Business and Blogging

When Is It OK to Back-Edit a Business Blog?

by Des Walsh on January 17th, 2007

Via my Newsgator RSS aggregator, I noticed a Robert Scoble post about IBM and blogging on corporate sites. 

Robert is picking up a post by Simon Phipps, commenting on changes he says IBM has been making to details on its website.

When I was studying and researching medieval and early modern European history, I had a very clear understanding of the qualitative difference between primary sources - what was originally written or “set down” in some way - and secondary sources, where someone was commenting or reporting, at at least one remove, on what had been said or written.

We were trained in such a way that, without access to the primary source, we always treated the secondary source very warily.

Of course, there was always the possibility of a primary source being a fake. But the digital age seems to make the whole distinction of primary and secondary sources somewhat “contested”, as modern-day academics like to say.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the “fixing” of what appear to be primary sources has become a very easy process, with rather bothersome implications for those of us who would like to know what was really said or written originally, who said or wrote it and - to assess authority or credibility - what their status or position was at the time.

Translating those issues to blogs, and at the risk of some over-simplification, the concept of a blog until recently has been that it is a very valuable document, precisely because the use of a permalink and time-and-date “stamping”, with identification of the author, has meant that a blog post was (almost) the digital age equivalent of the primary sources so beloved and sought after by us students of medieval and early modern history. In other words, you had the real story.

Naive? Perhaps. But if our innocence had taken a knock or two before this, how about the story alleging that IBM has been “back-editing” some corporate blog sites? 

Simon Phipps, who used to work and blog at IBM, and is now with Sun Microsystems, says in his post Edited Out of History that (historic) references to him on the IBM website are being edited out or changed. He instances a change to his title on a document of November 1, 1999 to provide his title as showing him as being a Sun employee, which he indicates is anachronistic.

Shades of George Orwell’s fictional but scarily prescient 1984 and the Winston Smith character’s task of re-writing history?

Phipps contrasts what he reports as happening at IBM with policy at Sun:

When we started blogs.sun.com, we had a long discussion about what we should do when employees left. The conclusion we all reached, supported strongly by Jonathan Schwartz who attended the meeting, was that they should simply be left in place, merely closed for further changes. Our view was that, if the blog text had been acceptable when it was published, there was no reason a change of employment status should vary that.

There is clearly an issue here of how corporate blog posts by former employees should be treated.

There is also a broader issue of the appropriateness of editing blog posts at all or to what extent. And there is an important b2b issue, where the historical record, via date-stamped, time-stamped, permalinked blog posts might be material to one or other business decision or financial transaction.

My own view is that it is reasonable to:

• amend basic and relatively trivial mistakes such as typos, e.g. “hear” and “here”, “their” and “there”
• amend, with annotation/explanation, errors of fact
• add editor’s note to, or even delete, items which are deemed to be defamatory or otherwise inapprop

We need to be as transparent as possible. We need to say what we are doing, leave a trail, as it were, for people wanting the full story. Whether or not we are prepared to share the full story, I  believe we need to ensure that we can all maintain some trust in the medium. So we need to state, as clearly as we reasonably can, what has happened - and, if feasible, why.

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POSTED IN: Corporate, General, Knowledge Management, Policy, Risk Management, Small Business