I had a read of our external site about blogging this evening. It’s definitely worth a look if you’re interested in blogging, and want to see an example of a positive corporate attitude towards it. I especially enjoyed looking through some of the profiles of other IBM bloggers, seeing why they do it, and what they think they get out of it.
Although I’ve been reading blogs for a year or two now, I’m still fairly new to blogging myself. I’m kinda enjoying it – I think it’s a useful thing to be able to reflect on something that you’ve done at the end of each day. It’s a little frustrating that the nature of my job means that it’s sometimes difficult to write about it here. I work in a technical support job for WebSphere MQ – investigating customer problems and providing advice, support, and code fixes for our corporate customers. Essentially, I get to solve puzzles – the customer describes a problem they are facing, invariably with one or more key pieces missing. My job is to work out what they are, and – as geeky as it sounds – this can be a lot of fun. And more than once, I’ve wanted to be able to write about something I’ve worked on here. But, describing problems faced by customers in a public forum would hardly be fair.
Maybe the answer is to move this blog to our intranet? Or create a separate blog there?
Hi Dale… I didn’t know you were out here, too – I’ll make sure to add you to my blogroll 🙂
I agree that it is sometimes difficult to talk about specifics. I try to make my posts about any resolutions to problems I find as generic as I can. In your role we have some official channels for that kind of information via TechNotes too, of course. It would be great if you had a blog on the intranet where you can share information with those of us in the field, but also to keep up your presence here on the internet. You’ll find that I have both types of blog, too 😉
Thanks for the comment, Andy!
And for the link… I do keep meaning to choose some of my RSS feeds (which includes you! ;-)) to put links to on the blog.
[…] After some encouragement from Andy and others, I’ve written my first post for my new internal IBM blog. If you work for IBM you can see it on BlogCentral. If you don’t, you… can’t. I’m not planning on getting rid of this blog, but I might post a little less often. This way I have a place to write if I want to talk about my day job. […]