Flutterby™! : employee blogging

Doc Searls had an extensive quote from and commentary on a reply by Kent Newsome to an earlier exchange:

In sum, most businesses don't trust their employees enough to allow them to blog.

Well, yeah. And most businesses don't trust their sales guys to develop software. People specialize, but more to the point the language of the consumer is only the language of the software developers or the engineering department when the consumer is a software developer or an engineer. Interfaces between departments are hard enough, interfaces between producers and consumers are even tougher, especially since there's little incentive on the consumer's part to ask for clarification if there's something there they don't understand; the consumer can always just go to your competitor who is speaking their language.