Business and blogging and humor: can the three peacefully coexist?

Television shows like The Office and comic strips like “Dilbert” make fun of the business world. Now both The Office and Dilbert are publishing blogs, but it’s not what you might expect.

Today I found the Dilbert blog at http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/. The entries by Scott Adams are both funny and thoughtful posts, but they don’t have any relevance to business. Some of the topics posted are “ My Invisible Caveman Friend” and “ I Hate My Guts,” but there’s no mention of the Pointy Haired Boss or of Tina the Tech Writer. In fact, as far as I saw, there’s no Dilbert characters mentioned at all.

I did a Google search on “funny blogs” and came up with around 51,000,000 hits. I guess there are a lot of people in the world who think they are funny or at least that they have a lot of funny incidents about which to write.

I read through some of the search results to find blogs that could be somewhat business related, not obscene, and, most importantly, funny. I would venture to say that most of the stuff isn’t business related, not even the funny blogs posted on business web sites.

Out on the Microsoft Developers’ Network, I finally found a clean entry from Dan Fernandez, the Lead Product Manager for Visual Studio Express. One of the entries that day is about Dan's dislike for candy corn; the comments that follow the blog are pretty good too.

Tom Kyte, from Oracle, has a blog at http://tkyte.blogspot.com/. Not too bad, and he even talks about writing code, negative databases, and his trip to Waltham to talk to the Northeast Oracle Users Group. His comments about the rental car made me giggle.

I’m baffled, though. Why aren’t there more blogs that talk about the poor quality of any software program, especially a competitor’s? Why don’t we poke fun at the CEO, for all of our customers to see, right there on the Internet? Why doesn’t someone share a funny story about the last group outing to a baseball game? When we share the stories around the table at lunch, everyone laughs. Why shouldn’t we share that merriment with the whole world?

Well, maybe it’s because making fun of your co-worker/manager/director/vice president/CEO/customer - by name - could get you in trouble.

Or maybe it’s because I didn’t look hard enough.

Do you know where the funny business blogs are? Then be a good citizen and share!