I had an epiphany of sorts Friday morning as I was composing an email on my phone...a moment when many ideas clicked together into a vision of how new media/social media fits into life and career.

My coworker and I have been exploring twitter...and he's been asking me about how to get started blogging. Then, he sent his boss some links he had found on twitter and a link to my public blog post...I replied back to him about setting up an internal company blog:

...you could blog internally and email [boss]...then others could comment. Anything you learn from that--that you can talk about publicly--is material for your public blog which builds your personal, professional 'brand,' which, in addition to making you personally more marketable, connects you with people in the field, which makes you more valuable at [our company]. It is a symbiotic relationship and the way people increasingly need to manage their careers, I think. Old idea: recruit industry leaders to come work at cool company. New idea: company is cool because industry leaders work there/were made there.

That little burst of an idea is a different way of looking at work and career. I think it operationalizes Penelope Trunk's advice from nearly two years ago that Blogging [is] essential for a good career and takes it a step further, applying it to an intrapreneurship perspective on work.

For writers and consultants, it is easy to see how blogging helps you promote yourself. But for an employee in a company, it can feel a bit risky.

I was reluctant for a long time to reveal the existence of my blog to my coworkers for fear that people would think I was wasting my time blogging instead of working hard at my job. There are critical parts of my job that I need to cover that have no relevance to blogging. But increasingly, I see how "putting myself out there" is valuable to me and my company.

• We need to walk the walk. Not only as a company, but individually. I can take my ideas to management or I can live them by example. Better to say, see what I did blogging and how it helps us than to simply post ideas internally and hope they get adopted.
• Our value to our employer is not just our individual skills but the network we bring with us, whether that network is access to technical resources, sales leads, or best practices and new ideas from other companies doing similar things. But perhaps you don't have a network when you start working. You can't build a network if your entire existence is internal to your company. So promoting yourself is not just networking in case you have to find another job, it is developing a reputation among peers outside your company that makes you a star within your company. If you neglect that--because you feel it is somehow disloyal--you are burying yourself.
• Our job is to learn and the best way we learn new things is by getting outside our day-to-day tasks. Thinking of advancing yourself internally, it is not about what you think you might be able to do and pleading to a manager to "just give me a chance"--it is about what you actually do that will get you ahead. Asking for a chance to prove what you can do is a sign of weakness, not initiative. Doing is empowering.

Now I'm not saying we should just go nuts and spend all day blogging and twittering. You need to work these things into your work life and find ways to make them increase your effectiveness. You don't want to be "justifying" what you are doing, you want to be saying things like "We've already signed up two new members on our website because of twitter--how can we build on that?"

My first blog post a year and a half ago was Work Changes Us. Although I wrote hopefully about a positive sort of change (I wanted to put myself in a better environment), the reality is that I wrote from the perspective of a person who felt his current job was changing him in a negative way. I had descended into a funk of negativism, cynicism, and fear, that was limiting my ability to see my way into a positive future. Even if my appraisal of my job then was too harsh, I was stuck. In becoming "unstuck," I have found how empowerment is about reaching out in addition to looking in.

When this all starts to make sense...when we can see how the pieces fit together, we begin to see how we can change our work and our lives.

This blog has covered many topics. It began around ideas of economic development and Richard Florida's creative class. But what it really is about is empowerment. It's not lifehacking or productivity enhancement or even social media technology. It's how we, knowledge workers, more accurately web workers and other members of the creative class can use technology, media, and experience to gain a greater degree of influence over our lives, our work, and our communities. I'm not sure how to brand that or define that as enough of a niche to turn this into a blog with thousands of subscribers, but my dream is that my own journey here can serve as a helpful guide to others who may feel that a part of their dissatisfaction in life is that they need to Escape from Cubicle Nation, but don't know where to start or what to do. The journey begins within and is not necessarily an escape, but a discovery.