Phil Wolff: klogs

Bootcamp & Conference: BlogOn Half-Full

Mon, 26 Jul 2004 17:15:47 GMT

Ted Shelton: "Frankly I felt that BlogOn was a waste of time and money."

I think the BlogOn conference was overproduced. In the name of professionalism the organizing firm turned off potential speakers, oversubscribed sponsors, etc.

I would have liked a debatable topic (aside from *blogging = journalism*. Two people slugging it out. Or a devil's advocate taking challenges from the floor.

I would have liked more hard numbers. Facts. Charts. Diagrams. We have the analytic tools to BS-check them; harder on vague opinions and single-points-of-observation.

I found it disturbing how much money was being commanded (from both attendees and sponsors) for a conference at a university. Maybe it was because it was at Berkeley? Maybe we should have taken over a community college or a Cal State or a DeVry. The facilities costs would have been cheaper at least. I heard an organizer apologize and say the next one would be at a hotel, like that would have been better.

Cost wasn't the whole problem. We're at a stage where early adopters are meeting folks who want to leap the chasm. Huge gaps in knowledge, experience, context, culture, vocabulary. It's the gap.

There are huge ideas to be explored, even in the world of applying blogs to media strategy and the enterprise. And most of the big ideas weren't even on the agenda at BlogOn. Probably because it was catering to those who want to commercialize, fund, and otherwise exploit (excuse me, "get in on") the emerging medium.

Let's fork these conferences so advanced topics on business and technology and culture fit the participants.

"akasig"

Blogging at work. Work at blogging.

Sun, 18 Jul 2004 01:23:48 GMT

This is not a peak hiring season. But there are jobs to be had in blogging.

IMN is hiring an inside sales rep to work in Newton, Mass, selling blogging and newsreading tools.

Siemens is looking for a contract ActionScript developer to work with Microsoft's Social Computing Group on Wallop-related stuff. Blogs + Social Networks.

Amazon.com’s Customer Content Team is hiring a senior software engineer. "We are the “discover” in “find, discover and buy.” Current features and projects include the world-wide deployment of features such as Customer Reviews, Listmania, Buying Guides, and Blogs, as well as workflow, customer service services and web services for all of the above."

IBM's hiring researchers into a team that's worked on weblogs in the past.

And the Ebay Developer Community Manager is expected to post to their public weblog.

SixApart has openings for a Web Designer/Developer and a Software Engineer. You too can make MovableType and TypePad better. Technorati has jobs for a Analytics Engineer, MySQL Administrator, and a LAMP Software Engineer.

Or how about a six month blogging user experience contract in Dulles, VA.

And then there's Monster's Rebecca who blogs pseudonymously.

Confab

Sat, 17 Jul 2004 23:51:13 GMT

The Social Tools in the Enterprise Symposium had fewer corporate attendees and more academics and consultants than I expected for a business conference. Then again, it's mid-July.

Stowe Boyd was a great host, a cross between David Letterman and Columbo. If you've never seen him in person, he has the voice and affect of actor Robert Patrick. (congrats on the brown belt, Stowe.) In the run up to the event, Stowe wrote an piece for Darwin on the convergence of social tools, blurring the lines between "the four co's": coordination, collaboration, communication, and community. This theme came through in the symposium.

Some high notes.

My presentation (maybe a low note) was a recap of the positive feedback that conditions blogger behavior. A collection of aha! moments that promote expression, control, ownership, sociality, and introspection in a blogger. Before managing a fleet of bloggers (always looking for that plural), let's understand that virtuous cycle and create tools and behaviors that support it.

It was great seeing George Por again. He extracts layers of depth with quick comments, often from his collective intelligence view. [note to self: I think this fits into the third layer of maturity in collective blogging.]

Marc Eisenstadt showed some of his team's tools for knowledge workers: hacks of maps, presence integrated with a video wall, and instant messaging. Marc Canter would have been yelling "Dude! That's a Digital Lifestyle Aggregator!" if it wasn't so workplace focused. This brings home the hard fact that most blogging tools are still too hard to use. Industry needs a ten-fold improvement in user experience in writing, reading, and navigating blogs (imho, especially the writing). Why is "UserLand" the only vendor using WYSIWYG authoring?

I enjoyed the Q&A about Lee's presentation. It's a great case study, one that will be repeated.

Martin's write-up of the sessions is thoughtful, although I think there are 40,000 blogs in China, not 400,000 (but give them a two minutes).

After the show, Allan Engelhardt said content is the slug’s trail in social software:

But the real value of social software in the enterprise is not in the content. Content doesn’t do anything. People do; and what makes a difference to the enterprise is people coming together innovating and changing the organisation. The value of social software is in creating social connections where none existed, or in strengthening existing connections.

Other items:

No Internet connectivity during the conference because the local tech/facilities guy didn't know what a proxy server was.
Doc Searls was in town, showed up for the night-before and night-after dinners. Between Doc and Stowe I'm starting to look harder at low-carb, or at least looking at my sugar intake. Shots of Doc and others lost while attempting upload.
Talking blogging, small business, etc. with Matt Mower on Friday, during an extended walk from Holborn through the city center. Matt knows why I no longer trust him to pick random pubs for a beer. Suffice to say I didn't pack my leathers.
The Bonnington Hotel in Bloomsbury is a three star hotel with five star service. Dozens of problems, only a few from the hotel, but all of them addressed promptly with cheer, courtesy, professionalism, and concern. I'd stay there again.
All the walking and tube hopping helped me connect areas I'd thought of as disconnected. It's reassuring that long time Londoners still carry or consult street/underground maps.
Most of the underground network is intentionally bright, with extra lights and white tiles on walls and ceilings, to stave off claustrophobia. It was sad that emerging from the Holborn station on Saturday, it was darker outside midday than inside the station.

During my UK visit I forgot to:

Visit with the Big Blog Company folks. If I haven't said it before, great blog, great work, spread the word.
Hit the museums. I just wasn't in the mood, too nice outdoors.
Visit Oxford. They had three guys at STES, so they must be up to something.
Walk. I walked for a bit, took the tube too, but there was much more to do.
Take time in the country. England isn't London, though it likes to think so.

Phil's summer of F2F - Part 1

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 18:26:20 GMT

Dear Phil -
Why should we conference in person when the virtual has been so enriched?

The virtual's not that rich.
The virtual's mainly broadcast.
And you miss the interactions that occur during breaks, meals, pub crawls, and the other cracks in an official programme.

So I leave my computer, my home, my city, my country.

Recently, AD:TECH ("Eyeballs for sale! Fresh steaming eyeballs!") and PlaNetwork (Kumbaya embraces digital identity), both in San Francisco.

Coming up:

I'm going to try for the Bio 2004 conference exhibit hall, this week. Especially interested in new bioinformatics and the publications systems that try to promote innovation without giving away secrets. Innovation World's Michael Boland and Mary Kate Stimmler are blogging from the conference.

This week and next are full of East Bay Kerry stuff. A Democratic Party Meetup where East Bay Kerry recruits volunteers. Committee meetings for Fundraising, Chairs, Media Relations, Visibility and GOTV, and Writers. We're having our first Speaker Training & Kerry Teach-In. And a big bunch of us are going to the Oakland A's vs. Pittsburgh Pirates game to show Kerry love to all those Pennsylvanians watching the game. Gary Hart is signing his latest book. And we're sending envoys to other political meetings, like the Lamorinda Democratic Club and the MGO Dem Club. All the time compression of a startup, none of the cash flow, and hard deadlines.

I've started going to Mark Finnern's Future Salons. Smart people, challenging topics. Next one June 18th at SAP Palo Alto. Saw him at Planetwork, first time in daylight. You owe yourself a venue to talk about 10, 20, and 50 years out. Great context and fodder for work and life planning.

In two weeks I'll attend the first day of Supernova, blogging a technical and policy discussion of today's convergence. Time to bone up on spectrum allocation, grid computing, WiMax, and more. I'm glad the wiki (thank you, SocialText) and rss feed (thank you, TypePad) are up.

I'm spending July 4th in Vienna, Austria, for BlogTalk 2.0, the conference by Thomas Burg and the Center for New Media at Danube University. Getting there a little early to spend time with the Actionable Sense Troupe ("How do you switch between Discussion and Action?") and BlogWalk 3.0 in beautiful Krems.

Then to Bloomsbury Square for the first London Symposium on Social Tools For The Enterprise, 12 July. This scans like etiquette and finishing school. It's really about blogs, wikis, social networks, IM'ing, and the like. And turning them into workplace tools. Matt Mower of Evectors Software put it together. Stowe Boyd's there too. I'll have a week in London. Favourite pubs, bookstores, museums, clubs, bordellos? Blogger events?

Back in town for the BlogOn conference. Read Susan Mernit's post. They have a boot camp, similar to workshops I proposed for London. What do bloggers know that others don't? To understand social software, managers need the insights that make blogging and other social tools "click" for users, and to frame those "Aha! moments" into a useful context.

What should I do this fall?

Rapid Response: Memetic Engineering in the 2004 Presidential Campaign

Mon, 17 May 2004 01:24:49 GMT

I wrote Rapid Response: Memetic Engineering in the 2004 Presidential Campaign, my assessment of a new project from the John Kerry campaign. It's a recap of the political Rapid Response model, an analysis of the John Kerry Media Corps version of that model, and a checklist of things for the JK campaign to work on.

Not included: the idea of the grassroots web site network.

When you blend:

"all politics is local" with
"the edge of the network has the power" and
"nobody trusts campaign commercials"

You turn to free media.

John Kerry HQ is doing it with Media Corps, but not to weblogs.

Both the Dem and GOP professional staffs are resisting publishing decentralization.

Otherwise they'd host the biggest network of blogs in the world. Blogs for each county, each precinct, every meetup, each working committee. Aggregators that tie local groups together. Both content and event/activity syndication. And promotion of those sites to the local news media, community groups, and political clubs.

The ROI? Better communication, coordination, cohesion, and collaboration. We need it as groups form, as citizens swell their ranks, as we commit time and energy to making momentum. Tools to help them follow the campaign's lead while making local sense of issues and messages.

But they're not. The people who understood and supported this vision are no longer part of the Kerry staff. Instead, we're seeing incremental marketing. 3 of 5 Cluetrain Points.

Maybe next time.

[aka public policy]

Corporate Blogging - Blog as your Front Porch

Sat, 15 May 2004 05:45:11 GMT

Other metaphors I like...

California bans smoking in office buildings. People slip out for a smoke and huddle around the doors or the ashtrays in smoker exile. For those 5-15 minutes, your small group of fellow addicts shares the moment. Sometimes you break out in conversation. Usually casual, sometimes deep, occasionally the start of a labor union or a new product or a lawsuit. Despite yourselves, repetition of exposure fosters trust. And people take it from there.

Sometimes I think of blogging like amateur night at a comedy club. You step up on stage for your five minutes, probably at one in the morning, greeted by a random audience who laughs at you and maybe your painful story told in a funny way. You thank the audience, who were just barely awake anyway and who were never vested in your barely coherent ramblings, and you leave the stage. Until tomorrow. When you come back for more. And the next day you look at the world a little differently, noticing things that could be material for your set, and you rush home, write them down, and that night you try it out on a mostly different audience. And your material gets better, and you start to build a reputation, and you relax into the doing of it and start to pay attention to the two-way conversation that takes place between a performer and those cheering and jeering on the other side of the microphone. From utterance to rapport.

Company cafeterias or regular happy-hour spots are as much about being seen, and with whom, as it is about the conversations you have. Food? It's a heartbeat check, a status reinforcer, a clique definer. Depending on your role, it may not matter at all, or it may be everything. Presence is everything.

An automotive supply store (tires, I think) had a big sign by the street. Each night the owner put a new witticism, twisted proverb, or insightful comment on the sign. And commuters on Atlantic Ave chuckled or thought on the way to school or work each morning. 10 words or less, but those "posts" became a landmark amid the drab clutter of an interchangeable commercial district. Now in Oakland, California, about 500 miles away, the owners of the Grand Lake movie palace put one side of their historic marquis into the hands of their movie programmer. He writes strong messages about blackbox voting, the Patriot Act, a possible military draft, the Iraq war. Some people think he's an ass, others applaud, but everyone slows down to see it on the way to the market. In both cases, the author had no control over readership. A consistent voice, regular updating, and strong points of view defined both personal and corporate identities.

Dina, Ton, Peter, Gary, Scott, Drakaal, back to you.

Scale-hostile pricing: Movable Type maxes me out.

Fri, 14 May 2004 18:08:18 GMT

Capping the number of users at 20, the new Movable Type 3.0 release pricing structures me out of its market.

Enterprise blogging is a team sport. So are grassroots, educational, and community blogging.

And teams have personnel turnover. New people replacing departures, temps filling in. So the total number of user accounts grows over time. The average person changes jobs every four years, more frequently when you're younger; 25%-50% new faces a year, assuming you're not in a troubled economy, facing personnel problems, or coping with growth. Did I mention no more guest blogging?

I can no longer, in good conscience, recommend MT to small businesses, workplace teams, or any of the 1000 Kerry grassroots teams any more. They'll max out any of the five MT licenses in six months. Or minutes. My East Bay Kerry communications teams (writers, speakers, media relations, rich media) have more than 100 volunteers. Repeat that for every county in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona, etc.

I'd love for MT to offer a parallel pricing structure for non-governmental organizations, for unlimited numbers of users/blogs.

What are my alternatives? Scoop and its derivatives are looking better. So is Traction, which, while more expensive per user, doesn't cap the number of users on a server. More choices.

[aka strategy]

Seven questions from Cleveland

Mon, 03 May 2004 21:50:02 GMT

I received this email from Anne Collingwood this morning.

Phil,

I am frustrated about the lack of attention the Internet is being given by the national campaign.

I see the need, but I am clueless. I am interested in your thoughts about both the following questions and about how to improve the Kerry Internet Effort.

Best, Anne

I’m working in Ohio with a grassroots organization called Cleveland for Kerry. My friend Matt is working in California with East Bay for Kerry.

The following issues came up during a phone conversation we had tonight. Would you be able to help us think through the solutions?

1. Is it too early to see the (state-of-the-art) potential of the Internet realized? How significantly can the power of the Internet diminish the need for television ads in this election? In 2008? In 2012?

2. Are bloggers more rigid in their thinking than others? Would you equate it to letters-to-the-editor in real time? Can there be actual debate online?

3. Are moderated discussions valid? Can a moderator censor some comments and still claim that they are listening to the people?

4. Did the Internet help facilitate the apparent cult of personality with the Dean folks? If so, was that kind of emotional investment wise; did it alienate folks not previously on the bandwagon?

5. Do bloggers feel betrayed if their advice is not used? Do they tend to extend trust to the candidate? How can a trustworthy candidate gain trust with new folks through use of the Internet?

6. What were the differences between young people attracted to Dean during the primary and attracted to Kerry during the primary?

7. The Internet offers campaigns the posting of data, mail, conversations, live broadcasts, tax revenue (just kidding :), and…?

There is no paid staff in Ohio. There is no staff that Matt knows of in the East Bay other than professional fundraisers. We see the Kerry Internet team working on live webcasts, fundraising drives, and the website. There are, however, "local websites" popping up all over the place, and we have no clue about what we can do with them.

If you don't have time to respond directly, we certainly understand. If you can refer us to someone or to websites, we'd appreciate it.

Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,

Anne Collingwood

What are your answers to these questions?

LeFever wins first Weblog Perfect Pitch Competition.

Thu, 29 Apr 2004 19:41:31 GMT

I'm sure the folks at Pyra and MoveableType were winners with their own elevator pitches, but those were for tools. Lee LeFever won for the internal pitch, for the hey, boss, let's try this thing.

First, think about the value of the Wall Street Journal to business leaders. The value it provides is context — the Journal allows readers to see themselves in the context of the financial world each day, which enables more informed decision making.

With this in mind, think about your company as a microcosm of the financial world. Can your employees see themselves in the context of the whole company? Would more informed decisions be made if employees and leaders had access to internal news sources?

Weblogs serve this need. By making internal websites simple to update, weblogs allow individuals and teams to maintain online journals that chronicle projects inside the company. These professional journals make it easy to produce and access internal news, providing context to the company — context that can profoundly affect decision making. In this way, weblogs allow employees and leaders to make more informed decisions through increasing their awareness of internal news and events.

First off, read it out loud. Take a moment.

This is an OK pitch. Say what you propose, frame it, and say why it matters to the listener. Use the language of the pitchee. Terse language is good, flowing is better. This pitch hangs together.

LeFever's pitch does some things well. It explains what weblogs are. How they're used. How they affect daily life and the bottom line. It's focused on the workplace and the specific problems of harnessing intellectual capital, of herding cats, of decentralizing decisions. There's a nice analogy to the Wall Street Journal as a context baseline, and that you need one of your own.

Do you think LeFeber made his case? Is this the right case to make? Would you buy a blognet from this man?

Event blogging wishlist, unrequited.

Sun, 18 Apr 2004 17:52:12 GMT

I edit EastBayKerry.com , a TypePad weblog. It's a dual-use site: evangelism with a public face for our group and political cause, and a work coordination site. From a September 2003 help desk ticket to TypePad support:

I'd like an event typelist.

First, I want the fields described by vCalendar, RFCs 2445 (iCalendar), 2445 (iTIP), and 2447 (iMIP).

I want to be able to import events from my desktop calendars (outlook, palm).

I want to display upcoming events in my sidebar.

I also want to be able to show recent events or events in a time range.

Each event should have a permalink.

I want to sort by date/time of the event, not the date/time the link was posted.

I should be able to control day/date/time displays.

I should be able to emphasize some events as important, so they get an alternative CSS style (so I can pick them out of a longer list of events).

I want to be able to group or categorize events.

I want the option of providing a link to a .cal file so I can drag an event link from a page into a desktop app. Outlook and the Palm Desktop and most PIM packages support drag and drop.

When I create a new blog post, I want to be able to point to one or more events the way I point to categories.

I want to syndicate an event list, as with RSS/RDF/XML.

I want to show another person's list on my blog.

I want to combine several events lists (mine and/or others) into one list.

I want to be able to see events in calendar formats. See calendar.yahoo.com for various layouts.

Also: TypeLists should be accessible to guest authors too, with permission.

It's still on the wishlist.

[aka design]

Kill Bill movie-references guide

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 05:06:33 GMT

Scaramouche (1952, George Sidney) The Bride versus Johnny Mo fighting on the railing.

An influence across generations.

While I'm reading how memes diffuse through the blogosphere in hours and days.

I love the web.

Social Networking Technology Forum, 28-April @ 7pm, Berkeley

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 02:52:51 GMT

Brian Sarrazin turned me on to this Social Networking Forum at Cal. Wednesday, April 28th, 2004, 7p-9:15 pm. Wells Fargo Room on the Haas Campus. Topics look worthwhile:

the economic incentives of SNT and the concept of “incrementalism”
the efficacy of SNT in building long-term relationships
the opportunities of ubiquitous computing, efficient user interfaces, database scaling and more intelligent query engines
the global marketplace as facilitated by SNT; market consolidation

The poor sods roped onto the panel: Eytan Adar of HP, Bobby Chao of Chinese friendster YeeYoo.com, VC Skip Fleshman, Andy Halliday of Spoke (formerly of In-Q-Tel), and Marti Hearst of Cal SIMS. Bonus: PhD Research Presentation by Harvard's Wayne Lim. $15 includes a quick dinner; rui@berkeley.edu for tickets. Bring Bullfighter but listen to voices of skepticism and experience, to what isn't said.

[aka community]

Google News + Technorati + Citizen Blogging = ?

Mon, 12 Apr 2004 18:31:41 GMT

Out of the millions who blog, a handful do what professionals call journalism. Would more be better? Should we actively promote citizen journalism?

We could.

Local Civic Journalism clubs.
A full blown track in public school starting at age 8.
An awards ceremony like the Pulitzer for best CJ reporting, best analysis, best thread, best catch of something missed by major media.
Grants to develop curriculum for Business, Science, Public Affairs, Sports reportage.
A professional guild helping CJers get press credentials and access like any news network.
Legal services for bloggers to protect sources, file FOIAs, use sunshine ordinances, and defend IP.

And this is just for plain old text.

What will citizen journalism look like in 2009? My wild ass speculation: (like anyone will remember this post)

Moblogging comes into its own. Photos at a campaign stump speech by attendees outnumber those taken by photojournalists. And some aren't in bad light, of the back of someone's head, of the floor, with a finger over the lens, or from 10,000 feet away. Some will capture the spirit of an event and a defining moment. Long bet: By 2010 I'd be very surprised if ubiquity alone doesn't find us with a cell phone photo (or whatever we wind up calling them in 6 years) winding up above-the-fold on a major newspaper story, featured on the evening news, and gracing the cover of Time Magazine. A generation ago, big media adapted to electronic news gathering. The public continues that trend as the diffusing technology follows Moore's Law (more, better, faster, cheaper, smaller).
Campaign coverage.

A blogger on the presidential campaign bus.
Designated bloggers at each meetup, taking photos and posting the minutes.
Campaign aggregators, by location, topic, and affiliation go up 5 minutes after the home page.
Local reporters become editors for local bloggers, compiling their accounts of the campaign.

Personal video blogging becomes a staple of the portals and ISPs, a reason for customers to adopt broadband. And buy shiny tiny new digital video cams. Even laggards will have Logitech cams delivered with their just to be in on the conference call at work or to talk with family. First evidence: surging video camera aftermarket.
Video syndication. We'll be moving more video en masse. RSS enclosures, anyone?. As we're seeing in China's blocking of weblogs and other news sources, people route around censorship. P2P news distribution offers that alternative. Even for text news, P2P distribution of RSS and cached feeds let the network scale up.
News discovery systems, like Google News, will expand reach from the thousands of traditional news publishers to a broad selection of personal publishers. At first it's to weed out P.R. pros and to find reliable streams of general interest subject expertise. Eventually, they'll learn that the sixth-grade blogger has something meaningful to say about Outkast, worth sharing.
Blog juice. TV news and online editions of newspapers will explore ways to co-opt cheap content. Bloggers as stringers? Look for a play from the Classified Advertising department to annotate listings with fresh context from blogs, especially in smaller markets. Maybe even sharing revenue with popular bloggers. Example: citizen reportage on housing, neighborhoods put in with real estate listings.
Stringer status. I'll bet hundreds of bloggers earn stringer accreditations from national news services and local news media. Not for everyone, but those willing to subscribe to journalism's standards will find this an edge.
Do you want it fast or good? Most blogging is about fast, slashing the distance between idea and paper. But video is inherently more interesting after post production. Home studio software adds polish. Voice overs, teleprompters, transitions, stock music, green screen backgrounds, titles. Nonlinear editing tools like Final Cut Pro will emerge in free/cheap format.
Extension. News isn't homogeneous, it's specific. Chess reporters have standard ways of representing game play. As do those who cover soccer/futbol. Or obituaries. Or police blotters. Or movie reviews. Watch for structural extensions to standard blogging, new blanks in the forms tailored to the application. And for clever ways to share new extensions.
History. Opposition research teams will hire specialists to comb campaign, activist, and lobbyist weblogs for dirt. Every weblog post from this election cycle is fair game. Would this help or hurt Kos's election chances?
En mi primera lengua. News translations on the fly, continuing a reverse cultural imperialism where English absorbs ideas and words from around the world. RSS and Atom will face semitic times of day and non-Gregorian calendars.
VNRs. Video News Releases will come along with citizen journalism. Citizen flackery and propaganda.
My News Station. We saw a handcrafted version of this in the Dean campaign. HowardDean.tv used DishTV, cable news, and hacked TiVos to collect news. They also collected video from the field, from students and volunteers, and cut it into a daily TV news program. That will become automatic. News aggregators (Bloglines) and discovery systems (Google News (clusters by topic), Technorati (clusters by reference), Daypop (what's hot)) will group and cut together syndicated videos based on location, time, and subject; create a montage of related footage; and stream a custom video channel just for you.
Community stations. Following Hoder's advice on regional blogosphere building, we'll see "people's news" become a trusted alternative to state and corporate media. Military professionals will prioritize community blog servers right after radio and television stations. It won't happen in this decade because John Kerry should be able to keep the peace for the next 8 years, but the next time a country fears an attack by the US, watch their blogosphere come under attack from within.
Big screens enter. What do you do with a 250 megapixel monitor? Something 5 feet tall by 8 feet wide at paper resolution? Could you create a dynamic montage of video and stills that reflected your interests over time, relative popularity and proximity of news stories. The World Wide Wall® of News: a must for every corporate Chief, political war room, and mayor.

Where do you think citizen journalism be in 2010?

[aka community]

Blogging's Three Cores: Discover, Read, and Write

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 12:45:19 GMT

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.

Discovery - finding interesting sources and posts
Reading - what, where, when, and how you want
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:

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
Tie the activities to business benefits
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]

Justify your social network software: fun doesn't count.

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 12:22:51 GMT

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]

Mail is part of Google's enterprise strategy.

Sat, 03 Apr 2004 17:46:24 GMT

Jeff Jarvis says Google email (gmail) is just another portal me-too.

I don't think so, Jeff.

Email has juice. Only telephones are used more.

40% of a company's knowledge is stored in its email boxes, hidden from intranet search engines, locked away on desktops. Email is rich with:

social information (who is asked about what, who redistributes information to whom),
time signatures (sent, received, read, forwarded, printed),
threading and propagation clues (A sent it to B who replied while copying it C who forwarded it to...),
urls pointing to the web,
enclosures passed along, and
entry points, from mobile devices to robots to business software.

evectors' ZOË demonstrates the value of combing through your mail to fuel search and reveal context.

For Google, this has three strategic benefits:

Better Google scoring. There's no reason Google can't collect a billion emails by this time next year. A million users times a thousand messages. The urls will inform PageRank™, and in near real time. If you thought weblogs got you Google juice, wait for email.
Ad Revenue. Either you'll pay for ad-free viewing or you'll get Google text ads tailored to your emails. A billion page reads of additional targeted inventory to sell.
Appliance sales. With Google search, weblogs, and email, Google will give Microsoft mail service a run for its money. Watch Google roll out Blogger in a Box this year, the better to clue the Google search engine to intranet content. A year from now, watch the microcontent of email and weblogs continue to converge, especially behind the firewall.

How does Yahoo differ from Google?

Where Yahoo sells communication, Google sells context.

Where Yahoo brings integration, Google leads with relevance.

Where Yahoo! lets you type up a "buddy list", watch Google tweak your orkut social network with clues from your mailing behavior, and vice versa.

Where Yahoo uses their toolbar to access their many services/properties, Google's toolbar will observe your browser experiences. And that includes now sending and reading email, surfing, news watching, reading and writing weblogs, following and posting to usenet, and shopping. With email, orkut and your toolbar, they now can create a compound profile of your interests.

Context, relevance, experience. Tough to beat.

[a klog apart]

Emergent disorganization: lessons from East Bay Kerry.

Fri, 02 Apr 2004 01:17:48 GMT

I've been rationalizing the 30-50 hours a week of grassroots campaigning I've been investing in the local Kerry campaign since last summer. Changing the world is great, and we're doing that. My takeaway is what I learn from it, how the work itself changes me. Here are a few lessons learned.

EQ is more important than IQ.

Everything in campaigns is about emotion. Values trigger emotions, as do symbols of those values. And emotions get you money, volunteers, votes.

Campaigns are tough on the emotions.

A local DFA leader said "Anger Unifies" at the last Democratic Unity Meetup. Lots of adrenalin. Ups and downs. I went to three Dean meetups the night after the California primary, the day Dr. Dean withdrew from the race. I saw frustration, despair, anger, denial, and loss. But I also saw resolve, support, and bonds with their fellow Dean faithful. In a race that lasts six weeks, you can turn up the emotional volume. But what do you do with a race that lasts 100 weeks?

You can't pick your comrades.

We encounter every "people problem" that HR pros prepare for, that social workers encounter, that psychiatrists commit for, in grassroots campaigning. The persistently off-topic person. Trolls. The person who thinks everything is interesting and emails you about it, and your 500 fellow volunteers. Fair weather friends. The craven mercenary. The paranoid. The narrowly obsessed (we almost started a John Kerry's Hair weblog back in September '03). The person who picks fights. The lonely. The shy. It takes centered, socially adept people to work with these people.

Burnout is a huge problem.

We're lucky to have any active volunteers survive the primary season. It's expensive to volunteer. You're giving up recreation that might have been keeping you sane. You're spending less time on friends, family, and your love life. You may even trade off time you could be working or looking for work, dipping into savings or living frugally. I know volunteers who put off graduation, that lost a job, that neglected their health. So recruiting well rises to the top 5 issues every week.

When grassroots groups pay for their own expenses, they go to jail or embarrass their candidate/cause.

My group, East Bay Kerry, is unincorporated and not a PAC and not recognized by the FEC or IRS. If we take money from an organization to print fliers or buy buttons, we're breaking the law. If we sell buttons at a table, we're breaking the law. If we keep a few bucks from a house party to pay for the party's pizzas, we're breaking the law. It's paralyzing.

We need ways to legally raise and spend money without screwing John Kerry for President or the DNC.

Hoisting: those higher on the scale of commitment recruit those lower on that ladder, and work to bring them up.

There's a clear ladder of political engagement. It runs from "I can vote?" to elected official. At each step of the ladder, we pull up those behind us. If you volunteer for 2 hours every two years, you call someone to vote this year. If you're leading a writers bureau, you recruit new members from those who were previously interested but not volunteering.

How much does that happen in the workplace?

Rarely.

Self-interest doesn't often lead to such seemingly altruistic behavior.

But if it is in the campaign's interest (or the enterprise's), how can you institutionalize pulling folks behind you up the ladder? How do you make each leader's success dependent on the growth of replacement leaders and fresh blood?

The new labor market features increased competition for great talent, increased employee turnover and shorter tenures. So hoisting becomes a competitive advantage. How well do you align incentives with hoisting behavior? How well do you incorporate

There is no organizing software that thinks of the user as the voter or volunteer.

All the commercial tools for running electoral or advocacy campaigns is top down, center out. CRM for politics. Clueless, in the Cluetrain Manifesto sense.

Keep all that stuff, though. It works.

Add new edge-powered stuff. Let anyone say "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!" Without approval from a hierarchy. Decentralized authority and the tools to act on it. And then help that nugget of energy flourish internally, and in interaction with others.

There are no tools for committee-scale organizations to be productive.

I want to put on a lecture series for John Kerry. Or host a bowling league fundraiser. Or mentor a Swing State grassroots team. Or coordinate high school students in growing Or coordinate 75 Earth Day activities.

Where are the tools that let me plan, staff, fund, schedule, coordinate, train, account, syndicate, dunn, manage, remind, and otherwise get things done?

Where are the recipes for getting things done? And the place to post my own?

We need team-scale productivity tools.

No grassroots organization is an island.

This is from some analysis I did for ActivistTech or DemTech or whatever it's called: A hypothetical bridge commission.

My speakers bureau in East Bay - West of the Tunnel works with other committees

Fundraising
Media relations
Writers
Swing state

Both ours, and those of East Bay East of the Tunnel, San Francisco's grassroots Kerryfolks, local union organizations, the Wellstone Club's speakers bureau, the official campaign, venue hosts, etc. More than 200 political and activist groups are players in the Bay Area's East Bay. Each committee in my organization needs to be able to manage the life cycle of relationships with each of the others. To get things done: events, money, recruiting, media, etc.

Where are the tools for identifying potential relationships, making them real, sustaining them, and gracefully retiring them?

Blogging remains absurdly difficult.

And the tools don't make it any easier.

Information overload is a real problem without practices or tools for managing it.

Just before the California primary, I was receiving more than 500 political emails daily. I didn't even get to look at my thousand RSS feeds.

When we got to 10 daily emails on our local Yahoo! group, people started unsubscribing faster than they were joining.

We're experimenting with multiple email channels (high and low volume, broad and niched, ad hoc and scheduled) but it's all confusing to our volunteers.

How much fatigue will the average voter feel in 200 days, if this keeps up? How can we lower the political noise? Does tuning out mean voters stay home?

Ok, so I'm off to a meeting of the Speakers Bureau.

Shirking the Power Law

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 06:08:01 GMT

I am so fucking ready to rant about this; that kind of day.

To recap, Dave Winer starts a BloggerCon thread saying Shirky's Power Laws rationalize a blogger aristocracy. Nick Denton says "in internet media, a peasant can become king." Seth Finkelstein pines for "a session on wealth and poverty run by Martha Stewart." Frank Paynter says you have to be born lucky to break into the A-list: talent and "deadly serious intention" need money and leisure time. Then JT invokes Sturgeon's Law, the ignorant overcoming the expert, our trust in celebrity and cats swarming to move the D-List to the C-List. Seth rebuts: "1) Be content with your lot in life. 2) The weathy deserve it since they are talented and apply themselves (while the poor are shiftless and lazy). 3) Work hard, be optimistic, and you could succeed too. 4) Anyway, it's better here than in Russia or China." jt adds that craving an audience doesn't breed excellence.

First, reading blogs is a zero sum game. Each person on earth has only so much disposable attention. Every content publisher competes for that finite pool. It's not the blogosphere, of course, but the entire mediasphere and the real world fighting for attention.

The very popularity of weblogs and their ease for new entrants means that our marketplace for attention becomes more efficient. Like any nearly efficient market, overall rents (profits distributed) average toward zero. In an attention market, that means you may get your shot at the big time, but your content had better meet some niche's needs superbly or you're toast.

Fairness? Equal distribution of attention means that everyone has to read more dreck and that nobody ever gets to discover classics or bestsellers. What's more, when there were ten thousand active bloggers in the world, you could really see your shot. You could see your stats rise as newbies followed previously blazed blogrolls.

But it's wrong to expect opportunity to scale. Sure, you might get discovered at Schwab's soda fountain. But in attention terms, it's amazing if your neighborhood billboard for the local pub gets noticed, let alone talked about. And you'd be flabbergasted if the Murphy's Dive poster was mentioned in a local trade rag, let alone the town paper, or picked up in syndication. And you'd be right to be surprised. Because Budweiser just spent $100 million in your state, spending it on high production value and primo placement. And what is your little 8x20 foot sign going to do against that kind of presence? Millions of people know Bud's brand, not Murphy's.

But that little sign may do the trick. It may be placed just so around the corner and remind enough locals that yours is the classy dive bar, the one with singing on Tuesday nights. And it could be the difference between breaking even and setting aside a little for retirement.

And you may even do some co-operative advertising. Take a little of that Anheuser-Busch cash and stick a Bud neon sign in the window. The regulars won't care, but passers-by may get enough of a familiar tug to walk through the door. A-list links are like that; someone with a lot of juice throwing a little attention your way, knowing you've got your own readership and you're gonna siphon its attention right back to the A-list's circle, and in spades.

We complain of advertising overload. Spam, ad pollution, telemarketers. Screaming for attention so loud it makes you pluck out your eyes just so you don't have to see one more inanity. Your ears bleed with fatigue. Your thumb builds a callous from using the remote to change channels or TiVo-ahead in commercial avoidance.

And into this we drop vox populi and speak of Voice. So now I must read the inanities published by family, and they mine. And the drivel of my co-workers. And the read of my lackluster performance on last night's date. And the adolescent self-involvement of TRL-addled hormone machines. It's like the Pennysaver on steroids. Listings of ton's of other people's useless trash begging for a new home, in this case a temporary place in my brain.

So we tune the cacophany out, we avert our eyes.

And stick with the three bars we know, along the beaten path. And if word comes about a new beer, we might try it, but it better be worth giving up the comfort of a cold Bud.

Technorati, you say? Daypop? Feedster? All the wonderful tools of discovery and navigation? Yeah, I saw that beer distributor's magazine too. It had picture and reviews and blurbs on all sorts of beers and ales, local and national brands, imports too. But I don't have time to try a million beers. Bud's good enough most of the time. It does the job. And I have better things to do than waste time and my hard earned coin on suds I might not like. I already know what I get with Bud and the occasional Anchor Steam.

Besides, there's a game on. Why am I talking to you?

[aka klogs]

A consulting and strategic market research firm swallows the blog pill.

Sun, 15 Feb 2004 17:29:40 GMT

Christopher Ireland writes up Cheskin's move from blog pilots to mainstream business blogging. Guided by Stuart Henshall.

We had no idea what a smart idea that was. It's taken two months, and we've been aching to blog, so I was very impatient and grouchy. He moved us from Blogger to Moveable Type, taught us the importance of category tags, blog rolls, news readers and a host of other useful concepts and tools. He's coached us how to use blogging as both an internal as well as an external tool. And he's excited a whole new group of bloggers here at Cheskin.

I invite you to visit our blogs again--we promise to keep them very up to date and to continue exploring this fascinating space.

Blogging in public can be a distraction. And an irritating change. But for a firm like Cheskin whose value lies in its own branding, few media are more intimate.

Ingrid Jones's diary.

Sun, 15 Feb 2004 17:24:12 GMT

Delightful to see the new American politics through such insightful British eyes. Me and Opehlia. A blogger and her cat from the land of the Beatles and Disraeli. A regular read on metablogging, online democracy, and other things I find fascinating. Just a bit askew in unexpected ways.

My YASNS riff: My orkut doesn't fit.

Sun, 01 Feb 2004 13:54:42 GMT

You may try to model me, but you can't define me. I'm larger than a tidy form.

That's why God and evolution gave us the ability to lie. And posture. And pretend. And choose our words and body language.

I am not my business card. Or my resumé. Or my orkut profile.

They are merely shorthands, placeholders, for the real thing.

And you never get the real thing.

The closest you come is by interacting with me: self as black box. Not by description.

Second best to getting the real thing: ethnographic observation of my real life behavior.

Third best: following my narrative.

Fourth best: analysis of my online behavior.

That hamstrings YASNs.

The prob, of course is that I am many people in one skin and we all change who's in charge with the ebb and flow of blood sugar, brain chemistry, and the damned cat that peed on the carpet and I'm one way in A's company, another in B's company, and some awkward way when in the company of both A & B since I'm working with B, dating A, but had horribly bad sex with B but I can't remember whose fault it was.

I am complex, not one persona but many, changing over time.

We become self aware of this in puberty.

And spend adolescence learning to navigate ourselves, to choose, to actively dream versions of ourselves into being. For the objects of our infatuation. For our authority figures. For our parents. For strangers. Hopefully for ourselves.

Then adulthood calls for settling upon an outer persona. We simplify, most of us, at least our outer affect.

But the other me's are still inside.

And each of the million other Ryzers/YASNSers are the same way.

If I'm that messy and convoluted, can you imagine the relationship complexity? personas*(personas-1).

I have a few broad suggestions for social network improvements.

Model sociology. Not just nice stuff but all the icky horrible interactions we see in the office, in school, in gangs. Rites of passage. Flirting. Insults. Combat. Cliques. Authority. Power.

Model psychology. Squeeze in Maslow's Hierarchy. Piaget or someone else who models childhood development, especially arrested development.

Let me do more. Solve real life problems virtually. Design tools for tasks I really need. Group formation. Group destruction. Group work. Better meetings. Prioritization of communication. Help people be useful to each other.

Do less. Email, texting, http, phone calls are all pretty dumb systems. They just move content, so the human content becomes paramount, richer, engaging. Find your core and strip away the rest.

Admit your limitations and open up the plumbing. We need APIs so programmers can extend the models and tools.

I should be able to write an extension that lets you see a combined orkut profile and Google references.

Or find what the people in my virtual sub-community are buying on Amazon.

Or authenticate access to my calendar using friendship degrees.

Or sync my mobile phone behavior (who I text and who texts me) with my buddy list.

Or turn orkut into my smart phone's Caller ID system.

Or bounce new friends-of-friends against my interest profiles and nominate a few for acquaintanceship.

Or whatever. The world knows more than you do, so let them in.

If you want social software to endure, ...

A guy asked what it takes to scale your rolodex to 100,000 people. Then built Ryze to find out.

What's your question? "akasig"

essay: Blogging the Market by Dafermos

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 01:29:18 GMT

Blogging the Market: How weblogs are turning corporate machines into real conversations. by George N. Dafermos. Version 0.91 Wednesday 15/10/2003. I could almost give this to a non-blogger.

Brain rich environment.

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 01:25:34 GMT

Susan Mernit called. 30 minutes later I'm in a North Berkeley bakery with J.D. and Mary. "J.D. Lassica?" I ask. Indeed it is. I didn't tell him to his face, but I've been learning from J.D. for more than a year now. That whole big J in the "blogging as journalism, blogger as journalist" meme. Thinking about ethics. Management as journalism. Public/private tradeoffs. Truth squads. He's quieter in person than on his blog (maybe that's called "listening", Phil).

Stuff I didn't get to mention to J.D.:

EastBayKerry.com is about making national issues local, local issues personal, and to provoke engagement in the political process.
Don't Blog was birthed during breaks while hung over at the 2003 Blogtalk conference.
I really like that General Clark's been holding Bush directly accountable for domestic misconduct about foreign affairs. Not just well said, but a consistent and dogged demonstration of public integrity.

I've been tuning in to Mary Hodder's biplog (Berkeley Intellectual Property Weblog) since Spring 2003. New Media Mary [sorry, Mary] also edits the napsterization blog. Mary's writing/shooting a documentary on Cow RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, sort of a Total Bovine Information Awareness Program. Blogworthy in a Mad Cow era. Contrast this to Mary's growing irritation with fringe intrusions into her own privacy, like seeing her name and RSVP status show up on party evites. Transparency in that little virtual social encounter makes going to the party less mysterious, meeting people there feel less serendipitous, and steals intimacy from the inviter-invitee relationship.

Just imagine how the cows feel. MooooveOn.

Then Thai lunch with Susan.

Susan wants to bring bloginess to social service charities. All that klogging goodness (authentic and timely stakeholder communication, collaboration turbocharged, institutional memory, etc.) for not-4-profit agencies that heal, feed, and nurture those who need it. Off to a good start but enduring bigco bureaucracy wrapped in 501c3 woolens.

Susan advised a bit about the state of the Actionable Sense Society's formation. Thanks.

Why do we need to escape the home office for the social engagement of a cubicle farm? Why do we find it so useful to meet in person? Do we ever figure out what we're going to do when we grow up?

I like it when Susan calls."akasig"

Your blog's soul is its writing form; that soul's expression is its home page.

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 19:24:55 GMT

What makes blogging different than wikis or other web sites? Among other factors, blogs emphasize the home page over site hierarchy. This lowers a blog reader's and a blog writer's cognitive burden. Three examples:

Fresh stuff is prominent. Unlike other sites, readers always know where to look for updates and top of mind. Contrast with your typical corporate site of a thousand pages and no trusted way to know what is new. The old rule that fresh content attracts return visitors remains true.
Writing precedes organization. In wikis and most web sites, you first decide where in the site you are going to add or revise content. Blogging says "write first, worry about filing later." This has the benefit of shortening the distance between thought and captured utterance. It also frees the blogger from squeezing an idea into an existing box.
Write once, Save to everywhere. Not only is the distance from thought to paper shortened, blogging (and other [CMS] tools) also lets you route your post. Depending on the tool, you can distribute your post to multiple blogs, to email distribution lists, to [RSS] subscribers. You can also make the post visible to readers navigating by broad categories, by finely keyworded topics, and by criteria inferred from the post's content. So routing can be an afterthought. And bloggers know that their first impulse should be to open the blank page and write.

p.s. I originally posted this on Saturday, 3 January, but I somehow lost it (operator error). I noticed it was gone when Michael Boyink mentioned it (well considered comments, Michael). I recovered it from a copy kept by eVectors' k-collector (gracie).

[a klog apart]

A complete list of blogging awards.

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 17:16:35 GMT

The title of this post is the goal, not the result.

Wizbang Weblog Awards 2003
British Blog awards - Guardian Unlimited
Asia Blog Awards
The Bloggies
Blogawards - German

Weblog des Jahres, Bestes Gruppen- oder Gemeinschaftsblog, Bestes Weblog über Weblogs, Bestes Weblogdesign, Bestes Fotoblog, Bestes persönliches Blog, Bestes Fachblog, Bestes Entertainment-Weblog, Der Geheimtip des Jahres, Das kurioseste Weblog.

Do you know of other blog awards?