I’ve been told (or at least like to believe) that I’m an entertaining speaker, and I’ll be doing a little bit more in the coming months. One conference that is relevant to many readers is being put on by some folks including John Mack, and it’s called PharmaBlogging, and I’ll be giving the overview presentation on healthcare and medical blogs.
The conference is November 14-15, 2005 at the Sheraton University City Hotel in Philadelphia, PA and of course it has its own blog. Go there to look, but most of the conference is about how to use and work with blogs if you are in the pharma businesses. (Yup, the little box to the right here is a reminder…)
Meanwhile, I’ll be getting some audio and video clips up on the site soon, so you can all see what my hairstyle was like back in the day I had some!
Categories: Uncategorized
Frankly, I’m irritated about how large corporations are both trying to appropriate the blog as a communications medium while subtly threatening people who might be using blogs for the purposes of free speech.
See this article:
http://www.timesleader.com/mld/timesleader/business/technology/12634035.htm
So, 1/5 of corporations are reading blogs for “extra information” on people? And I suppose the implication is this extra information will be judged secretly, without asking job seekers about their blogs during interviews or considering the corporate practices that channel people into seeking a public voice? The intention is to silence protest and dissent instead of fixing the problem.
There’s no surprise in the corporate preference to eliminate inconveniences instead of listening to them. However, for marketing and pr departments to appropriate the voice of the public citizen, while engaging in a policy of repressing the authentic voice through HR “professional advice”, is intolerable! Blogs are about transparency – empowering the individual and declaring the suppressed truth from the margins. Corporate blogs are about faking transparency: adopting the roll of the individual, truth-speaking blogger to distribute corporate propaganda and key messages.
Right now all the legal action I see is about excluding bloggers from the protections of the free media. If we want a free society, we should be protecting the place of the blogger and developing the legal tools to deflect the corporate threat to incorporate the secret evaluation of blogs into their hiring practices.