Category: Blogging

Perry de Havilland makes the not-very-interesting point that an individual weblog is not democratic. Of course, a single weblog represents the view of its writer or writers. Within the framework of democracy, a weblog is a vehicle for free speech, which helps citizens articulate ideas and make up their minds.
Following up to the de Havilland article, Jon Lebkowsky talks about the role blogging can play in a deliberative process among citizens.
Blogs help generate broader discussion of ideas. But discussion doesn’t inherently lead to convergence and decision-making. Therefore, we need to have explicit processes for leading discussions to…
* reach conclusions that bloggers can use to advocate within the political process.
* form constituent groups, who can actually aggregate influence, advocacy, votes, and (in our corrupt system), campaign contributions.

Hiawatha Bray of the Boston Globe caught two themes of the Jupiter conference: blogs as marketing, and blogs as self-expression, and is convinced that they will cancel each other out.

“It’s a clever way to give Internet companies a human face. But is it really blogging? Sure, the corporate weblogs use the same technologies,
but their hearts are not really in it. The best blogs don’t just deliver
authoritative information; they resonate with the personalities of their
creators.”
“Just as e-mail, born as an academic convenience, is now a marketing
tool for human growth hormone, the blogs are bound to go commercial. Who
knows? Maybe a few will even get it right. There are good TV
commercials, after all.”

These stereotypes aren’t much like the top work-related public blogs
(Mark Pilgrim, Jon Palfrey), where articulate professionals converse
with peers and build reputation with articulate essays on technical
subjects. Nor are they like the real-life intranet blogs in the IT
departments of Verizon and the State of Connecticut, in which employees
manage projects, talk with internal customers, and brainstorm about
managing through a reorganization.
Bray caught the hype and missed the reality.

Heath Row transcribes a great session at the JupiterMedia conference, in which people talk about how they’re actually using weblogs in business, and the affect of weblogs on organizational culture.
Choice quotes:
Paul Perry, IT Director at Verizon Communications:

I knew that a lot of emails were going around about what was going on in the industry. Sometimes I was in those threads. Sometimes I was not. The problem with cc lists is that you have to decide if the email is spam or if you’ve hit the right audience. I needed to find a way in which I would be fully informed but I didn’t have to decide who to inform. Another problem with email is that it’s gone. I didn’t want to have to go into everyone’s email to see what had been read or not. I also needed the right technical people to highlight what I thought was important and what they thought I needed to see….

Even very technical people who were aware of blogs didn’t want to post at all until they saw other people post. I created a private space for them to post in their own private journal. As soon as they were ready to open it up to the project, they could. It was important to post and make mistakes. You need to offer a ramp that is shielded and private. I don’t see any additional candor. The organization size is very large. Verizon IT is 10,000 people. It’s not like we can all share and have enough interaction person to person. With an organization that large, you are open to some misunderstandings if you don’t offer more context first.

Rock Regan, CIO, State of Connecticut

We’ve got probably 90 people using a blog to discuss the architecture of our organization. I have a liaison who deals with the 65 agencies, not just technical agencies but the business folks. It really started in my office. I’m not going to claim that I’m good yet, but I’m certainly open to ideas. How can we use this? How can this make your job better? For me, it’s a critical function that’s going to be instrumental in our survival. A 22% staff reduction in the last two months. We’ve got to do things differently….

We’re beginning to see some great discussion among people who don’t communicate well together. We’ve had some discussions recently to make some differences in core technologies that will allow groups that don’t communicate well know what the other groups are doing. You’ve got to open up the opportunity for people to know what’s going on in those different functional areas.

Social software works bottom-up. People sign up in the system (for example, by downloading an IM client and registering an ID there) and then they affiliate through personal choice and actions (I add you to my buddy list, and you decide to remove me from yours).
Traditional software approaches the relationship of people to groups from a top-down fashion. In the corporate setting, its hard to imagine a person existing without being specifically assigned membership to top-down groups: your team, your division, the budget committee and so on.
Over time, more sophisticated social software will exploit second and third order information from such affiliations

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Jason at Blogger — we’re playing catchup. The customer base isn’t web designers any longer, it’s the Geocities audience. New community features, stat-tracking. Scale a community directory. “Can it GoogleScale?” “my IP lawyer and PR person wouldn’t like that.”
Frankston. Uses blogger, and a homegrown tool.
Bricklin. Spreadsheet automated tedious housekeeping of writing a custom programming. We’re at the stage in blogging tools where Lotus 123 started to displace Visicalc. And we don’t know what Excel will look like. Pictures — that will be as important as the gridlines and formatting we got in excel.
Anil Dash. TypePad. Designed for basic users to create and host weblogs. We think the anatomy has been decided. Comments, trackback, permalinks, blogroll, images. None of our tools have kept up with managing those components. Working backward from the way people work with the format.
Michael Gartenberg at Jupiter. There are a variety of devices and platforms. Has anyone blogged on something other than PCs?
Next-generation Manila. Mail to weblog, server-level aggregation, built-in publishing. Make the interface easier to use. Radio. 2way synchronization, with multiple desktops, backups. Doing things you can only do on the client side adding a very slick mac and windows interface, instead of being inside a browser. P2P system, augment ability to publish large files form the desktop. First 10 people become resources for the next 100.
Anil. Choosing who can read what you publish? If you do that, is it a blog? Anil thinks so. Anil thinks you have a contract with your readers to update.
Doc. Blogger permalinks don’t work.Jason. It was a feature — most first blogs don’t work. Actually, permalinks will work on the new platform.
Question: How open is the code? Robb — everything but the core. Anil — any user can modify. MT Pro on schedule for this year, same license, with code exchange. Enterprise customers can share customizations. Evan — developers will become more important. Anil — javascript blogrolling will happen at API level instead of javascript.
Doc: wants to save pictures from home machine and serve from home machine. The cable guys have the vision of an asymmetrical web. Does blogging have the leverage to make the dream happen.
Rick Bruner: Wants Macromedia Lite for blogger. The answer is using those as front end tools, with an API. Can do this already in Radio. The HTML control is already in Trellix, there’s a gecko version. Works fine. Also pastes from HTML, and Word, and Excel.
Search and replace for regular expressions, feature to flag dead links.
Michael O’Connor Clarke: What about the reading tools?

Blogging as content management. “Blogging is about voice, content management suppresses voice.”
(this relates to the earlier discussion about editorial control — traditional content management is based on editorial approval workflow — weblogs assume no or minimal editorial review)
John Robb — users are in charge of content — aggregation will make content management obsolete.
Moderator — have we had an 8-year digression into front-end markup?
John Robb — future of blog platforms — add features: integrate with portals, LDAP for single sign-on, administration to handle communities of weblogs, limit MP3s, virtual domains; extensibility; verticals: customer services, web application functionality
Adam Weinroth sees small businesses and nonprofits filling a gap as low-end CMS
Bill French — Blogging is just an use case of content management — there are others — brochure sites; group blogs; integrate OfficeXP and post-it notes. A federation of services built on xml standards; something so agile that it looks like a chameleon in a bowl of skittles.
Summary — The difference between this panel and the others — this panel is about content — the other panels were about people. The people are more interesting.

The Army created a war game, to make army service more attractive to kids. The speaker went to cover Afghanistan for this game. They created the weblog to “build relationships with their customers.” The coverage was self-sensored, because of military security concerns.
At the beginning of this session, Halley told the story of how she started blogging, writing about her father’s death.
Dave Winer started the the day’s program, talking about weblogging and honesty.
An honest weblog from a battlefield will talk about people killing, and people dying.
I’m not a pacifist, but I am very troubled by the idea of war reporting where nobody kills and nobody dies.
To be honest, I haven’t read the Afghanistan blog — need to.

Dave Weinberger weblogs are about writing badly, and readers forgiving spelling errors and broken links.

If you’re blogging the conference, ping http://topicexchange.com/t/weblog_business_strategies_conference/
Courtesy of Martin Roell.

Blogging in the marketing mix
Beth Goza, Microsoft “the only blogging strategy a marketing department should have is no blogging strategy” I started my blog as a person, because I love technology. Blogs personalize giant corporations. It’s about people being passionate — you can’t force people to do it. They should be allowed to be controversial.
Blogs are anti-pop-ups — anti-invasive
How do you overcome the fear of your PR and legal team?
“Does a blog need personality?”
Michael O’Conner Clarke — the act of linking is an act of personality. Blogs don’t need to be dramatic. If you’re a CEO and think what you’re doing is good and right, then let your employees go and get out of the way.
“Offer top 3 customers the ability to have a blog”.
“Marketing departments have shied away from having conversations with customers for many years.”
“When is it time to retire a blog?” “When no-one is reading it”
How to measure success? “Technorati is the best thing that’s happened to blogs”.
Is blogging the death of the pitch?
Beth Goza is the person who flew the bloggers out to Microsoft. “They’re influential, and we want them to know about what we’re doing.” “You need to treat bloggers with the same level of respect as other sources.”
A pitch is education.
“I don’t want someone to educate me, I want to learn.”
Rick Bruner reads blog for content and personality, not ranting.