Mathemagenic

And an illustration for my previous post on Personal vs. business dimensions of employee blogging: how I would position my weblog in respect to those scales (see also notes at Flickr for some specifics).

In case you want to try it for your own weblog: use empty image or .xls file. Don't forget to link back or let me know in some other way :)

One of the things I'm trying to do is to figure out how to talk about work-related blogging given that this is something in between personal and business interests. A weblog by someone who works for a company (=talking about employee blogging here) could be anything between my personal diary that doesn't have to do anything with my work and it's not really me blogging, but my work.

To position a weblog I'm thinking of using a scale between personal and business (re: personal vs. organisational perspectives ). However, a scale by itself is not enough: in case of blogging about work decision-making is multidimensional.

Below is an attempt to identify the dimensions of choices on personal vs. business scale (a lot of it comes from the Microsoft data, but I tried to generalise based on my own experiences and other sources). Personal and business columns describe the extremes, the middle one includes examples of how different interests could mix.

Scale Dimensions	Personal	Mixed	Business
Initiative - who initiated a weblog	Decided myself	Decided myself, but checked if it's ok at work Decided myself given positive signals (that blogging is allowed and encouraged) at work	Was prescribed at work
Location on corporate servers	Personal server Public hosting platforms	Company-affiliated servers (e.g. funded, but not part of an official web-site)	Corporate servers (part of corporate official presence online)
Technology control	Control myself Company doesn't influence it	Mixed	Full control by the company (don't know if those blogs exist: I expect that at least some degree of personal customisation should be possible)
Affiliation with company	No Explicitly hiding	Implicit - not immediately visible, but not hidden Disclaimer - I work for company X, but this is my personal opinion	Yes, explicit
Attribution to a company (this is reputation related, but I don't know how to formulate it well)	Things happening as a result of blogging influence mainly myself	Mixed: if something happens other think it's a mixed responsibility of myself and my company	Things happening as a result of blogging influence mainly my company
Access, audience	Anyone Selected by the author	Mixed	Other employees only
Content focus	Mainly non-work matters	Mix of work and non-work	Mainly work-related
Content style	Personal, subjective, confessional	A degree of filtering/editing to fit norms of professional writing	Business, objective
Micro-level content decision making (e.g. what goes into a specific post)	Myself	Myself, but listen to others at work Myself, but have to get permissions from others at work	Defined by work needs Defined by others at work
Process decision-making (have to be worked out)	I decide when and how to blog	Mixed	When and how to blog is dictated by business logic and exiting workflows in my company
Blog uses (functions? purposes?)	Not related to work	Mixed	Only business-related (good for my company) or work-related (good for performing well at work)
Blogging as part of job description	No	Not explicitly, but brought in as an "extra" during evaluation Blogging not as a purpose, but one of the (officially) possible instruments to get work done I can blog if I want, but I don't have to	Yes, my job responsibilities explicitly include blogging
Work time spend blogging	No	Sometimes	Yes, only blogging at work time
Content ownership	My copyright I can decide to give it away (e.g. under CC licence)	Shared Both parties accept some rights of another side Nobody knows for sure - it's too complicated to discuss	Explicitly copyrighted by company
Content access	Me and those I decide to give it (e.g. company can't access it if I leave the job)	Shared: both parties can have their own copy of it	Corporate (I can't access it when I leave the job)

From what I've seen so far most of the tensions around employee blogging are in the middle. A weblog purely on personal end is not likely to be very interesting for a company (I can't think of any business benefits or risks in that case ;). Something purely on business side I wouldn't call a weblog at all (biased by my own definition of a weblog), but in this case benefits and risks are defined by the way a company works.

Some dimensions are interrelated. E.g. if you blog as part of your job you are likely to do it at work time; if your weblog is on a corporate server you don't have full technology control and anyone can easily figure out the affiliation, but a configuration for any specific blogger is likely to be different (an example of my weblog).

Does this whole thing makes sense given your own experiences? Did I miss any important dimensions?

UPDATE In case you want to try it for your own weblog: use empty image or .xls file. Don't forget to link back or let me know in some other way :)