The grass roots days of blogging are ending. Not that blogging is dying; in fact, just the opposite. Blogging is going mainstream and its going corporate, like it or not. Blogging (or blog-like technology, if you prefer) is moving inside the firewall, into marketing departments, into research tools, into intelligence tools—in short, into the world of knowledge management. As I read Amy Wohl's recent posting on The Sanctity of Blogs, I found myself thinking, "yes, but only if you are talking about grass roots type of blogs". Specifically, Amy makes three points that got me thinking... "The intellectual content of blogs belongs to the blogger who wrote it and not to the blogging site which happened to host it. Therefore, [it should be possible] for bloggers to move their content for any reason." Organizations are recognizing that knowledge is the new capital, and blogging is poised to play an important role in capturing and managing knowledge assets. As I have described elsewhere, the needs of enterprises are very different from the needs of individuals. As weblogs emerge as corporate assets, it should become, in general, not possible "for bloggers to move their content for any reason." (Does anyone believe that a company employee is free to move company documents—even those he or she authored—for any reason?) "Blog site owners should not remove blogs except for good reason (breaking a well-known rule, such as including sexually explicit material) and even then, with reasonable notice, considering the problem." Again, I agree, if we're talking about truly personal blogs. However, if we're talking about a company electing to remove from its own corporate server the blog of the company's COO who just resigned—as in the cited case of Userland taking down John Robb's blog—I have to disagree. (Does anyone believe that a company should leave a former officer's bio on the company web site?) "Link owners should be mindful of the blogs they are attached to and make every effort to keep links stable and enduring." I take issue with this only in that it is not stated strongly enough! Information is an asset; but, only if you can find it. I consider any blogging technology that does not assign a unique, immutable identity to every information artifact to be broken. (Does anyone believe an operating system should permit a filename to change on its own?) | 
