Michael Schrage, who’s one of my favorite tech columnists, has a column in CIO Magazine this week called Think Before you Blog. It makes an excellent point: that blogging by itself doesn’t necessarily enhance your image and can actually make you look bad. That’s why you have to think before you get online and start spouting.

A friend recently told me about an executive she knew who decided to get into blogging. He set up a blog on the company site and began raining invective on competitors and other players in his industry. He’d been told that bloggers were supposed to be controversial, but he apparently didn’t distinguish between being controversial and being an jerk. His blog was so obnoxious that it became a joke and an embarrassment inside the company. No one wanted to be around him. Only he thought he was doing the company a favor. The company didn’t. He was fired last December.

Blogging is about having something to say, not about insulting people.