I'm judging Judith Meskill's 'Perfect' Corporate Weblogging 'Elevator Pitch' Competition. Here's how I've been thinking about it.

Look to the three cores of blogging for inspiration.

1. Discovery - finding interesting sources and posts
2. Reading - what, where, when, and how you want
3. Writing -  what's relevant to you and your audiences

When we talk about blogging and the blogosphere, we're talking about these three activities. Nearly all the blogosphere's tools support one or more of them.

Your challenge in any justification is to:

1. Tie investment in your blogging project (time, people, tools, attention) to any of these three activities (what people will do with your project's outputs) and
2. Tie the activities to business benefits
3. While catering to your stakeholder's common sins (Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed, Sloth) or to appealing to their virutes (humility, kindness, abstinence, chastity, patience, liberality, diligence, prudence, temperance, courage, justice, love, hope, faith).

For example, "If we spend just a thousand bucks on a blog server for the MarCom department, we'll get better press than the competition and that cute PR guy will be putty in your hands, Maam."

Let's just talk about reading for a moment. No blogging environment is complete without tools to help you read blogs. For example, Rocketinfo offers an enterprise newsreader. They pitch:

The Value to You:

• Increase the breadth of news you look at
• Improve the research and dissemination process
• Leverage and maximize your existing information investments
• Increase and/or measure the consumption of research across your organization
• Increase the efficiency of your research department, enabling you to do more with less

You get the idea. Read more, save time, and get info to the right people.

Implicit:

• Discover/Don't-be-surprised-by new threats and opportunities
• Don't be the last one to know among your company's competitors, or your internal competitors
• Get credit for solving the problem

Please don't tell me about your contest submissions until the contest is over: Judging is blind. Good luck on the competition.

[aka klogs]

Judith Meskill tipped me that Silicon Valley Web Guild is hosting a panel on social network systems, another evening of YASNS puffery. May 6. Four smart people are speaking for their products. Tribe's Mark Pincus, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman (whom Marc Canter says I must get to know; Hi, Reid!), Adrian Scott (who preceded Ryze with an insightful essay on why you must scale your address book), and Spoke's Andy Halliday.

I have a challenge for moderator Rosemary Remacle:

Channel danah boyd.

The honeymoon's over. Ask tough questions.

All these systems depend on people volunteering time and attention, on their pimping friends into the system, on believing you can turn virtual connections into social capital, web pages into gold.

• What's in it for me?
• Do social network systems (SNS) get you love, sex, or friendship? get you competitive career advantage? get you elected? get you productive?
• What's in it for the person who only has a few "friends"? 
• Do SNS's turn into anything more than a slightly smarter address book?
• What is your early conversion rate, the proportion of people who try your system and stick with it after 30 days? after 90?
• How do you avoid the Geocities problem of web page tombstones, profiles grown stale and abandoned?
• Why do you think your forms are a useful representation of me as a person?
• Are you modeling how people really interact or some oversimplification?
• Can I leave my contacts to my children?
• How do you turn my contacts into action?
• Aren't you making it easier for bad actors to be more effective at identity theft, stalking, and emotional abuse?
• Don't your systems burn my contacts, expending my social capital without real benefit?

Then ask about the enterprise version.

• How will this create value within a mid to large organization?
• Why is this more urgent than, say, spending another $100 per head on social skill training or antispam software or giving everyone a news portal?
• Will your system work within firewalls?
• How will your system work across firewalls? How do you expose just some of the profile of some of the people in an organization to some of the public?
• If my company has Spoke inside and my customer has the Google Orkut Appliance, how will they work together?
• What about cultural boundaries?
• Why should employees invest their time and trust in an enterprise SNS when they know their profiles will be left behind when they move on? 
• Why is your explicit declaration of relationships better than their tacit discovery?
• With what other enterprise IT systems will you integrate your SNS?  

Then speak for those of us who invest:

• How will you make money now?
• How will you compete when AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft follow Google into social networks? You know they're going to turn their buddy lists, email groups, blogrolls, and discussion forums into some version of an SNS. What will you do better and differently?
• Orkut was one programmer's side project. Where's the barrier to entry?

This should be a trial by fire, Rosemary.  They're smart and have been on the road for more than a year, bored to their gills. Do them a favor. Pull teeth until they give up the answers. Be the skeptical interrogator I know you can be.

[aka community]