As I mentioned some time ago here, I’ve moved to a new WordPress blog, and started a podcast. I don’t plan on visiting the old neighborhood often, but a couple of things have made me a little notalgic, and so I came back.

The first thing was my trip last weekend to the West Ridge (Chicago) neighborhood where I spent most of my life, before moving to the suburbs. Driving along familiar roads brought back some happy memories.

The second thing was some emails from high school classmates. It’s been 30 years, and our school is scheduled to close, so classmates have been writing about the “good old days.”

It’s nice to remember the past, but I try hard to stay in the present.

I posted my third show today–a couple of days after posting my “fourth” show. The mixup was because I split a lengthy discussion at a recent IABC/Chicago Senior Communicator Forum into two podcasts. I meant for this one to be first, but finished editing the second one and posted it before this one was ready. Oops!

The Senior Communicator Forum concept is helpful to more seasoned communicators, because it provides an opportunity to share and hear ideas, issues and information with other people who “have been there.”

If you meet the qualifications, try to attend a Senior Communicator Forum in your area, or contact me for more information if you wish to start your own forum.

I’ve just posted a podcast on my podcast site. It is a portion of a conversation that I had on Jan. 31, 2007 with three other colleagues during a Senior Communicator Forum at VW Credit, Inc., in Libertyville, Ill.

This portion of the discussion centered around Kraft Food’s embrace of podcasting, and why it wasn’t as enthusiastic about blogging.

This was supposed to be the second part of my posts from the Senior Communicator Forum. The other part was going to be Show 3. So I actually have skipped to Show 4, and will post Show 3 later this week. Confused? Obviously not as much as I am!

I haven’t seen any commentary from bloggers regarding the article that appeared in Tuesday’s New York Times regarding the Wal-Mart IT employee who illicitly taped a NYT reporter’s call.

Maybe we are too information/opinion-saturated to react to something like this; particularly when it doesn’t seem to affect us. That’s why I think that we’re frogs in a pot.

If you’re unfamiliar with that analogy, it refers to the theory that a frog is easier to cook in a pot with cool water that is slowly, imperceptibly warmed. Put a frog in a pot of boiling water, and it will try to escape. Slowly heat the water, and the frog doesn’t notice until it is too late.

At the same time that professional communicators are pushing companies to embrace newer communication tools and technologies that increase collaboration and information-sharing, company management–led by Information Technology–is tightening controls over the access to, and dissemination of, information. They are “turning up the heat” within their companies, to make the connection to the frog analogy.

In the case of the Wal-Mart employee and the NYT reporter, the eavesdropping seems to have been unapproved by management, and the offending IT employee was sacked.  Here is the lead of the NY Times article:

Federal investigators are looking into the actions of a computer systems technician at Wal-Mart Stores who, over a period of several months, intercepted pager and text messages and also secretly taped telephone conversations between Wal-Mart employees and a reporter for The New York Times, the company said yesterday.

The IT employee was using security software offered by a software vendor. While he overstepped his authority, the point is that he probably heard about the monitoring option from the security software vendor during a sales pitch.

I can relate. Someone in IT management recently told me to be careful about the information I shared about the company in blog posts. That person showed me one of my posts, where I had shared some non-confidential facts about the company. He had obtained the link to my blog post from a security software vendor who was trying to sell a product. The pitch was, “Look at the information about your company that is available on the Internet.”

It’s not only the information shared on blogs that is getting IT scrutiny. IT knows (or can easily find out) what websites we view (blocking those that don’t meet some internal business standard), where we send emails, and when we inserted or removed portable media such as thumbdrives.  They can even “take over” your PC–as my company’s IT “help desk” does when I call with an issue. It’s not a far step, technologically speaking, to “eavesdrop” on employees.

Of course we scream when it happens. At first. Over time, with other things grabbing our attention, we don’t notice, or don’t react as strongly. Like frogs in a pot.