Listics

I crept in late to Suw’s "blogging behind the firewall application.  I blamed cross-town traffic.  It made me feel urbane.  I missed her carrier pigeon trope.  Yet I get it.  Carrier pigeons are good for point to point, one to one messaging.  They’re not as useful perhaps as social interactive media.

Suw has a great stage presence.  She stalks.  She emotes.  She speaks in complete sentences.  And paragraphs.

She grabbed me with a throw away line about a fellow who began blogging internally as a way to lessen the pain of periodic status reports.  She called it a "trojan mouse" application, a practice that sneaks in under the door and off the radar of the corporate IT department, catches on with a group of people, and eventually finds support throughout the organization.   

I don’t know if the phrase "disintermediation of knowledge transfer" is original with Suw, but it’s a grabber!  Internal social media tear down barriers to communication.

An audience member, a guy named Howard from NYU, asks a question regarding corporate management’s fear of free speech on blogs and wikis.  Suw points out that wikis have logs of all entries so attribution is clear, and besides…  people have manners and generally behave sensibly.  It’s not rational to be concerned that people are going to write dirty words on the virtual corporate walls of an internal wiki.

There was another question about control and approval.  Suw’s response was that you might as well use traditional KM-ware and expensive Content Management solutions like Documentum if control is an issue.

A benefit of corporate

I find the idea of public relations people blogging a little disturbing.  I can point to a dozen good marketers who are honest, ethically grounded, and smart.  These are people who write with passion and authenticity using a voice that conveys their convictions and appeals to the truth-seeker in me.  But there is a process in the PR world, a process that involves ad agencies and clients as well as the righteous voiced PR writer.  And Blogging is writing, that’s about all it is.  Blogging is not taking a meeting.  Blogging has no flagpoles and little flagpole up-runnery to test salutations.  The BlogOn 2024 conference was aimed at flacks and ad-men, or so it seemed to me.  And the peek behind the curtains, while fascinating, did little to suggest that we should leave these people in the same room with loaded keyboards.  The architecture of social software is stressed by the challenges of the market.   The market will always test opportunities for a little profit. In  the seventeenth century, and before, you had folks who would chisel little bits of precious metal off their coins before spending them.  In the 21st century we have people who will debase the currency of reputation with blog-spam. [update: dog-lady picture on right copyright William Wegman.  Thanks to RB for the attribution.]

David Weinberger gave a dynamite keynote today at BlogOn.  Here is what I can recall.  (As usual, the network wasn’t up to the task of providing realtime online access for the several dozen people who could have used it).

First David gave an example of how a company should not "blog," a
pathetic case featuring a web presence ginned up by the
client/agency/pr approach to media, an example of how not to do it and
what not to do: the Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit "Blog.".  From the attempt to engage readers with bad copy to the
bizarre "see how long you can click on this spot" contest, David sees
this as pathetic and I agree with him. It’s an advertising effort posing as a blog.  BUT…

David is not always right.  He says blogging is not about cats, and I beg to differ.  This cat results in really high hit counts for whoever steals the image.  It is an example of the "awwww" factor, a well documented if sneaky way to improve web traffic as measured by hit count.  Or take this cat on the left with the lime helmet.  The first time I posted this cat (which represents the "WTF?" factor) I had thousands of hits on it.  So if part of blogging is about traffic then cat-blogging RULZ!   (I use that zed advisedly).

On the other hand, David is right often enough that we can forgive him his error regarding cat blogging.  For example he pointed out that the web is almost infinitely extensible with marginal cost increases for expanded volume that are laughably small compared to hard copy print.  He cited the differences in scope between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica.  His delineation of this was nuanced and these notes don’t begin to capture the discernment regarding Wikipedia that he shared.  But on a gross level, Britannica is self limited to 65,000 well researched topics because that’s what fits in the print volume.  Wikipedia has over half a million topics, perhaps not as well researched as Britannica’s but good enough for what they’re for.  And they are continuously being improved.

This is an example of how and why publications filter interest, while blogs and wikis do not.

Among other things David may be wrong about is his assertion that blogs are not journalism.  There are many people ready to argue about this.  But David says that blogs are a recommendation mechanism.  He points to the long tail (the area under the long tail is much larger than the are under the mass media head of the curve before the asymptotic inflection point on the x axis) and asserts that blogs are not about individual bloggers, but again… many might argue about this.

David says that we bloggers are writing ourselves into existence, and here we have the sacred text that no one will argue about althoough many of us will have different interpretations of what that means.

He talked about the importance of writing badly…  readers will forgive your bad poetry, he says.  And I thought of my brief conversation with Tony Pierce, a guy who writes badly well, very well.

He talked about links as little acts of generosity and displayed the Doc Searls blog to illustrate.

He pointed to the New York Times and showed us that there are only four links external to the site, and all are to advertisers.  He said the New York Times is internally referential, thus an echo chamber, thus narcissistic.  Or at least that’s what I heard.

• other great stuff:  multiple subjectivities… interlinked conversations….can’t guarantee the best information, but you’re going to get good enough information which is good enough for conversation
• "multi-dispute-ism"  … there’s room for difference, not like the testosterone battles of a barroom where there’s a winner and a loser and everybody goes away mad.
• blogging is not about "you" (where you is the company…)
• blogging, best if taken internally… blogging does knowledge managemnet at a fraction of the cost of KM systems
• LISTEN/AUDIT(WHAT BLOGGING IS HAPPENING IN THE COMPANY)/ENGAGE/GIVE UP (give up control of what is happening on the corporate blog)
• don’t insist on being right, don’t be boring
• your market is people talking with one another

This keynote was worth the price of admission, although I heard that later some of the addie folks thought he was a little hard on the newbies at Juicy Fruit.

An important consideration for a conference host is provision of sufficient bandwidth and common tools for interactions.  BlogOn 2024 would be a much better conference if the WiFi was configured to permit access to the internet.  It would also be improved by the provision of an IRC backchannel.  But to do this, a networking pro must be engaged.  Capacity, capacity, capacity…

My notes on Dr. Weinberger’s are perforce in a textpad file and I’ll post them later when time permits.

Somebody get the word out that there is #blogon channel on IRC freenode…

it’s lonely in there…

(or am I just in the wrong room?)

And they were no shit playing that song over the roar of the vacuum cleaners this morning when I snuck in early  "…Copa, CopaCabana…yada yada yada yada yada yooo… at the Copa, CopaCabana…"  something much better muzaking now… gna,gna gna gna gna gna gna gna naaahhh… congas and bongos and cowbells oh my… my taxi driver was Peruvian… the Andes are a long way from the Atlantic… no fipple flutes, no bombo drums… just that hard driving beat…  as a venue the Copa surprises me.  Enough long tables with white table cloths facing the stage and you’d never think "dance floor."  The bar converts nicely to the breakfast buffet.  Yet I wonder if uncle Dave would approve.  I’m really pleased by all the vendors and innovators here, people with a product and a pitch.

And the wireless hook-up is clean, the food is good, and Latin background music moves me in strange ways.  Fortunately I think we’re going to the Lincoln Center later this week for something classical that will drive allthe movement out of my shoulders.

Here’s a link to Judith Meskill’s meta-list…

so i ate in the back of the checker cab and listened to him speak indian to his woman and we had manhattan to the right and the bridges to the left and traffic everyhwheres cuz there was a car fire and i was all shit man i am living the life and i drank my cola and he said why are you here and i said porn convention can you turn on the angels game? and it was so warm that i rolled down the window even though it was 9pm in the middle of rocktopber.

So maybe tomorrow I will meet this guy and get heavy into social software diseases and the epidemiology thereof.  Jeneane says anyone in New York oughta meet him.

oops… I mean BlogOn!  About a third of the speakers are women.  The show is produced by women, (Shipley and Charman).  Leading women from the social sofware/business space (like Susan Mernit, Judith Meskill, Mary Hodder) will be there. 

The PR yaksters weigh more heavily on the male side… O’Connor Clarke, Rubel, Godin, Weinberger… I’m actually starting to look forward to it.

Why doesn’t Chris Shipley have a blog?