I have a blog out there in the Internet wilderness: dalelane.co.uk/blog. My use of it has varied over the year and half I’ve had it, in both style and frequency. But overall, I feel kinda comfortable with it. I don’t have to think too much about what I do with it – I just post whatever I feel like.
But I have another blog: hidden away behind the IBM firewall. It’s on BlogCentral – which if you’re not familiar with it, is the blog platform on the intranet here at IBM.
And I’ve never really worked out what to do with it. It hasn’t really found it’s voice.
I rarely have anything to say that I consider secret, private or confidential enough to warrant not posting it to my external blog. So the BlogCentral blog ends up becoming a place to catch the odd post here and there that is either too sensitive or too unfinished to put on dalelane.co.uk
Looking at it in isolation, not in conjunction with dalelane.co.uk, my BlogCentral blog is a random collection of infrequent and fairly poor posts that don’t really represent me.
After going to Andy’s talk today, his mentions of “Your blog is your CV” got me thinking that I should do something about this.
So I’m trying to figure out what that should be.
Option 1:
Close the BlogCentral blog. IBMers who don’t know me who randomly come across it, will get a distorted view of me, so just get rid of it.
Option 2:
Cross-post everything. Make BlogCentral the first place I put all my posts, and use dalelane.co.uk as the public subset of them.
I like the idea that my BlogCentral blog then becomes more representative of me. And people using internal search engine at work will be more likely to come across me when searching for interests or skills of mine.
But I’m not sure of the netiquette behind cross-posting as a regular thing.
I guess coming across content multiple times is becoming the norm – for example, when Andy bookmarks something in del.icio.us I’ll see that in twitter, jaiku, his blog, and in my RSS reader. And I’ve gotten used to just ignoring the duplicates. Maybe it’s not a big deal?
And there is something interesting about the idea of having two comment threads for every post – one internal and one public.
Option 3:
Something else?
In some ways, this is a wider question than just blogs. The same could be said of my use of Twitter (a lot) vs BlueTwit (hardly at all) at the moment. And the same question kinda applies… wondering where to post stuff. And whether aggregating everything inside work, and choosing a subset of that to share with the wider world at large would work.
By way of experimentation, I’ve cross-posted this. It’d be interesting to hear people’s reactions.
Tags: blogcentral, blogging