I was just surfing around Macromedia DevNet and noticed they were plugging Sean’s blog on the first page. Given some of the latest events with employee dismissals and what-not over blogging related issues, I find the idea that Macromedia is embracing their employees’ personal blogs to be very refreshing.
There are certainly all kinds of employee blogs out there, but it seems that most of them get filtered through the PR department before being posted. Said blogs also seem to usually be some half-bit blogging incarnation posted in a dusty corner of a corporate website. However it’s quite obvious that many of the Macromedia employee’s maintain their own personal blogs. It’s pretty empowering to read content by employees as well as engage people in discussions via comments and e-mail who develop the product that you use on a daily basis. Every now and then you may even notice something you’ve mentioned in such a discussion or blog post get implemented as a hotfix or new feature on down the road.
Anyhow, I just thought I’d give an ‘atta boy to the great community Macromedia has been building in the past few years, as well as keeping from becoming one of those big machine-like corporations who focus on the dollar rather than customer satisfaction and fanaticism at the end of the day.
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Oh please… Macromedia created those blogs all in one go when MX came out, it’s a marketing operation. As for Macromedia not acting like a big corporation, you must be joking. Of course they are in the business of making money, or else they wouldn’t have many shareholders would they?
Thanks for pissing on the party, “rathernotsay”. I’m sure we all needed to be treated to a cold dose of your cynicism after reading Brandon’s post. Yes, Macromedia are in business to make money. Yes, employee blogs CAN have a nice marketing effect. And none of that diminishes one iota from the points in Brandon’s point! Get over yourself!
Thank you, rathernotsay for being completely uninformed and showing why you’d rather not say who you are. Sean was asked to do a blog and he agreed only on the terms that Macromedia would have no control over the content and that he could totally dis Macromedia in the blog without getting in any trouble. This is probably why Seans’ blog was mentioned specifically.
For the record, I started my blog in June 2002 after Jer (Jeremy Allaire, my boss at the time) asked on the CFGURU mailing list for ColdFusion developers to consider starting personal blogs.
Yes, it’s my personal blog - not the opinions of Macromedia - and I cover a lot of issues beyond just Macromedia-related stuff. And, yes, sometimes I’ve posted stuff on my blog that has raised eyebrows internally. I do try to keep it on-topic tho’ (unlike some of the Flash-related blogs!) but it is amusing to see the greatest number of comments on stuff like the color scheme of the blog or the occasional politically-inspired postings.
As it happens - having just looked it up - my blog appeared two weeks after the Studio MX launch (which was May 29, 2002) although all my early blogging focused squarely on ColdFusion related issues. In fact most of the other MX products hardly get a look in on my blog. I even discuss - shock, horror - the competition!