As a freelance developer, I am often brought on location to work with clients/development teams on a number of different projects. For the most part, these projects span several weeks, if not months. Joining a team in this manner forms both new acquaintances and friendships. Often, the activities we engage in outside of work roll into parts of conversations during work.

Several months ago I was working on a 4 month contract. It was with a client I’ve had for several years now so they, staff and management, were aware of my blog and the things I was working on. Something struck me one day as I was posting up an entry I had written, “Will they see the timestamp on this and feel I was not working on work-related things?”.

For the most part, I write most of my entries late at night, around midnight or so. I tend to prepare several but post them over time throughout the day (there’s reasons for that which I’ll cover some other time). As a result, it’s possible to find lengthy posts in the middle of the day even though I hadn’t written it right then.

For that specific contract, I was billing by the hour. I wasn’t particularly worried that the client would be checking up on me or that they would even accuse me, however, it did raise an eyebrow. It seems entirely possible that if a dispute had arisen, the frequency and volume of your posts could actually be a liability if a client wished to go over matters with a fine-toothed comb.

I know from past fiascos with clients that regardless of the quality of your work, once a client is unhappy with some aspect (be it failed marketing, overzealous expectations, etc.) they come back and blame only one group, the developers.

This line of thinking was resurrected by a post recently made by Ross Mayfield regarding Corporate Blogging and the Fear of being fired. There has been some debate that blogging will have control issues that limit its growth. Specifically, employees will be fearful of truly airing their thoughts, in either public or private forums, when their employer could learn of the comments. Dave Winer points out an interesting counterpoint, the desire to climb the corporate ladder would serve as a considerable source of motivation to participate in these forums - the desire to have a good reputation is more powerful than the fear of falling down.

Ross sums it up as follows:

The prospect of being fired up (a cheesy cheerleader way of saying promoted) is as much a motivator as being fired. Whether large scale adoption of corporate blogging will occur outside tech because of control has less to do with characteristics of industries than leadership. It happens first in information intensive industries, but can happen anywhere a manager wants to gain competitive advantage and is willing not just to give up some control, but recongize its already lost. The same dynamic already happens with email as publishing, with less transparency.

Source: Ross Mayfield, “Corporate Blogging and the Boss”