The Blog Council : Learning to blog the responsible way

Cisco, Microsoft, Dell, and a number of other large corporations have launched a so-called Blog Council. Best I can tell from their press release they’re going to create rules and standards for ethics-based corporate blogs so we’ll know how to use blogs and engage the blogosphere the right way. “We can work together to develop model policies that set the standard for corporate blogging excellence,” says Sean O’Driscoll, General Manager, Community Support Services for Microsoft.

Better hide this news from the state bar regulators and the large law firm legal marketing professionals. They love creating rules and standards for things they don’t understand. Can you imagine the likes of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, Reed Smith and Baker & McKenzie getting together with state bar ethics regulators to develop standards for lawyer blogging excellence? That way firms who had never blogged would know to use blogs and engage in the blogsophere in a responsible way.

Better than invent a new standard, let’s just us the Airbag Department of Security Blog Advisory System. It was carefully developed last year in response to Tim O’Reilly’s Blogger Code of Conduct. Though designed so that blog publishers could alert their users to the threat condition of words being used on a blog, with a few tweaks and a call to Greg Storey it may do the job.

Rather than trample free speech, we post warnings to protect the innocent. Take a look.

I’ve been approached by more than one lawyer to sit on a council or advisory board to develop standards for ethical law blogging. I’m serious. I declined as I did when they called to develop standards for the ethical use of a fax machine. We survived.