...in rented rooms and foreign places

I'm very dubious about corporate blogging. Actually I'm fairly ambivalent about blogging full-stop, but I'm especially dubious about corporate blogging - that is to say, weblogs that are written by employees of a company with the full support and encouragement of the company in question.

My company's intranet posted a link to this article from the Economist. It's about Robert Scoble, a guy who works for Microsoft as a "Technical Evangelist", which apparently means that he spends his time writing a blog for the Evil Empire (although I notice that his blog isn't hosted by Microsoft itself). There's an ever-growing number of them, apparently, and they are being written by ever more prominent executives (there are persistent rumours that Bill Gates himself has one).

What are we supposed to get from these things? Are they ever likely to say anything interesting (and I mean really interesting - to be honest I'm not all that interested if the number two at Sun Microsystems launches attacks on Hewlett-Packard from his weblog)? Would you read one?

The reason I mention it, and the reason that my company had an article on this posted on the homepage of the intranet, is because this is something they are trying to encourage themselves. We, as employees, are being actively encouraged to start up our own weblogs. They are hosted on the company servers, and the authors of every single one of the thousands of blogs already there are readily identifiable by their company email address.

I started one today.

We all know what happened to the Woolamaloo blogger, don't we? Sacked by Waterstones for some extremely innocuous comments about his employer made entirely in passing on an otherwise completely inoffensive blog (he's got a new job, by the way).

I think we all moan about our jobs to some degree on our blogs, don't we? I don't really talk about mine directly, but if you were determined enough, you would be able to find out where I worked pretty easily, I think (you could ask me, for starters - it's not a secret). Is there really anything on here that might get me the sack? My taste in music?

So I started one.

I'm not entirely sure where it's going to take me, and I think I may get bored of it pretty quickly. I put two posts up today, and I have a feeling that it's going to be basically about work, although I am going to make some effort to make it a little more interesting than that sounds. For starters, I decided that I was going to give it a name - there are loads already on there, and all bar a couple were called "My Weblog" (and the others were called things like "Wireless Network Protocols" or "My Life in ERP"). With a hat-tip to Tom, I decided to call mine "Mother I Can Feel The Soil Falling Over My Head", which is already making it stand out (which I'm not altogether sure is a good thing.)

Ah. To hell with it.

I'm throwing this open to the floor. Any suggestions for topics?

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On the CD front this week I've picked up a couple and rediscovered a couple of old ones buried away somewhere:
- Clearlake - Lido (thanks to Damo and Serena Wombat for this - it's excellent)
- Radio 4 - Gotham
- Stereophonics - Word Gets Around (after talking about it last week and realising I left my copy with an ex-girlfriend about 6 years ago... )

The rediscoveries were excellent. They were CDs that I picked up about 15 years ago in a bargain bin for 99p each because they had no sleeves.

- Kraftwerk - Radioactivity
- The Stranglers - Greatest Hits
- Leonard Cohen - Greatest Hits
- Robert Johnson - Delta Blues Legend

I'm especially pleased with the Leonard Cohen, as I was looking at this very album on Saturday and very nearly picked it up for a fiver.
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I was at Twickenham yesterday. My girlfriend is a French citizen.

Pah.