We know this to be true because Dublin-based Research and Markets says so. Michael O’Connor Clarke has already begun the initial fisking of Research and Markets: Companies Need to Raise Employee Awareness Regarding Blogging and Associated Threat, but I can’t stop myself from weighing in on the subject. In fact, I have started a whole new category just for this post: Blog Fuckwittery.

Anyone involved in introducing new technologies to business is aware of the fear that mere newness can create. Even if the thing you’re dealing with is not new, the fact that it may look new or have a new name causes a certain risk-averse portion of the corporate population to come out in boils and see visions of their firstborn being eaten alive by Beelzebub with a warm Chianti and French fries.

This report is the very essence of that fear of the unknown. Over on Flackster, Michael deftly deconstructs the abstract, so I shan’t repeat his words here, apart from these ones:

“Viruses, worms, Trojan horses, Remote Access Trojans, hackers, organized crime, terrorists, and others continue to make the Internet a dangerous place due to fraud, extortion, denials of service, identity theft, espionage, and other crimes. Now, blogging is emerging as a threat to the Internet user community.”

Blogs are like terrorists? Like viruses? Sorry. My flabber is too gasted to permit any kind of rational response here.

Quite. My personal flabber feels currently like it’s been taken out back and beaten senseless with a cricket bat.

The table of contents hints further at the evil that blogs do:

- Introduction
- Notice to Clients
- Blog Policies & Procedures Needed
- What is a Blog?
- Who Uses Blogs?
- Why Do Employees Use Blogs?
- Why Companies are Vulnerable to Blogging
- When Do Employees Use Blogs?
- Is Blog Use A Risky Behavior for the Enterprise?
- Home, Office Blog Linkage
- Internet Crime Overview: These Entities Can Scan
- Blogs, in Addition to the Crimes Noted
- Three Acceptable Use Policy Variants for Blogging and Bloggers
- Blog Acceptable Use Policy: ZERO TOLERANCE
- Blog Acceptable Use Policy: LIMITED USE
- Blog Acceptable Use Policy: PERMISSIONED USE

Note the use of inflammatory language, such as ‘vulnerable’, ‘risky’, ‘crime’, ‘entities’, and ‘zero tolerance’. This is using the language of the terror alert in reference to blogs in order to whip up anti-blog sentiment and trade off businesses’ fear of being somehow abused by bloggers, a fear which is quite frankly ludicrous.

There is undoubtedly a lot of sense in having a blog policy for your employees so that everyone knows where they stand, but if your employees have signed an NDA, yet you don’t trust them not to disclose your secrets, then one has to wonder why you are employing them in the first place. If they haven’t signed an NDA, maybe you should think hard about what you’re actually afraid of.

Opening a dialogue with staff who blog is easy, need not be confrontational, and should result in an acceptable use policy that both parties can live with. Yet if we take this report at face value - and until I actually get a copy of it, that’s all I can do - it seems to imply that blogs are all evil, evil things which will induce crime and corporate vandalism and spying and, oh fuck, entities! Which scan! Ffs.

Oh, I’m trying so hard not to get all ad hominem here, but the people that wrote this obviously have their head stuck up their own colon so far that their eyes are brown. I suspect that these people have no real understanding of blogging or the blogosphere at all. They conflate potential problems with blogs* and problems with emails (viruses, worms, Trojan horses etc.), phishing sites (fraud, identity theft) and hackers (denial of service attacks). I’m still not sure where the organised crime, terrorists or extortion come into it, but they are nice scary words which look good on the page.

The thing is, if there is anything nasty going on with blogs, it has nothing to do with viruses, worms, Trojans, phishing, fraud, identity theft, DoS attacks, blah blah blah, and much more to do with bloggers saying things that companies wish they hadn’t.

And porn. Strange how they haven’t mentioned porn.

Blogs are not a threat to business. Stupidity is a threat to business. Ergo, this report is a threat to business.

I can’t wait to read it, to see how they justify all this fuckwittery.

*I sincerely doubt that blogging is an important tool for corporate spies what with the traceable and non-ephemeral nature of blogs, but if there are any espionage experts who can disabuse me of this notion, please do fess up. I’d like to know: Blogspot or Typepad?