Enabling Management Oversight in Corporate Blog Space

When a modern corporation empowers its staff to use blogs to communicate with colleagues, partners, suppliers and customers, the role of management in exercising oversight and guidance over the public speech of staff becomes dramatically challenged. This paper describes a computational solution to the interpretation of human-readable blog publishing policy documents into semi-automatic disconformance checking of corporate blog entries. The disconformance interpretation is regarded as an abductive reasoning, which is operationalized by information flow computations. Using a socio-cognitively motivated representation of shared knowledge, and applying an appropriate information flow inference mechanism from a normative perspective, a mechanism to automatically detect potentially non-conforming blog entries is detailed. Candidate non-conforming blog entries are flagged for a human to make a judgment on whether they should be published. Experiments on data from a public corporate blog demonstrate an encouraging performance of the proposed methodology.