It’s an interesting intersection of themes and conversations. I was writing a piece on how blogging might not work in an environment where the risks of sharing half-baked ideas in public outweigh the benefits of doing so, when I realised that at the end it’s not the environment, but the way one chooses to deal with it.

An academic environment is a good example: it is makes a lot of sense not to blog work in progress, since it is exposes raw ideas to potential competition and creates all kinds of issues with publishing finished work. Just as I blogged a piece from PhD chapter on attribution and ownership, Carol reminded me of possible implications of doing so (via Facebook wall, so I’m not sure how to permalink):

saw your status update about you wondering whether to blog your PhD chapters… I personally would recommend publishing in a journal first, you could then blog about your journal paper after. But if you publish your chapters on the blog first, you may automatically restrict yourself from publishing in journals where often you are required to not have published the work anywhere in the public domain first…. it’s a copyright issue…

Well, while being well aware of the risks of doing so I still want to do it. Partly because given my longer-term plans I can afford ignoring potential problems with a journal publication, but mainly because I find more important that the results of my work reach people than that they do it in a particular format.

An environment might provide favourable (or not) conditions for blogging, but I guess the real issue is how far blogging resonates with personal values and ability/readiness to act on those values given the circumstances.

• Blogher: business blogging BOF
• Corporate guidelines for personal weblogs
• Is it difficult to ‘catch up’ with a weblog?