« WSJ Article on Scanning Blogs | Main | Apple pushes Podcasting into the mainstream »

Blogging Boundaries: Are they different for business vs. personal blogs?

On Friday I was fortunate to be a panelist at a very well attended blogging event in Newton sponsored by Business Wire. Other panelists included long-time bloggers, Jay Fitzgerald, general economics reporter for the Boston Herald and Steven Cohen, senior librarian for PubSub Concepts Inc. The event moderator was Dana Gardner, senior analyst of the Yankee Group who is actively involved in podcasting.

The audience included many PR and marketing professionals from the Boston area who had various levels of experience with personal and business blogging. Dana steered the panel through a series of interesting questions about why people blog, the importance of blogs for marketing research and the potential for blogs to be a great marketing/customer connection tool. That lead to some great questions from the audience about who should blog and whether or not there should be any boundaries to what people write on company blogs. Jay has to face the issues of transparency, disclosure and boundaries every day on EconoBlog, his business blog for the Herald as well as on his personal blog about Boston, Hub Blog.

Because Jay is a true journalist, he chooses to remove his personal bias from his articles and posts on the Herald, but he also has to be careful on his personal blog about exposing too much personal information and perspective. It's interesting to see how Jay finds that balance on both of his blogs without losing his personality or shying away from controversial topics. Dan Kennedy explored this issue with Jay and other journalists who weren't so thoughtful in an article from April in the Boston Phoenix.

Another interesting question is whether libel issues impact personal blogs in the same way as business blogs. Last week, John Palfrey from Harvard Law School's Berkman Center, who is also a contributor to this blog, wrote a post about legal information for bloggers. For people new to blogging, he provides some good legal resource links. If you missed it you can read it here .

Posted by Julie Woods on June 27, 2005 at 11:30 AM | Email this post Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341cdcdc53ef00d83551249a69e2

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Blogging Boundaries: Are they different for business vs. personal blogs?:

» Adderall. from Adderall.
Average adult dose of adderall xr. Dexadrine adderall comparison. Adderall. [Read More]

Tracked on Jun 8, 2009 9:27:18 AM

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.