Over here, Euan Semple welcomes Richard Sambrook, the BBC’s Director of Global News, to the (public) blogosphere, noting that he’s been writing a must-read internal blog at the Beeb for some time now. And Euan also notes that it’s “no mean challenge” for Richard to decide what to put out here, in the “wild”.

Euan, as is often the case, is not wrong. As I’ve moaned here before, the long silences on this blog are often a direct consequence of being immersed in some of the most interesting work I get to do. Mrs Tosh thinks I should stick to writing about cats, or coffee, because the rest is just a slow torture.

Earlier this year, for instance, I was on a self taught crash course in, essentially, setting up a small radio station; buying a studio-full of stuff for the launch of our podcast schedule, recruiting people and working out what would work in terms of the content. Not only would it have been therapeutic to write here about that process, but it might have been useful too - I do, of course, believe (indeed, know for sure, given what some of you do for a living) that my readers know more about radio than I do. Maybe you guys could have helped. Maybe you could help with the things I’m working on right now.

But, of course, we live in a competitive world, and my spilling my guts about what was going on inside GU Towers would rightly lead to something of an inquest. Such is the pace of change in this industry that, earlier this year, even to say I was thinking lots about radio, and what works and what doesn’t, would give a heads-up as to what we were doing. And, although it’s not very 2.0 to say so, that simply wouldn’t be a very smart thing to do.

Why the secrecy? Lots of folk write lots of stuff about this business, after all. Trouble is, the business of blogging about the intersection of technology, journalism and social change is one that’s dominated by academics and consultants; people who make their living from advising. They’re free to discuss whatever they like and, indeed, it’s good for their business that they do, because they are in the knowledge business, not the delivery business.

It’s a seductive world, because it’s about ideas, not the more difficult business of implementation. The latter is less about the heroic individual, and more about the unglamorous world of meeting rooms, progress charts and compromise.

This is why I’m always so sceptical about the power of “business blogging” - I simply don’t think any sensible, successful business is going to spill the beans on what’s really going on. It’s frequently either too dull, or too messy, to expose. What would the shareholders think, let alone the customers, if every fruitless sales pitch or failed technologcial experiment was shown off to the world?

Back in this business, the ideas the new media gurus have been discussing are starting to settle down now anyway. The period of great debate about where this business should go is at an end, at least for those who have been paying attention (for those not paying attention: the future is the PDF. Trust me). As our own Simon Waldman put it, in his farewell post on his own work blog:

“What started out as vague concepts and half baked ideas in the blogosphere have now become standard fodder for every media exec in town. Some really believe it. Others just mouth the words as if it was a speech in Greek they’ve learned off by heart. But the overall message is pretty much the same.

It’s not that new ideas aren’t going to pop up - just that there’s already a huge backlog between the things that we are all talking about and what we’re doing.

The net result of this is that those of us who work within media organisations - even those of us who like nothing more than spouting off in public - have to shut up, pull down the shutters and start delivering stuff.”

None of this, of course, is a criticism of Richard or his blog, which manages to be an interesting read thus far, without any suggestion that he’s spilling the Beeb’s darkest secrets. I just hope he has more success than me in keeping the flow of things regular, without the wasteful process I go through all the time; writing about what’s on my mind, only to find it really would be for the best if I just closed the window without clicking on save…

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