A few things about this “move” are admittedly a little strange. The new blog is hosted on my personal site ynada.com, just like the old one. It also runs on Wordpress and if you read the descriptions (”my blog about..:”) both are fairly similar. Why would I annoy my few subscribers by moving? Why bother setting up a new blog if I could just as  well continue the old one and simply shift my focus from corporate blogging to new topics?

I think this is my way of saying “that was that, this is something different”.

The bulk of the material in CorpBlawg is about corporate blogging and it feels odd to break up that relative consistency by writing about something completely different now that my PhD project is completed (by the way, I am the process of getting my thesis ready for publication, so keep an eye out for that if you’re interested).

The other, perhaps more important aspect is that I’ve learned a lot about blogging in the course of the last three years and my way of writing has changed accordingly. I think one the most interesting ways of using a blog is as a personal knowledge management tool and among other things, I intend to use blog.ynada.com for that purpose. This means that I will write it in a less essayistic and elaborate fashion than I did in CorpBlawg and use the new blog more like a personal scrapbook for all kinds of bits and pieces that I want to work with later. I’ll save the ‘big stuff’ for what I suspect we are all saving it for – ‘real’ publications, i.e. articles in scientific journals and books. To stick to my my own imagery, I’ll use the new blog less as a megaphone and more like a diary, or (more precisely) like a lab notebook. Entries will most likely be shorter and less polished than before, but more usable to me and perhaps even others, provided that they are familiar with the context of my work. They will be less useful to a general readership and aimed more at colleages, collarborators and at myself than my previous blogging.

So there you have it: a change in style and purpose leads to a change in conceptualized audience and therefore I need a new blog. Ah, isn’t it just lovely when practice so neatly follows theory?

Over and out – and be sure to subscribe to my new blog.

I’ll dive into all of that as the weekend nears – for now, it’s nice to be back.

I expect things to return to normal soon, however, as I develop more of a routine. Right now I’m still learning to juggle a number of very different tasks at the same time, e.g. teaching, research, software development and open access activism. All of these things are great and I wouldn’t want to ever go without them, but one needs a very good strategy for juggling different jobs at the same time without dropping anything important.

Kinda amusing that it had to be the post about flogs. Perhaps the content thieves have a sense of irony…

Oh yeah, I’ve also created an index of my favorite posts.

Let me know what you think.

When faced with the two options of either tidying up my apartment or tagging my posts, I promptly did the latter. Now what does that say about me?

This blog aims to be a source of reliable information and informed commentary on the topic of corporate blogging. Corporate or enterprise blogging is an entirely new form of corporate communication and has – at least that’s what many people believe – the potential to impact how corporations all over the world conduct their business and how they are perceived by customers, shareholder and employees. Independently of whether it’s corporate executives blogging about their stratigic goals or company PR pros using blogs to promote a product, corporate blogging seems an attractive and budget-friendly way of getting the job done. Of course blogging does not take place in a vacuum – the level of interactivity inherent in blogging makes managing the communication process a major challenge, one that companies sometimes find difficult to overcome. The blogosphere can look like the PR equivalent of a highway with no speed limit and no rules – a place where the most perfected comporate image can be totalled in a matter of seconds. The fact that this can also happen without any participation on the company’s part is, however, what makes blogging increasingly relevant to businesses. It’s simply too risky not to participate and remain silent when everyone out there is talking about you.
My motivation for starting a blog myself is twofold. Firstly, I believe that a blog is a very useful tool to organize one’s thoughts and to keep track of ideas (they’re elusive buggers sometimes). Secondly, writing a dissertation on the practice of corporate blogging and not having a blog myself somehow seems contradictory. As I want to understand all levels of the phenomenon, it seems logical to me to participate instead of merely lurk. Thirdly, reporting on how things unfold on a regular basis seems appropriate when considering how novel the idea of corporate blogging still is. It is anything but a static practice and it will be exciting to watch and occasionally comment as it evolves.

So there you have it. CorpBlawg is a blog on corporate blogs, from an academic point of view. If that seems terribly meta and tedious, let me assure you that I’ll do my best to keep things interesting, balanced and on topic (no endless tirades about how blogging will solve all the world’s problems in a heartbeat, I promise). The public will provide the music, while I watch dutifully as the dancers (hopefully) loosen their ties and kick off their shoes. We’ll see a misstep or two of course, but nobody’s ever learned to waltz instantly.

I, for one, have no doubt that the show will be worth watching.