Blogging essential to a career?

I saw over on Scoble’s blog that Bubba mentioned me and the Boston Globe article about blogging and how that is intertwined with bloggers’ careers. I don’t think blogging is necessarily essential – actually, I think it’s much more complicated than that.

In general, my opinion is that if you’ve got nothing to hide, blogging openly will help both you and your future employer(s). Through your blog, people will be able to see what you’re interested in and what kind of personality you have; I think of it as kind of a free market, where buyers and sellers can browse around and (hopefully) make more ideal matches. It works both ways too; if a company gets into blogging, then potential employees can kick the tires a bit before they decide whether to apply – good matches will try even harder to get in, bad matches will self-select out. (We’re trying this out on Plaxo’s blog right now, we’ll see if it works out )

Some might look at my experience and think: “but look, you got yourself into a world of trouble, wasn’t that a huge negative?”

But in actuality, getting fired from Google might be one of the best things that happened for my career (and not just because it made me famous infamous). It was clear that there was a culture mismatch when I worked at Google – I wanted to be open and transparent to customers, while their strategy was to strive to be opaque. Now at Plaxo, there’s a much better fit culturally, and career-wise it’s a much better opportunity as well.

So for me personally, the article is dead on. But I would hesitate to say that it applies to everyone; I’d say blogging can boost your career, but think before you leap