Merrill Lynch Pulls the Plug on Outside Pubishing
CNET News reports that Merrill Lynch is banning its employees from using outside email accounts, chat rooms and forums via its external network connections. With intense regulatory scrutiny and higher corporate accountability standards for financial firms, Merrill and other major investment houses have little choice but to try to ensure that individual publishing is done only in venues in which it can monitor and archive these communications. Clearly firms like Merrill are benefitting greatly from this need in that it is giving them much more ability to use these individual publishing venues to create and manage more valuable content that they can leverage into transactional value. But in the long run, hiding individual publishing behind the firewall may keep these institutions from being embedded in a larger world of content that increasingly is becoming empowered by rapid formation of new and powerful venues for individual content creation and distribution. Castle walls do little good to help protect a town from markets moving elsewhere.