Some of the same filtering technologies that block SPAM from getting to you will now be applied to keeping your trap mouth shut. (Hey, we’ve trained the SPAM technologies so well they will be getting used against us!) Blog readers of Jeff Nolan saw first hand reporting of these types of company products at the annual Demo conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. With respect to this particular subject, you can look here, here, and here on Jeff’s blog.
Ephraim Schwartz has an article just yesterday portraying his impressions of the growing trend underlying these products. Schwartz writes,
"This year’s show heightened my awareness to one trend in particular: high anxiety over what employees can publish in both
e-mail and blogs. There was a slew of products that monitor employee communications in one way or another, mapping them to
corporate policy on everything from offensive language and sexual harassment to outright prohibition of personal e-mail."
So if companies can’t get comfortable with their corporate policies on blogging, soon there will be no need to express the rules. Just encode the rules explicitly in monitoring software or train the devices using language processing and Bayesian rules like some SPAM filters. Based on Schwartz’s article, imagine:
- pop-up windows appearing on employees’ screens telling them to reconsider what they are typing at any given moment,
- managers getting scorecards of how many email and blog infractions an employee has, or
- the legal department being automatically tied in the loop to approve what people write.
Blogging is big, but Big Brother is not too far off.
Steve Shu
Managing Director, S4 Management Group