Category: Blogging

the genre difference between personal and business blogging.
Gartenberg says that business weblogs are different from personal weblogs — “you shouldn’t put the cheesecake recipe online”
Dave Winer thinks people should put cheesecake recipes online.
Does blogging subvert the corporate hierarchy?
Dave Winer tells the story of someone at Harvard who criticizes the administration’s perspective on the DMCA.
Is blogging journalism?
“Blogging is the same as journalism.” People question this — are reader comments a different sort of editorial feedback.
Is blogging commentary, not reporting?
“Disclose your interest, never say something untrue.”
The dangers of employees blogging
“You have to trust people.”
Halley — “how much truth do businesses want to have?”
Should every company have weblogs — “like asking, years ago, should all employees have email”
“If your employer is approving all posts, that’s not a weblog”

Michael Gartenberg talks about Jupiter’s experience with weblogs — it’s interesting because he’s talking from experience, not just reciting theory.
He gives the good answer about the complaint that weblogs are ego-driven. All publishing is ego-driven.
“People renew the service because they read the weblog.”
“Hype is good, we’re putting on a conference.”
“Blogging can get you fired”

Sam Ruby, who works at IBM: weblogs will subvert the corporate hierarchy
Adina: Is it going to be like the telephone? (Where early telecom executives wrote memos deploring people’s use of the phone for trivial personal conversation?) Or is it going to be like radio, where the corporate oligarchy took over the medium, early in its history, by buying the law.

I’m in Boston for a few days, for work and play.
Tomorrow, I’m on the Managing a Business Blog panel at the Jupiter Weblog Business Strategies conference.

Looking forward to hearing more good examples of things people are doing with social software in the real world.
And then going to the BostonBlogs dinner. And then going back to Austin.

Tom Coates has something sensible to say about the “wikis are ugly” tempest in a teapot.

I think there’s a an underlying theme behind a lot of reviews of this kind and it’s a rather old fashioned idea of fixed and stable products. The Wiki is considered a thing that works in a way, rather than a rough accumulation of various versions of the same rough concept – each of which has some benefits and some failings. Each of which could be nothing more than the first stage in a longer and more fruitful path of evolution. Each of which could be stripped down to its core and integrated with other sites – small bits of meme DNA grafted into message-boards or weblogs or even more static editorial pages. There is no product to review with finality- there is no here here (as Gertrude Stein might have been misquoted). So we dig around and we take what we like and we make new things – some will bed down and spread, others will not. Many will be spliced with each other once more…”

From the Lazyweb Birds of a Feather session at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference.
GeoLocation that reminds you want you wanted to do when you get somewhere. I’ve always had a terrible time remembering things past context switches. It would be so cool to be able to add a geocode to a to-do reminder, which would pop up when you reached that location. This is probably hackable today, with a GPS-enabled PDA.
Cross-platform calendaring. Even better, decentralized calendaring. So I don’t need meetup to centrally organize my emergent meeting. I can have a blog-conversation, and can schedule a meeting or teleconference with people. Yes, let’s do lunch. My blog will talk to your blog.
🙂

I think SSW is a style of application, rather than a category of applications.
(from a discussion on the definition of social software, over at the mailing list)
Examples:
You could build a recommendation engine that was social software — such a recommendation engine would enable recommendees and recommenders to meet each other. If AllConsuming.net added a collaborative filter that showed blogs reviewing books that I was interested in, that would be a recommendation engine as social software.
You might be able to build a CRM system that was social software — if customers and salespeople were able to see the information, and collaborate with each other. By contrast conventional CRM systems are based on assumptions of structured workflow and hiding the sales-person’s intent from the customer. These assumptions are so deeply embedded that they’re hard to see.
from a response to Pete Kaminski.

Dave Sifry comments about the draft specification of Easy News Topics 1.0 (ENT), proposed by Paolo Valdermarin and Matt Mower.
Dave is concerned that a category standard would fall prey to the problems of ambiguity and scamming that killed HTML META tags.
As I noted in comments on his post, Dave is absolutely right at the scale of the web or the blogosphere.
However, I think that categories will be much more valuable at the community level. For example, Austin has a meta-blog, aggregating posts related to Austin. People in other cities are starting to do the same. If we could map sub-categories, we would be able to create a cross-regional directory. There are local editors who keep the system from being spammed, and make decisions about how to map categories.
So, I think that the system can work in the context of defined groups and defined applications.
The only thing that ENT is missing is a way to alias categories — Austin’s “music events” maps to Ann Arbor’s “concerts.” Presumably this could be implemented at the application level.

In Crain’s B2B Marketing Magazine, Rich Karpinski writes about the use of weblogs in business marketing.
The article cites Macromedia, iView Multimedia, Cape Clear Software, and Collaxa as companies using blogs to communicate with customers.
The article talks about the challenge of using a personal medium in a way that keeps the company’s marketing message, and the value of using blogs to communicate with a human voice.
via Doc Searls.

As linked by Slashdot, BuddyZoo provides statistics about your AIM buddy list.
With it, you can:
* Find out which buddies you have in common with your friends.
* Measure how popular you are.
* Detect cliques you’re part of.
* See the degrees of separation between different screennames.
This kind of map, I think, would be more useful in a flexible, open environment than in a rigid, closed environment.
In a rigid, closed environment, like American high schools, people already know what cliques they’re part of (jocks, nerds), and don’t have a lot of choices about changing them.
In flexible environment, you could visualize groups that you were a small number of degrees of separation from, and join the group, by participating in an activity, joining a conversation, or getting an introduction.
In an open environment, you might learn things about the social network that you didn’t already know.