In many ways it is a step in a good direction that many companies use internal “collaboration portals’ with chat forums, wikis, etc. But it also segregates these corporate communities from the public web. Certainly, company-internal proprietary knowledge and business discussions belong behind the firewall, but that is only a fraction of the knowledge sharing going on at work.

It is unfortunate that even non-proprietary conversations about Open Source tools and technologies get separated from the public internet. I think at least the so-called “personal blogs” that many corporate collaboration portals offer belong into the worldwide “blogosphere”, not on intranets or other “walled gardens” systems.

Judging from my own experience with oldoldo.wordpress.com, bloggers and professional software developers actually benefit from using public blogging services. Platforms like WordPress are very good at making articles findable via search engines like Google, allow categorization, attachment management, feed update notifications into Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. And on the whole, a public blog generates more useful feedback and discussions than limiting the same thing to the people who happen to work for the same employer.

To directly notify coworkers about new posts on my blog, I simply post the link (i.e. the hopefully permanent URL) on my employers collaboration site, not the content itself.

And if I ever change jobs, I will still have access to my own posts. That certainly helps an older guy like me, with a weak memory for details … :)