christopher: regarding version control, that’s certainly one approach, but honestly i’d prefer to keep SEC style document retention out of blogging. fact is that if someone wants to alter their blog after the fact, there are typically easy ways to do it - version control or no version control.

regarding the on topic idea - totally in agreement. i think charlene’s idea is a good one if you plan on being consistent and steadily off topic rather than occasionally. mitch kapor, for example, split his political commentary off into a separate blog - and i fully agree with that. ditto for me if i planned on writing about the red sox every day for a full season - that would be best served by its own space. but a little variety here and there is a very good thing, IMO. if you have constant commentary on something off topic, it probably means that it may need its own space.

charlene: totally agree that too much off topic blogging does erode trust, and i also appreciate that that code’s a starting point. i’d use a different starting point - particularly for in-house corporate blogging - but we can agree to disagree there i think. but in general, i’d rather have too much personality come through in a blog than too little. i’m sure you can appreciate this, given the non-Forrester bio bits in your about page.

if i were to revise the code (and i do realize that i could, using the wiki), i’d cut it down to the 3 or 4 rules i agreed with and then adjust on a case by case basis. too many of the rules, IMO, are problematic for different consituencies. but maybe it’s just me

This is an interesting point. I actually broke my blog into two http://www.baus.net/ and http://www.tahoeblog.com/

The reason I did this is that it became apparent to me that while some people cared about my technical interests, others just wanted to know what the conditions were like in Tahoe.

There is an intersection of the two groups, but it is fairly small. Although a lot of geeks from the BA go snowboarding in Tahoe ; )

I think the solution here is to provide a revision history for the document. I keep my entries under revision control, but haven’t exposed the document history to the user, although that information exists.