Ask HN: Does your employer own your blog content?

[wmockbill]

As part of my job I was researching MySQL's support for JSON data types. I put together a document to explain to the other devs the various functions that you can use along with simple examples.

As the document grew, it seemed that it would make a nice blog post that I could put up somewhere. At which point one of my colleagues pointed out that because this was done during work hours, I dont own the content and would need express permission from my employer before I could do this.

Sadly my employer doesnt have a tech blog, as that would have been the obvious best place to put it. I've asked for permission, and it's more than likely they will be fine with it (they tend to be good with things like this). But this got me thinking about other bloggers.

So my question goes out to all you people who have a personal blog; I assume you do some research of your content during work hours (as part of your job) and then blog about it at some point.

What relationship do you have in place with your employer? or is it all done in your own time?

Bonus: while you're at it, which blogging site do you use/recommend?

[geofft]

Your knowledge is yours; that's what lets you get hired by another company while making use of skills developed at your current company, and that's what lets you talk about your previous work at interviews. Your employment agreement probably carves out exceptions for things like trade secrets and customer lists, but not for just understanding MySQL.

Creative expressions are subject to copyright. Ideas, facts, and knowledge are not. Therefore, any actual writing or code samples you do at work are likely owned by your employer, but things you have learned are not.

I recently learned some interesting quirks of the select system call at work and wrote up a two-page document about it for internal circulation. I'll likely write up a personal blog post also, but on my own time without reference to the text I wrote at work. (The text will have to be different anyway, because it won't reference the specific OS and kernel versions we have at work, nor the specific recommendations I had for what to do about it.)

Your employment agreement might have more to say about this.

[wmockbill]

Thanks for your comments

I'm going through my employer agreement to see if there is anything on this subject.

Early on as I was putting together my notes I got the feeling it has the potential for a blog post, so I made the document very generic, and was careful not to mention anything about our internal data, DB versions, OS etc..

So it would be somewhat difficult to re-word the document, maybe I could change the example data, but even then the overlap would be quite large.

Next time I will do a company specific one, and keep the generic examples in my head to do in my own time.

Update: my agreement has a "Social Media Policy" section and so long as I mention that "the views expressed on the blog or Web site are yours (mine) alone and do not represent the views of the company", it would seem I'm OK