Metablogging

Metablogging is blogging about blogging.

Recently I had dinner at Gordon Biersch with my friend and former colleague Tim Bray, who is currently the Director of Web Technologies at Sun Microsystems. Tim's blog is published outside the auspices of Sun, however, he is the author of Sun's policy on blogging. Employees at Sun are encouraged to blog, and are given web space on the company's servers to do so.

Microsoft and many other tech companies in and around Silicon Valley encourage their employees to blog about the work they're doing. You may remember, doing so is what made Robert Scoble famous.

As Tim and I discussed the pros and cons of corporate blogging, and the challenges of writing effective marketing blogs, I mentioned that I'd heard that Apple doesn't have a blog policy, and that I found that surprising. How could such a large, tech-savvy, beloved company not have blogging employees?

So I decided to do a little research on the subject. I found a very interesting — and, be forewarned, very long — conversation on this very subject on Scobleizer.

On this particular blog post, the comments are far more interesting and revealing than Scoble's original post on the subject. I encourage you to read it, and blog your thoughts on the issues under discussion.

The main question being debated is whether Apple should encourage, or even permit, its employees to blog. But there's a secondary issue that I found extremely interesting, and that is, how much latitude should bloggers allow their commenters? You'll find that many of the comments on Scoble's post are ill-informed, rude, and downright nasty — yet not only does Scoble not delete these comments, he responds to them, politely, smartly, and with dignity.

I admire Scoble's fortitude, yet I know that, if I were him, I would have ended the conversation about half way through those comments. As a blogger myself, I draw the line at allowing people to insult me in my own home.

You are all bloggers, too. What do you think?