Song of innocence and experience
SFist is running Irina Slutsky‘s interview with Mark Jen who was fired for putting information about Google on line. The lesson he learned?
I wasn’t sensitive to the media at the time. My experience with blogs has been a personal experience, as in you read the blogs of your friends or your family, and that’s about the circulation. I didn’t actually know that blogging was becoming a huge movement and there was a huge community coming around it. But now I know.
He’s now at Plaxo. Plaxo’s attitude towards blogging:
Plaxo recognizes the value of the value of employees connecting with the community. There are rules—you can’t talk about sensitive or confidential information. But as far as personal feelings on things, that’s ok.
So, he’s learned not only where to draw the line, but that there are lines. That’s a tough lesson for people brought up in the blurry, open world of blogging, and a big part of me is sorry that anyone has to learn it.
Here’s “Nurse’s Song” by William Blake because, well, why not?
When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
And everything else is still.
“Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down
And the dews of night arise;
Come, come, leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies.”
“No, no, let us play, for it is yet day
And we cannot go to sleep;
Besides, in the sky the little birds fly
And the hills are all cover’d with sheep.”
“Well, well, go & play till the light fades away
And then go home to bed.”
The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh’d
And all the hills echoed
I love this poem because the poem is itself so innocent. Yet the nurse is so complex: An adult who mediates the darkness that looms over the scene. How do you know what is un-see-able over the horizon? At best you have a nurse and not, say, a regulatory agency. (Sorry, I’m just back from Isenberg‘s Freedom to Connect and it’s still, well, looming over me. In a good way.)[Technorati tags: google blogs f2c WilliamBlake]
