April 2005 Archives

A few ideas grabbed here and there:

From Jochen Wegner, Germany, Technology Editor Focus Magazine.
There are 100 000 weblogs in Germany. A very tiny blogging phenomenon, with not one impact blog. Why? Because Germany is a reputation-driven country of elites.

[Personal comment: This is strange. In his homelies, Benedikt XVI has talked several times about what he calls social communications. If a 78 year old german pope "gets it" how come younger germans don't?]

Yann Chapellon, France, Le Monde Interactif
The blog service at Le Monde opened for subscribers in october 2004
Moderation: 5 people (large number!) 200 blogs are now updated every day.

You have to pay to be a blogger on Le Monde. You are educated to attract traffic. You have to agree on a charter of conduct and not promote parties, churches or anything.

[Personal comment: On the chat, one reaction was with Le Monde, "you pay to have your blog censored". Yes and no. You pay to have your blog censored AND you pay to have the "Le Monde" brand name and endorsement on your blog]

Form Pierre Bellanger, France, Skyrock). Skyrock Radio has 4 million listeners per day in the the 13-24 age group. The Skyrock web site attracts 1.3 billion impression on the intranet - 9 million unique visitors - The free blog service Skyblog started in 2002, with an advertising-based business model. So far 1.8 million skyblogs have been created and thousands of posts are published each day. The 13-24 is the first generation to use the internet as a normal tool and the first to really understand the community aspect. Says Pierre:

We used to be a radio station with an audience. Now we have become a community with a radio station

From the discussion: A question was raised about Skyrock's reponsibility regarding education.
Pierre's answer:
1- We abide by the law and filter all posts conveying antisemitism, hate, paedophilia and the like. We moderate, but we cannot moderate too much. It's about keywords, cybercop, and moderation on pictures (10 people). We delete pictures whenever there is a complaint.
2- We have a charter of conduct and we cancel publising rights to people who do not comply.
3- We are concerned by ethical questions: some blogs talk about suicide and anorexia. Thus we feel ourselves compelled to work with associations.

[Personal Comment: I was a little concerned just now about linking to Skyblog. So far, I have always linked to sites I had good reasons to trust. I don't know what to think about Skyblog. It's obviously a benchmark, but is that enough to endorse it by linking to it?]

Doc Searles Author of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

The FCC can regulate broadcasting, defined as "moving content". On the other hand "speech in a place" is protected by the first amendment. So the way we define blogs, the words we use, start to matter if we want to protect ourselves under the first amendment.

Deeper meaning is conveyed through metaphors, borrowed vocabulary. Time is talked about in terms of money; life in terms of travel; business, politics, sports in terms of war (the war box is the most popular in many ways)

For blogs we have three metaphors
1- It's about shipping ("content")
2- It's about real estate ("design", "sites", "addresses")
3- It's about writing. ("journals")

It's about writing. There's nothing wrong with the two other metaphors, but if we present ourselves as content providers we will fall under the FCC rules. "Big C" (Copyright) people want to regulate "content", churches and lobbyist want to restrict "content". They assume we are consumers. We are not. We are producers.

Blogs are by readers and writers for readers and writers. They don't "deliver information", they inform. We are all authors of each other. Authority is measured by Google and Technorati by inbound links. It is both earned and granted. Thus the blogosphere goes beyond democracy. Blogs, like Open source, are the demand side supplying itself. Blogging grows from protocols, standards, and practices, not just by raw number of users. In the blogospheres, traffic and stickiness are irrelevant, hyperlinks and trackbacks are.

Blogging is about rolling snowballs downhill, rather than pushing rocks uphill

The Cluetrain has hardly left the station

PS: Doc's presentation can be found here

Is the blog a media phenomenon? It might not be after all, because blogs belong to a larger family which is social software.As Yossi puts it

The real killer app on the internet are people

1- self expression
2- communication
3- sharing
4- collaboration

Social signaling: On modern instant messengers an indicator telling what the user is doing now. Yahoo has made tests an it appears that what IM users what to know most is what piece of music others are listening to now.

Enhancing reputation: when you want to use experience products, you only know if you want it after you consumed it. Hence the reputation system tied to all experience products, and which marketing people must master.

[Personal Comment: Great presentation, especially the part about reputation systems]

Ideas grabbed here and there:

From Stowe Boyd, US, Corante - Corante is a traditional media in blog clothing. It is a federation of independent like-minded consultants (the Corante network) using one single blog platform as their collective publishing medium

From the discussion: Social medias work bottom up. Blogs are unfiltered, full of spelling errors. Bloggers are artists, "individuals pursuing their own muses"... Blog readers have little expectations regarding content, whereas readers of established media do. Thus the established media must protect their brand equity by only circulating validated and refined content.

[personal comment: I was surprised that nobody in the panel talked about the importance of branding. All media, all blogs, all web sites carry a brand (Mopsos for this one). Whether it is established or not, a brand means something - or it should ;-) - A successful brand conveys a strong identity, a "plot" as Tom Peters would put it. It is very difficult, and it takes time, to build a strong collective brand like Time Magazine. But for a personal blog, it is far easier, because only the author is involved, and there can be many trials and errors. That's why I use Mopsos instead of my name. I don't want to be equated to the Mopsos brand, which represents only one aspect of my personality.]

Ideas grabbed here and there

from Ross Mayfield, US, Socialtext (10 people - founded in 2002). Socialtext sells wiki infrastructures to work behind corporate firewalls. Traditional Enterprise software is too rigid and basically automate business practices, whereas exception handling is at the heart of innovation processes.
quote

e-mail = occupational spam

from Lee Bryant, UK, Headshift - A social infrastructure for better internal communication is based on a variety of tools and technologies: open standards (RSS, Web services...), online services (Flickr, Technorati), blogs, wikis, aggregators. Each one has its own purpose: Blogs are good for sense-making, wikis for collaboration, Flickr for presence sharing etc. Our approach is pragmatic. We try to engage people in their own terms. We talk enterprise content owners into making their document management system available through RSS / XML feeds. We give employees simple tools in local ways build their own aggregators. (Lee's presentation here)

From Euan Semple, UK, BBC - At the BBC, Euan introduced the bulletin board two years ago, then blogs last year. 70 blog are running now, including senior staff posting several times a day. The Wiki service introduced recently is growing the fastest.

[Personal comment: I would have liked those gentlemen to explain the tactics they used to introduce blogs in large vertical stove-piped organizations with a strong and powerful corporate IT staff determined to have it their way, which is of course top-down]

Ideas I grabged here and there:

From Darren Barefoot, Canada, InsideBlogging and Capulet.com. PR is changing. Bloggers are becoming a middle layer that the PR guys need to go after. Blogs consistently break the news one or two days earlier than the press. But do not let PR folks blog, or have them blog about what they do.
Trying to raise revenues by advertising on a corporate blog is a bad idea.

Paolo Valdemarin, Italy, eVectors - In communication terms, one voice is enough, and it works better to let one person speak in her own personal voice rather than speaking as a group through an agency. When companies talk directly without going through agencies, they don't "communicate" as professionally, but the voice is more authentic and closer to the customer.

Andrew Carton, UK, Treonauts - Driving force behind Treonauts: creating a community around a product using the blog as a linking tool. Andrew "closes the loop" by engaging into meaningful conversations with his readers (new specs, advice…)

I answered question from a reader, who wanted to buy add-on software. He was so happy with my answer that he asked me what link to hit on Treonauts so that I could collect my commission.

[My comment - Blogs have readership if they have something original to say, if they have personality, if they have style, all attributes usually given to art forms, and as such tied to the person. Nevertheless, art can be collective and collective blogs are possible if the members of the group work together in harmony and have a distinctive personality as a group. Think about the Golden Gate Quartet. And by the way, that's called a community of practice]

Ideas I grabbed here and there:

From Meg Hourihan, US, Co-founder blogger.com: Blogs are moving beyond text. They are about democratization of media. Content was produced and manipulated by intermediaries. Now we give the ability to people to communicate without mediation.

From Charlie, Finland, Nokia : It doesn't matter what the medium is. What matters more are conversations generated by the medium.

From Caterina Fake, co-founder Flikr - Blogs will consist of photographs, which will not be accessible to everyone. Flickr aims at setting the standard. "If people are going to steal software anyway, it better be ours".

From Barak Berkowitz, Six Apart, US - Traditional marketing "focus groups" define bloggers as people with too much time on their hands and who think too much about themselves. We define blogging as an emergent of communication mode that is both asynchronous and persistent. e-mail is slow synchronicity. There is need for permanence. And this about metadata, not just tags.

How do we move the perception of bloggers?

From the discussion:

Blogs work when they are focused on one topic and/or have a lot of personality. Blogs are not for PR people whose job is to put a "spin" on everything. Blogs are authentic.

The threats to blogs:
1- Technology legislation, not people. threats on DRM.
2- Usage that people can make about your infomation.
3- Unionization: giving rights to journalists that are not given to bloggers.
tool
And the question of personal responsibility: What are blogging service providers responsible for? What happens if the servers of TypePad and others to be attacked and content altered?

Quote from ?

Being fired for blogging is a real career booster

First, this discussion shows three clear directions for future development of blogging technology:
1- Integration of text and other media, especially photographs;
2- Access control (conversation space) and reservation of usage rights by the author
3- Development of classification and metadata, and processed RSS feeds (e.g. by category).
... So beware Flickr]

Other personal comment: PR people still have a role in monitoring trackbacks and comments and advise the author about topics to address. There is an emerging business here, aka tBBC].

Joi Ito, Japan, Six Apart japan, Technorati
Joi made a quick presentation - quick meaning not short, but fast ;-) - about the new paradigm of communication born with the blog phenomenon. The break even point of publication has been driven down so much vs. The break-even point for content that fits into physical distribution, that this induces a totally different view on marketing and communication (for more on this, read "the long tail" article on Wired). If it can be that easy to publish if you skip the intermediaries, the issue is no longer to deliver content, but to discover it.

It is is about rediscovering word of mouth, listening as opposed to shouting as in the traditional marketing & advertising media.

It's no longer about protecting content but about getting people to listen to it. In a few years all the music of the world will be on the future iPODs and the like. Intellectual Property is becoming a myth in a Commons based content production system, where permission has already been granted.

The power of the networked media is rising and these media speak in a different voice, even in big companies. Look at GM's FastLane: Executives are honest in their posts, and, through conversations, build a completely different type of trust

It's about the rise of amateurs vs. professionals. Amateurism has a negative connotation (amateurs are people who can't be professionals), but it shouldn't. Look at the number of trackbacks between mainstream media and bloggers.

It's about being open and never trying to lock people into your own enterprise-driven world. Even AOL, which used to be closed are opening up. People only pay if they have no other choice.

It's about culture. You can't have people change their behaviors. Either your are analog or digital.

It's about democracy. Ethernet connected computers, TCP-IP established the network, html connected content, and blogs connect people. The biggest cultural gap is not between countries but between bloggers and non-bloggers.

In the end, it's really about free speech.

[My comment: There is an important political debate here, because the balance of power is bound to shift in favor of relatively educated youngsters who master internet communication, i.e. the young generation, which is really not in favor of Europe or Japan, where the population is ageing]

Cécile Moulard, Vice-President, Club Sénat introduced the convention and pointed out that we had 22 countries represented among the 300-odd people in the room, gathered here only through word-of-mouth and blogging, and no advertising. She pointed out that French is the second language on the internet (vive nous!) and that the French blogging community is booming, ahead of most European countries.

[Personal comment: if blogging is popular in France, Loïc LeMeur himself is certainly part of the explanation.]

The Paris Quartier Latin was the center of the blogging world today. I went to Loïc's Les Blogs event today. It was quite amazing 300 people and 22 countries represented, and with "la crème de la crème du blogging world" (say it with a french accent). Wow: look at the list of speakers!
During the day, we never really knew whether this was a business convention, a political rally, or a party of old buddies. It had some of the three. Now considering that there was neither advertising nor mailing for the event, and that the message circulated only through word-of-mouth and blogging, this is pure magic.

Standing ovation for Loïc!

[next post will be my summary of the event. Meanwhile, 1053 pictures, including mine, can be found on Flickr just 18 hours after the event. Talking about weak signals...]

In one of his latest books, Re-imagine! Tom Peters talks about a depressing moment when he was called to a participate in a three-hour meeting of one of the top 50 American companies. To quote:

Presentation after presentation spewed forth. The meeting, typical of giant corporations, was really a meeting... to prepare for a meeting... to prepare for a Big Meeting. That is, a meeting of the top 20 of this huge unit, to prepare for a round table of the top five people... who in turn would report their result to the Really Big Guy.
Many of the presentations were apparently scintillating. Rather radical change was proposed. And "proposed" was the operative word.
When the time came to prepare the Semi-Big Guys for the Meeting about the Meeting with the really Big Guy, all radicalism evaporated.
The issue, said one executive, was "cultural". That is, a shift towards a "demand side", customer-driven, brand-centric enterprise. As opposed to a down-the-line "supply side", engineering-driven approach/"culture." But one of the Semi-Big Guys patiently explained , the Really Big Guy "won't tolerate the word 'culture'. He thinks it's bullshit."
The Really Big Guy is apparently happiest with charts and graphs and sterile analysis. God help the presenter who strays into the "softer side of things".
And on it went. Every radical proposal had to be translated into the ABL... Acceptable Bland Language favored at the Tippy Tippy Top of giant Corp.
(...)
When I left that meeting with my pal, I was utterly depressed. Indeed, I saw no reason whatsoever to continue writing this book. What's the point? When every Seriously Cool Idea evaporates in meetings to prepare for meetings? When "powerful" people turn into "gutless" people? When nothing happens other than... tiny incremental adjustments at the margin?