Recent studies indicate that 85 percent of workers in America with Internet access admit to spending an average of 2 hours per day on personal e-mails and Internet activity, while 80 percent of employers monitor that activity, according to a press release from Bracewell & Giuliani

B  & G is giving Human Resource Management Association members in Texas the low down on employee surfing and blogging in the workplace and the legal implications of corporate monitoring of employee online activity.  

Different companies obviously see blogging very differently.  Here’s what Sun Microsystems has on their site;

Welcome to Blogs.sun.com! This space is accessible to any Sun employee to write about anything.

Sun certainly is not too concerned about their employees blogging. When he spoke at the Syndicate Conference late last year Jonathan Schwartz said they attribute the revitlization of Sun’s brand to their blogging.

But employee blogging can be a minefield.  Last year’s upset over the image posted by Niall Kennedy speaks volumes on this subject.  The flap over the image aside, Niall’s point about fear and the availability of the ‘new printing press’ in the hands of everyman is very valid.

Technorati supported Niall 100%, but it did create some backlash.

“We do not censor people’s blogs, and we take the censorship allegation extremely seriously,” wrote Dave Sifty. “I actively encourage our employees to blog, and to express their opinions. However, many readers do not make as clear a distinction between personal and work lives as many experienced bloggers do, and will view a provocative image on a blog in the worst possible light, especially when presented by the company’s Community Manager.”

There may well be bumps in the road when you start blogging in your business.   It’s a given with a new form of expression that gives a voice to anyone and everyone.

It’s wise to set guidelines for your employees when they blog.  But don’t let the FUD get you – the benefits blogging offers far outweigh any fears you may have.

 

 

In a case which has evident implications for Canadian bloggers but also for bloggers worldwide, Kazaa Australia boss Nikki Hemming is suing Canadian blogger Jon Newton and others for defamation, on the basis of an article earlier this year on Newton’s p2pnet site, as reported in this week’s IT Today section of the national daily The Australian (not a hyperlink permalink, no guarantee it will be there indefinitely).

The suit is over material posted on p2pnet and anonymous comments on that post, some months ago at a time when Hemming was in court in a Sydney case. Included in the suit with Newton are his ISP and four John Doe, anonymous commenters. The article has since been removed from the p2pnet site.

Jon Newton is disputing the suit vigorously and observes that if Hemming wins the case ‘it’ll open the door even wider for lawsuits against Canadian bloggers’  .

Canadian internet law professor Michael Geist has commented on the case and its implications in his BBC Online article Free speech, libel and the internet age. Geist draws attention to how the legal frameworks in different jurisdictions have a variety of implications for internet intermediaries, such as internet service providers and even individual bloggers who allow comments.  

The difficult question is not whether these sites and services have the right to voluntarily remove offending content if they so choose – no one doubts that they do – but rather whether sites can be compelled to remove allegedly unlawful or infringing content under threat of potential legal liability.

The answer is not as straightforward as one might expect since the law in Commonwealth countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia varies depending on the type of content or the nature of the allegations.

Canadian media lawyer Dan Burnett also comments on the different treatments in different jurisdictions, in his statement as reported at the August 5 Toronto Freedom of Speech Online concert and benefit. Burnett sees Canada as being laggard in reforming the law and comments:

In addition to the reforms we are lagging behind already, the internet age raises some new and fundamental questions. How does the right of reply on wiki and reader-post sites affect the law? Are we going to hold site operators liable for automatic posts by others? Are (we) going to recognize a defense for a person who operates a public forum for debate?

So where are bloggers without ready resource to internet lawyers to go for advice on these matters?

It seems not uncommon for bloggers to refer, on defamation and other legal issues, to the Electronic Frontier Foundation Legal Guide for Bloggers. That’s good as far as it goes, and there is some good advice in the document, but unless I’m missing something the document is a legal guide for the United States of America, not a global guide. (Actually, from a chat today with a lawyer friend very knowledgeable in these matters, I would seriously doubt whether a comprehensive global guide of any depth in this area is likely to emerge in the near or distant future.) 

Whatever the peculiarities of various legal jurisdictions, clearly some degree of prudence is needed in terms of what we post to our blogs and what we allow in terms of comments. Dave Taylor had some good advice on this in his post last year SEO Book’s Aaron Wall sued over comments on his weblog: Dave saw the case as ‘a wakeup call to business bloggers who haven’t yet thought through their own comment and comment moderation strategies’. 

And however the currrent case in Canada turns out, it too is clearly a call to look at the posting and comment moderation policies for our own blogs and those of any companies to which we consult.

Putting out money where our mouths are, we’re hoping to put money where our mouths are. That is, this site is all about using blogs for business. Yet, despite the name of the site, that would imply we are a consulting company, up until now, BBC (as we contributors hubristically call it) has been something of a labor of love. Granted, of the contributors are consultants themselves, who benefit from the exposure this blog affords their practices. (Myself, I took a day job two years ago.) But basically, this has been a not-for-profit exercise in information sharing.

Then I noticed something a few weeks ago: we get a decent amount of traffic. Enough that I figured, well, if blogs are supposed to be a good way to make money, let’s give it a try. So, you will notice as of today, this blog has ads on it.

Mostly we write here about how to use blogs as a marketing vehicle for companies with other, larger business models. But we also do comment from time to time about pure-play blog publishing businesses, a la Gawker, Weblogs Inc or Federated Media. One of the real secrets of blog publishing, however, is the B2B model. I have several friends who are making a full-time living off of business-oriented ad-supported blogs, such as Steve Hall at Adrants, Rafat Ali at PaidContent and Tig Tillinghast at MarketingVOX. So I figured we should give it a try, too. We’ll let you know how it goes. As the man falling from the 20-story building said as he passed the 10th-floor window, “So far, so good.”

After talking to more than 500 people one on one at SES San Jose over the last few days, I now know that very few people understand the power of RSS.  We asked questions of eveyone who came by our booth and this is what we discovered:

Most people know what RSS is, but only about 10% are using it on their websites.  Of course everyone who has a blog has a feed.  But the big surprise to me was that they don’t know what it can do – or why they should pay more attention to it.

In our panel about News Search Nan Dawkins of RedBoots spoke about how to use your blog and pitch other bloggers to get coverage in Yahoo News and Google News. I followed with our case study on the use of RSS and content syndication to get broad pick up and coverage in Yahoo News. (Featured July 21 in PR Week)

The question I got most frequently after that session was “How did you do that?”  When I asked them if they have a feed of their content, many who blog said yes.  But they has not done anything with it. Their feed was not even registered with the 100 + news aggregators.  Many bloggers don’t use Technorati tags or leverage the power RSS feeds can offer. 

They know they have a feed, but they have no idea what it does or how to promote it.

Over the next six weeks I will be writing a series of articles on The Power of RSS and Syndication – a little mini-course, if you will. If this is of interest to you, please let me know

 

 

 

I’m always on the lookout for stories about bloggers who get into trouble with official government agencies, because I think that the freewheeling and fairly tolerant blogging community is one that’s hard to understand when you’re a government official. When we add MySpace to the mix, you know the result is going to be even more volatile because people who haven’t been exposed to MySpace and its social networking ilk imagine a sort of prim and proper social chat community rather than the chaos, immaturity and just plain weirdness that is pervasive.

So when is a slightly sexually suggestive comment on MySpace grounds for an investigation from the City Council? When you’re a volunteer committee member? Read on:

Over the past month I have had nothing but frustration with Dreamhost, who happens to be my ISP (Internet Service Provider). The server has been down or very slow for hours, seemingly days at a time. My email has been inaccessible on and off throughout the month. And to make things worse, I couldn’t even get through to their online support area to find out what was wrong.

Well, today I got their newsletter in which they included a link to their weblog, which went into excruciating detail about what their problems were for the month of July.

Here’s a link to the post.

A good lesson for all of us here is that when things go wrong in your company and customers are affected as I was, simply telling the truth about what happened and what you are doing to correct the situation is sufficient to keep their business and happy with you.

If only Dell would learn this lesson…