The Business Blog at Intuitive.com

Dave Taylor has been involved with the online world since 1980 and is recognized globally as an expert on both technical and business issues. He has been published over a thousand times, launched four Internet-related startup companies, has written twenty business and technical books and holds both an MBA and MS Ed. He's a columnist for the Boulder Daily Camera and Linux Journal and frequently appears in other publications both online and in print. Additionally, Dave maintains four weblogs: The Business Blog at Intuitive.com, Ask Dave Taylor, Dave On Film, and GoFatherhood. Based in beautiful Boulder, Colorado, Dave is an award-winning speaker, sought after conference and workshop participant and frequent guest on radio and podcast programs, as well as active member of his community and busy single father to three children.

Best place to host an academic blog?

I received the following email from a reader:

"I am reading your Google Idiot's Guide. My husband teaches in the Legal Studies Department at a local State College. We want more students to find OUR program. Should he create a blog specifically relevant to his own department's page, or does the blog need to be associated with the college itself through the home page? He is prepared to blog several times a week, maybe even every day if we can help to guide students to his program directly!"

If you're a Fortune 500 company, for example, do you want to have your employees blogging under the corporate banner (which therefore risks them saying things that might not be in alignment with the corporate stance on specific topics) or would you prefer them to be independent, blogging on blogger.com, Facebook, etc (where you have no idea what they're saying and where they can criticize your company or even deny a relationship)?

Academia is even more nuanced because it's widely accepted that individuals are free agents, moving from teaching position to teaching position, college to college, as it best helps their career. Get too tightly associated with a single academic institution and it's going to be very difficult to ensure that your reputation travels with you when you take your next job at some other college.

In a large organization, departments can often end up being analogous to individuals too: do you promote your department, possibly at the cost of the entire company being promoted, or do you throw in your lot with the mothership?

Which brings us to your dilemma.

The first question I have is how autonomous are departments within the college? If there's an existing culture of doing your own thing, then it's considerably less of a big deal than if it's a tight, insular organization.

I'm also curious whether the tone in your query of "winner take all" is consistent with how you see this? If you're blogging on behalf of the student, then the win is them finding the right class and department of study, not them necessarily finding your program.

Without further information, I suggest that you aim for the compromise of having a blog in your own department, but ask the school to link to it from the institution's home page or other more visible pages.

Let us know what you decide and how it goes!

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