Reality comes crashing in

One of the perils of pseudo-corporate blogging, as I see it, is the damage you can do to your company. Blogging seems to me to be a personal thing.

When a company or organisation comes along and tries to blog it often jars. Possibly because, however much our marketing and branding departments try to anthropomorphise, a company isn't a human and you can't empathise with it.

There is also a social experiment going on here which we, the lab rats (or beagles if you are that way inclined), don't understand or grasp. Whether the altruistic spirit of collaboration in web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it) will continue or whether it will be exploited remains unclear. Although as a cynic I know which side my money is on...

The advice on blogging I have garnered so far appears to be:
1. Be honest
2. Be brief
3. Be interesting
4. Connect things (either ideas, people or content)

For a nice summary from a more experienced blogger than I click here - thanks to Tony Karrer

I am blogging for the reasons listed below. But also, as the managing director of a major UK outsourced training provider (click here if you're interested) I should like this to be beneficial to my company, my clients and my staff. I hope that wasn't too overt a plug.

One of the things I am struggling with at the moment is how to introduce web 2.0 in a beneficial way to my company. We have created forums for our instructors which are open to everyone but they were only launched last week so I'd wait a bit before going to look. I will be running training courses for all my staff on how to use Google properly, how to set up RSS feeds, how to use Linked In etc etc once I have found someone to deliver it.

At the moment I am not sure I know which way web 2.0 and learning 2.0 are going to go. Only that I am fairly sure that it will have a major impact on our industry. Which is precisely the opposite to what I felt in the first wave of Internet hype.