Time to chime in to the discussion - Don, Ray and Joshua - about employee weblogs. It's a beautiful spring weekend, I'm sitting on the deck, definitively on my own time - so I can say what I want, right? Free, unencumbered?

Well, not quite. If I had a really interesting life, there'd be plenty to talk about which didn't cross over the work-related boundary. But as it is, my private life is fairly private, and many of the other things which keep my mind occupied are all about technology, and (honestly) I enjoy building code during my working hours. There's so much to talk about there. Groove Web Services, to which John just shipped a significant maintenance version. Groove Mobile Workspace for SharePoint (where I just fixed a number of important bugs too). The cutting edge is especially fascinating - having spent recent weeks experimenting with InfoPath integration, there's a lot to discuss.

Still, that's not what my weblog is for. If you want to see the current state of InfoPath and Groove togetherness (it's primitive but wildly hip), go to TechEd and drop by our booth.

So, what is this blog for? Wish I knew.
When I started blogging, it was experimental, with a frisson of self-promotion; a little later, with Cabezal, there was very little distinction between work and non-work life, and certainly no legal impediments to opening the kimono in detail. Now, it's simply a way to join in a few public discussions, in the full knowledge that

• very few people take any notice,
• everything is public and permanent, and
• someday everyone's "work identity" will have a weblog-type journal attached, so let's help steer the form that will take.

Maybe I should expand on that last assertion. If I have an important concept on the back burner, and haven't discussed it in the office, that's not yet company IP - is it?