Talia and Brand New Liam

Talia and Brand New Liam,
originally uploaded by toddotodd.

Testing out photo layouts. We'll see how this looks.

Talia (2 1/2) and Liam (2 months) 

The Start of Something, I Don't Know What

There's a lot of crap flowing through my head at all times. Seems to me that a blog would be a good place to flush it out. This came crystal clear to me yesterday when I moderated a panel about the world of blogs and how they affect companies, employees, journalists, etc. I felt like a horrible impostor since the panel was a pretty cool, talented and blog-savvy group of guys (Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo, Mike Manuel from Media Guerrilla, and Michael Bazeley from the Merc) and I don't have one myself. Therefore, here's my toe dipping in the water.

The panel itself was a lot of fun. There have been a few people fired from their jobs for blogging and most public companies are shitting themselves trying to figure out how to respond to the fairly incredible growth of the medium. We tried to explore the issue in less than an hour by focusing on ethics, blogger responsibilities, how PR people should work with media bloggers, and how corporations should figure out a way to embrace their employees who blog rather than try to ignore the train that's coming their way. Jeremy made a great comment that I thought crystallized the problem. Responding to one of my deeply riveting and insightful questions, he said that he is essence at times an "unauthorized spokesperson" for his company. Now, he is far more in touch with his company's PR department and management than most bloggers, but I thought that comment summed up every corporate lawyer's worst fears about blogs. Companies spend millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours building their brand, developing communications policies, protecting their intellectual property... The idea of a few or even hundreds of "unauthorized spokespeople" talking about their companies is a problem they can neither fully grasp nor stand to ignore.

Anyway, I had a good time. I think the audience did as well. So that's my first post. Knowing how my brain works, I'll probably fill this up pretty quick and then ignore it for several weeks and then fill it up again. I'll also probably post an obscene number of pictures of my kids. But they're really cute, so you can live with it.