15 January 2008

Day-job blog

I can't get away from it! Blogging is now part of my work life as well as my ‘real life’.

I started my new job as an editor at Te Ara, the online encyclopedia of NZ, last week and one of my tasks is to manage the Te Ara blog: Signposts.

Mainly I’ll be editing and publishing other people’s blog posts, but last Friday, when we heard that Edmund Hillary had died, all the usual writers were nowhere to be seen. And so the task of writing a post about Sir Ed fell to me.

You can admire it here.

5 comments:

Karen said...

I so enjoyed blogging as part of my job. That can be my new excuse for dismissing jobs adverts - it doesn't say I can blog, bor-ring :)
Have you been instructed on your voice? At least it needn't be corporate, but you are Representing EnZed and its confused self-image. Perhaps you can single-handedly reshape Nz's image from Man in Bush to Woman at Computer. Not that a Sir Ed post can do that :)

Anonymous said...

Hey, there's no piccie of you under bloggers. We demand a Hellie picture.

Helen Rickerby said...

Hi Karen!

Maybe if you got a job somewhere that didn't have a blog, you could work your way into writing a blog for them. I don't know if there are that many jobs yet that are all about blogging, but you never know. I can't remember whether it actually mentioned the blog in the ad for my job - possibly it didn't - so you can't alway judge a job by its job ad.

Yeah, the tone of Signposts is actually a lot more playful and personal than I expected. I'd kind of assumed, because it was coming out of a government department, that it would be more formal and anonymous. This is definitely more interesting.

About the pic - there ought to be one up, but I didn't manage to get myself organised today. I'm actually thinking of scanning one of the drawings that you've done of me and using that as my picture. I have to have a hunt and see which one will be good.

Speaking of blogs, I notice that you have set one up (rather a long time ago too)- are you going to use it? Indeed, it would be easier than writing lots of emails. Or as well as writing lots of emails?

Hugs, Helen

Tim Jones said...

I've been enjoying Signposts. I too am a "work blogger" as well as a "home blogger" - I've had a freer hand than I expected with the Webstruxure blog, although I do run everything past the boss before posting it. The difficulty is finding an audience - although, according to Google Analytics, our readership is gradually increasing.

Helen Rickerby said...

Hi Tim

I just had a look at your day-job blog - it does seem to have a very personal tone for a business blog. I think this is a good thing - it makes it more interesting for everyone.

Isn't Google Analytics fun! I love all the graphs and things, but my favourite bit is the map that shows you which countries your traffic is coming from - the darker-green a country is, the more hits you're getting from that country. Very pretty.