foreign media reporting and analysis to policymakers, government institutions and strategic partners. We deliver targeted, timely and authoritative open source intelligence for analysis, operations and policymaking.

And further goes on to insist the site has protected access, that access to the site will be monitored, etc. All that's on the front page are these warnings, a login screen, and a "Request Account" screen. And clicking on that button tells me to indicate my affiliation giving me this list of choices:

• US Government Employee
• US Government Contractor
• State and Local Government Employees
• State and Local Government Contractor
• BBC Monitoring Employee
• Foreign Liaison with US Government

Sigh, I'm none of those. However the "BBC Monitoring Employee" choice is curious. Do you suppose the BBC is part of Big Brother after all?

Here's what GlobalSecurity.org has to say about BBC Monitoring (http://www.monitor.bbc.co.uk/top.htm)

The proliferation of radio and television broadcasting in recent years has significantly increased the importance of media monitoring as a prime source of economic and political open source intelligence. BBC Monitoring scans radio, television and news agencies in over 140 countries, providing fast, reliable information in a variety of ways. It provides a range of commercially available services, and operates in conjunction with the CIA Foreign Broadcast Information Service. The Research and Information Unit at BBC Monitoring is dedicated to collecting and verifying data on political parties, events and leading political figures throughout the world.

I find it curious the same use of the "open source intelligence" phrase as above. Perhaps my guess above was correct?

A good overview of corporate blogging

Does Your Company Belong in the Blogosphere? (by Katherine Heires, Harvard Business School, November 28, 2005)

She says:

...a blog is an incredibly effective yet low-cost way to:

• Influence the public "conversation" about your company: Make it easy for journalists to find the latest, most accurate information about new products or ventures. In the case of a crisis, a blog allows you to shape the conversation about it.
• Enhance brand visibility and credibility: Appear higher in search engine rankings, establish expertise in industry or subject area, and personalize one's company by giving it a human voice.
• Achieve customer intimacy: Speak directly to consumers and have them come right back with suggestions or complaints—or kudos.

And along the way points to several corporate bloggers including a few CEO's.

An advice blog meant for CEO's is showcased, but after reading a few entries I don't get how the content is for CEO's.

Dennis Hastert, U.S. Speaker of the House, is now a blogger

On the official Speaker of the House web site, Dennis Hastert has started a blog.

So far there's two entries. There's no RSS feed, that I can find, which will limit the impact. But then there's plenty of places where an RSS feed would be fabulous, such as their "newsroom" page, but the RSS feed is lacking.

Attack bloggers on the loose???

There's a lovely piece in Forbes magazine slamming the blogging community. Yet the article itself is a prime example of the over-the-top slam story that's lacking in the kind of credibility you get when you check your facts carefully.

Attack of the Blogs (Daniel Lyons, 11.14.05, forbes.com, registration required)

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.

And with that bit of distortion as the foundation for the article, can we expect fair and balanced journalism?

The article leads off with the story of Gregory Halpern and the woes of his company. His company offered several products for sale, and was going fine until a blogger latched on:

Then the bloggers attacked. A supposed crusading journalist launched an online campaign long on invective and wobbly on facts, posting articles on his Web log (blog) calling Halpern "deceitful,""unethical,""incredibly stupid" and "a pathological liar" who had misled investors. The author claimed to be Nick Tracy, a London writer who started his one-man "watchdog" Web site, our-street.com, to expose corporate fraud. He put out press releases saying he had filed complaints against Circle with the Securities & Exchange Commission.

The result of the "attack" has been a drastic decline in the company stock price, their deal with Nestle never came through, etc. The "journalist" turned out to be an out of work stock analyst who later was indicted and convicted in stock a pump-and-dump scheme.

Okay, fine, perhaps Halpern and his company are innocent victims. But is "bloging" the culprit here? The whole slant of the article is to label bloggers as a vicious horde out to damage and destroy for some kind of evil ends. But is that true?

A blog is merely a web site of a particular shape and functionality. The fake "journalist" mentioned above could have done the same damage using a regular web site. That he used blog software has nothing to do with the effect of what he did.

For example here's another section of the article:

"Bloggers are more of a threat than people realize, and they are only going to get more toxic. This is the new reality," says Peter Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, a Cincinnati firm that sifts through millions of blogs to provide watch-your-back service to 75 clients, including Procter & Gamble and Ford. "The potential for brand damage is really high," says Frank Shaw, executive vice president at Microsoft's main public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom. "There is bad information out there in the blog space, and you have only hours to get ahead of it and cut it off, especially if it's juicy."

These people are confused ... Sure, there probably is bad information out there. But it doesn't matter whether it's a blog or not. Blogs are not the enemy.

Some companies now use blogs as a weapon, unleashing swarms of critics on their rivals. "I'd say 50% to 60% of attacks are sponsored by competitors," says Bruce Fischman, a lawyer in Miami for targets of online abuse. He says he represents a high-tech firm thrashed by blogs that were secretly funded by a rival; the parties are in talks to settle out of court. One blog, Groklaw, exists primarily to bash software maker SCOGroup in its Linux patent lawsuit against IBM, producing laughably biased, pro-IBMcoverage; its origins are a mystery (see box, p. 136).

In other words, this is the same old process (corporate PR warfare) moved into a new arena.

Corporations have been slamming each other for years. Faked up slam stories have been circulated for years. PR firms have for years specialized in making spin and counter spin work to create or destroy public image. There's nothing new here, it's the same old practices clothed in new technology.

But here's one of the few interesting thoughts in the article:

Google and other services operate with government-sanctioned impunity, protected from any liability for anything posted on the blogs they host. Thus they serve up vitriolic "content" without bearing any legal responsibility for ensuring it is fair or accurate; at times they even sell ads alongside the diatribes. "We don't get involved in adjudicating whether something is libel or slander," says Jason Goldman, a manager at Google's blogging division. In squabbles between anonymous bloggers and victims Google sides with the attackers, refusing to turn over any information unless a judge orders it to open up. "We'll do it if we believe we are required to by law," he says.

There are several large blog hosting services such as Google (Blogger.com), TypePad, LiveJournal and Movable Type plus others. What this paragraph suggests is that perhaps the blog hosting services ought to be held accountable for the statements of the people for whom they host blogs.

Okay, let's ponder this for a moment.

At first blush the attraction to operating a blog is one has a virtual soapbox from which to speak to the world. Everybody has their own message to bring to the world (as I discuss here), and not everybody's message is one of love and light. Further, there are many messages to speak to the world that the corporatists would find damaging to their precious businesses. Hence, it would behoove a blog hosting service to not censor what the users of the service write.

They might not get many customers to their blog hosting service if they were very heavy-handed in censoring what the bloggers write.

For example the blogger.com terms of service spell it out pretty well.

5. PRIVACY POLICY ... It is Pyra's policy to respect the privacy of Members. Therefore, Pyra will not disclose to any third party Member's name or contact information. Pyra will also not monitor, edit, or disclose the contents of a Member's information unless required to do so by law or in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to: (1) conform to the edicts of the law or comply with legal process served on Pyra; (2) protect and defend the rights or property of Pyra; or (3) act under exigent circumstances to protect the personal safety of BTS members or the public; (4) fix or debug problems with the Blogger software/service.

... 6b. CONTENT RESPONSIBILITY Member acknowledges and agrees that Pyra neither endorses the contents of any Member communications nor assumes responsibility for any threatening, libelous, obscene, harassing or offensive material contained therein, any infringement of third party intellectual property rights arising therefrom or any crime facilitated thereby.

... 12. MEMBER CONDUCT ... (2) not to use the Service for illegal purposes; ... Member agrees not to transmit through the Service any unlawful, harassing, libelous, abusive, threatening, or harmful material of any kind or nature. Member further agrees not to transmit any material that encourages conduct that could constitute a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability or otherwise violate any applicable local, state, national or international law or regulation. Attempts to gain unauthorized access to other computer systems are prohibited.

...

The way I read the policy, the intent is to portray blogger.com as a soapbox from which people can write pretty much what they want within some reasonably loose bounds of acceptibility. However one of the restrictions is against posting libelous or abusive material, so if blogger.com were to adhere to their publicly claimed policies then they would cancel blogs which are deemed libelous or abusive. What's the problem, then?

Not that one really needs blogger.com to launch a blog. It's trivially easy to set up a blog with blogger.com, but it's only slightly harder to do so with a regular web hosting company.

That is, suppose someone dearly wanted to be posting abusively libelous material. Suppose blogger.com were hardline about terminating accounts of people who post abusively libelous material? How would that someone go about posting their abusively libelous material? Simple ... they go to any of the dozens of web hosting companies, get an account, install blog software, and they're online with a blog.

Why should the hosting company be held liable for the actions of one of their customers?

Let's take a physical world example. Say a drug dealer was renting a storefront as a cover for their drug dealing operation. Is the building owner responsible? No. When the police capture the drug dealer, would the building owner also be accused of any crime? No.

That's the kind of arrangement we have going on here. Hosting companies are operating a kind of rental operation, where they run computers and offer people the space to store their web sites. Why should the hosting company be held liable for what their customers are doing? Yet, that's what the Forbes article suggests, that the hosting company should be liable.

Security concerns with corporate IM use

This isn't a blogging issue, but it's still interesting enough a question. What are the security implications of using "instant messaging" for corporate use?

There's a meta-question which ties it to blogging ... there's a range of technology being developed on the Internet but is being transitioned to corporate use. When it's out in the public it may have one set of expectations ... e.g. instant messaging is about people cruising for sex partners ... or blogging is about people writing diaries of their observations and experiences. But what's really happened is some capabilities were embedded in software, and those capabilities can be used for other (job-related) activities.

For example ... here's an interesting use of instant messaging: collab.netbeans.org. The idea is that software development is a collaborative joint activity. So why not build a chatroom into the IDE environment? And if you're going to build a software developer oriented chatroom, why not make it deal properly with source code?

Anyway, back to security of corporate instant messaging ...

In my job we (the whole company) were just exposed to corporate training concerning protecting confidential information. Clearly corporations have confidential information that provides a competitive edge. Protecting that edge is important.

So, how might instant messaging be used in a corporate setting?

What if ... first, everybody in the team would be keeping an IM client on their computer desktop all day long. Anybody with a question might pop it out to the others in the team. Anybody with a hairball brainstormy idea might pop it out to others in the team. Anybody wanting to unload frustration over the meeting they just left might ... er ... well, maybe they wouldn't pop that out to their team. Anyway, you get the idea.

The thing is, those uses are going to frequently involve corporate-confidential information. And, additionally chat transcripts could become very important pieces of documentation, and should be preserved somewhere.

But, given that corporate instant messaging use is going to involve company-confidential information, whose instant messaging server are you going to use? And is there a chance that your instant messaging conversations will be tapped by outsiders? Company-confidential information is supposed to remain confidential, which means considering the security of the communication lines you use for discussions.

e.g. It may be real convenient to use existing instant messaging services (e.g. MSN, Yahoo, AOL, etc) and everybody just gets the appropriate client program. But can you trust the confidentiality of those services? Is the communication protocol secure and untappable? Or by using the existing service, would you be revealing your secrets for anybody who knows where to look?

Hence it would be sensible for the company to install its own instant messaging server. At least the server is controlled by the company, and might not leak information to eavesdroppers. That is, assuming the server itself is secure, and assuming that the communications between client and server are untappable.

Corporate blogs as advertising?

Corporate and character blogging (Posted Sep 29, 2005, 6:03 PM ET by Chris Thilk), Blogvertising or Adverblogging? (adsthatsuck.ca)

The main claim is this: "What the writer does is get right to the heart of the matter, in that no matter what form they might take, how formal or informal they might be, a blog that is produced by a company has is still at it's core a form of advertising. All that's different is the format of the ad."

To which I say: Baloney

It depends on how the corporation approaches blogging and what's done with it.

Clearly in some cases the advertising department might take ahold of blogging, and use it as a marketing/advertising vehicle. And clearly they're going to flub it because they don't understand the medium.

But, for example, consider the Adsense Blog where the staff that runs adsense posts helpful hints and ideas from time to time. If that's advertising it's highly buried.

A primo example is blogs.sun.com where Sun let the geeks loose to write "whatever they want" (within reason).