Month: June 2003

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.

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.