Blogging Technologies And Platforms: Today And Tomorrow

Panel information.

Doc: What I want to know most from these gentlemen are where their tools are going.

Jason Shellen: a little bit of what Blogger is doing is playing catchup. We had a very small team for a number of years. We felt we were building a tool for Web designers in '99, now we're up to 1.5 million registered users, and oddly enough they're not all Web designers. Our users are more akin to Geocities users. We've been undergoing a code revision which we kind of see as a platform for the future. That's all very boring. What is excited is when we see new ways to tie in with the community, and build it in a week. Now we're at Google, and can bounce ideas off really interesting folks who may be working on something very different. Blogger I would venture to say used to be the core for finding new blogs. Suffice it to say, that didn't scale well. We can Google-Scale (my IP lawyer would be very upset with me for that). I think it's dead on not that the tools will fade into the background, but that the blogging specific function will.

Bob Frankston: talks about using various tools, writing his own tools. The advantage of using Blogger is the built in features, the community, the RSS feed. We need to encourage both trends but be aware of the conflicts. Recognize that we're at the very early phases. Need to have users, but also encourage developers.

Dan Bricklin: With our tools (Trellix), that's the schtick, you've got to integrate the look and the functionality. The important thing about the new stuff being written is the automation of the tedius housekeeping, just what Bob said. Analogy to using Basic, then using VisiCalc. This is what the tools do, automate the tedius tasks, enable ease of publishing. Better automation=better output, stronger stuff. The guys at Lotus didn't imagine what Excel would be. One important thing is media forms. I'm really into pictures, history too. The multimedia aspects in many ways are important. Not everyone can write well, not everyone can take photographs well.

Anil Dash: with SixApart, we make Movable Type. Our immediate future will include a design for basic users to start and create weblogs. We think the anatomy, the pieces, have been decided. None of our tools have kept up with managing blogs the way they are. The goal is working backward from what people are doing to making that easy.

Michael Gartenberg: it's interesting that no one has mentioned the changing nature of the devices we work with. We're dealing now with a divergence of devices. One of the things we talk about a lot at Jupiter is digital ubiquity. A handful of people here are blogging on something other than a PC. What we're going to be looking for are ways to not just access but create that content on multiple devices. Need to be able to do it "without being the kind of person who installs an operating system as a form of social entertainment."

John Robb: we're about to come out with Frontier 9.1. Will include mail-to-weblog, will accomplish many other things more smoothly. With Radio, we're looking to add two-way synchronization, added a backup feature recently. We recently worked with a company on a very slick Windows interface, working on a Mac equivalent. Gives you the smooth operation you'd get in a slicker desktop app. Also looking at a P2P system for Radio blogs that would augment your ability to publish large files. Mentions Glenn Fleishmann, put up a PDF of his book, wound up holding an appeal on his blog to get people to help pay for the cost of the download demand. There wouldn't be any copyright infringement involved in the P2P system we have in mind, but helps not break the back of individuals or individual servers. I'd like to have a blog in one location that I can send out to multiple locations.

Jason Shellen: jumps in to say that the concept of blogging being embedded in different things doesn't mean your blog lives different places.

Anil Dash: talks about integrating all the aspects of your life that touch technology. We can broaden out the methods of publishing. The control part then becomes determining who can read what that you've published.

Jason Shellen: points out an audience member doing Q-Logger, says check it out, very interesting personal information manager.

Bob Frankston: discusses the move from diaries to controlled publishing. What I expect is people are becoming good at creating synthetic personalities. Political questions, how do you read information?

Doc: but if you actually want to use a persona in the real world, that's a problem. Brings up digital identity. Discussion tries to distinguish between the blog as a tool for publishing various ways, and the blog as a tool for connecting personally, exposing yourself to the world. Controlling access is involved, also depends on what you have to say.

Anil Dash: in attempting to sell to businesses, access control is a big deal. What is a permalink? A permalink is a promise.

Michael Gartenberg: emphasizes continually updated content.

Doc: Let me bring this down to a very mundane level, and very specifically problems that I have with some of your tools. Doc and Dave Winer may be the only two people in the room who use the Manila outliner. Doc wants a keyboard command to insert a link. Dave promises to do it for him. Going to Blogger for a sec, I've helped start several. Permalinks never work out of the box. Jason Shellen: It's a feature! Because most first blogs aren't necessarily very good. Kidding aside, in our new version that should be fixed. Soon.

Anil Dash: Typepad will be out this summer...

Audience question to the developers about access. Robb: with UserLand, everything but the kernel is public. Dash: Movable Type is non-redistributable open source, in the sense of editable code, anybody can make any modifications they want for their implementation. We're also facilitating ways for people to exchange these customizations. Shellen: for Blogger, what's driving innovation most is our own use. If it's broken or not working well, we use it every day and we know what critically needs fixing. Dash: The future direction for all of these tools hopefully will be a migration to Web services that plug in at a programmatic API level.

Doc: I have an ideal. Would love to serve pictures from my home machine. The cable guys and others have made the assumption there's an asymmetrical Web, if you want to serve something up go find a co-lo somewhere, which is what I'm doing now. Frankston: the companies will have no choice once more people start to use the Web symmetrically. Talks about a Web publishing app he wrote for personal use. Bricklin: I just don't think blogging is going to drive it, I think digital cameras, etc. will drive it first. There are P2P type apps like what John's talking about that will do this, the images are served out of your house. Gartenberg: You're talking about an infrastructure that is hugely aligned against this from an intellectual property standpoint. Audience member: you're missing though that the Web is paid for by people who buy uplink bandwidth. Frankston disagrees. Doc: do blogs have the power to alter this intransigence that Michael mentions? Dash: yes for text, no for rich media. If it's an image, cloud storage makes perfect sense, I'm mostly taking pictures away from home anyway. Shellen: we're making sweeping assumptions about broadband use too. Most people still are on dial-up. Audience-member: my ideal tool is something like Dreamweaver Light for bloggers. WYSIWYG features in Dreamweaver are unparalleled, ability to undo. It's a much more powerful tool for creating the code. Dash: two part answer. All of us support the same APIs for publishing. I can't imagine someone's not doing this. Robb: we are, we already integrate with Dreamweaver. Frankston: an important point here is the immaturity of the "it just works" side. Dash: fifteen months ago, with Ev's help I did a Blogger API Word template. All is totally possible, just hasn't been packaged yet.

Audience member asks about extended find and replace for archives, alert for dead links. Dash: we have find and replace. There are dead links plug-ins available.

Audience member asks about having to use myriad tools, the need to tweak the stylesheet, etc. People's eyes glaze over. Dash: the tools don't work the way that blogs are used right now. Re coding, I'm lousy at it and I hate it. The tool we're trying to build will address what you're saying. They have to, or they won't get the audience that weblogs deserve.

Audience member comments about using blogging to fight political battles, the need to show up. Doc: markets tend to work both ways. These people mother the inventions that obviate the policy questions. Bricklin: The power of TiVo being dubbed "God's Machine." 802.11 is finally at that point I believe. Frankston: Yahoo is rolling out a lot of broadband capacity. The number of bits to share movies, other rich media, is overwhelming. Companies eventually will find that defending dead bits is not in their business interest. There will be a lot of these skirmishing. As surprising as it is, Verizon is emerging as the good guy. The promise of asymmetricity. Doc: recalls being the only person in the audience at a Hollywood conference last year who was there with a laptop, and the only one who didn't have a TiVo.

Blogs and/as Content Management

Panel information.

Introductions:

Tim Appnel: has been an IT consultant for 12 years. Has done a lot of advising on content management. Can attest to some of the ways a corporate weblog can fail that have been talked about today.

Mike Amundsen: EraServer, EraBlog.

Bill French: a self-described conference pot-stirrer. I have a degree in marketing, also involved in technology. We try to look at the information space in a little different light, and chip away at the knowledge management problem using XML standards. Put together a set of Web services and help people understand how information could be put together in a loosely coupled manner. People wanted to use this to blog with.

John Robb: CEO of UserLand. Got into this because I appreciated the potential of blogging as a knowledge management tool. We have about 2,500 organizations using our tools. Dupont, others. Lots of small businesses and onprofits. Government organizations, Los Alamos. I have a pretty good perspective of what has and has not been successful. With bigger organizations today, most people are using Web based solutions. Saves you money, and you have a complete system that can serve a relatively large sized organization.

Bill Stow: blogging is the foundation for new kinds of communication channels within large organizations. In order to do that, we'll see blogging transform itself into multiple forms. The importance of blogging is to provide voice to an organization. Large systems like content management tend to repress voice. People need to be able to offer their competency to the rest of the organization.

Adam Weinroth: Put together Easyournal out of my apartment, now playing catchup to figure out the business andits strategy. Got into blogging when travelling in Europe. Nothing suited his needs as far as communicating with friends and family back home. Put together an extremely rudimentary content management system, discovered people who knew about it liked it and wanted it for their own use.

Matthew Berk, moderator: what exactly is content management?

John Robb: weblog software takes advantage of the functionality provided by a content management system. "Web publishing for the rest of us." Weblogging is pretty well-defined in its feature set. Difficult when a couple of developers try to put something together on the fly, without really understanding all the features involved. Weblogs are a truly horizontal application. In education, student sites, team sites. In corporations, annotating, archiving for a single point of reference for a team. If someone builds something modeled on Word, for example, there's not a straight one-to-one correlation to the actual product.

Bill French: we were trying to help workers make better decisions at a higher capacity. Attempting to create the capacity to act. In thinking about the big picture, we tend to focus on what the real requirements are. We also understood there was this third element: the ability to derive an insight. Re CMS, there's the capture aspect, there's the publishing aspect. Blogs bring the ability to get an increased awareness. When I think of CMS, or the term blog, I get particularly aggravated when people try to pigeonhole this stuff. Puts a straightjacket on your thinking, takes your brain and puts it in a vice. Most of the blogging tools on the market today have the capacity for re-use. At the end of the day, it's information, and what we really should be thinking about are better ways to abstract the information.

Bill Stow: I agree about abstracting the notion of a blog. We started our product as one that was easy to use and non-intrusive. But the fact is many large organizations require and want control and process from the software they're purchasing. If we were to take the current beauty of blogging, put it in front of people, and at the same time turn it into what content management is today, we'd be turning them into something we might not like. A middle ground is possible, but it means you have to see this new thing in many different forms. Mail systems don't provide the persistence you need to capture all this internal knowledge present in large organizations. Not every boss wants to see free-flowing information across the organization, either.

Mike Amundson: the blog conversations now are like what we've seen before—what was this thing called SMTP, HTML? What we're going to see now is the same kind of behavior that surrounded the introduction of HTML, but this time about content markup. We've now got people annotating by category, subject, author. Aggregators, newsreaders short-circuit talking to browsers. Panic around employees generating content, what are we going to do? It may be about content capture: use, re-use, repackaging, searching, sorting, selecting, customizing. Nobody talks about content management for email, and I think that's the way it will go with blogs. Instead of empowering users with HTML, we're empowering authors with XML and RSS.

Adam Weinroth, about users: I've seen a lot of praise for Easyjournal really focusing on the content rather than the display layer. Others would like more of an ability to design a professional looking site. Comes down to a matter of preference.

Matthew Berk: sees a shift away from the obsession with layout and markup. Weinroth says users are interested in little bells and whistles, like a funny cursor or effect. Some of that drive to have things just so gets channelled there.

Tim Appnel: there's a bit of overlap. I use a blogging tool as a low cost content management system. Comes down to what your requirements are. It's like talking about a handsaw versus a jigsaw versus a chainsaw. Biggest difference now is blogging tools tend to be Web native. CMS systems tend to be geared toward enterprise systems, legacy systems no one wants to touch anymore. ... I actually think blogging tools are going to fade into the background, Web services will get pulled into everything. (Later, clarifying.) What this means is you're not going to know where the blogging tool ends and something else begins. Geocities didn't work because it lacked structure and infrastructure. Didn't account for the need to repurpose, move things around. Weblog tools have nailed this.

John Robb: disagrees, due to unique feature sets, communitites. This is an application with staying power. It's hard to develop an application accepted both by the reader and publisher. What I deal with every day are the hazards of continual growth of the feature set. The deep layer features are there if you need them. Standards and integration enable speed and ease of implementation, point and click administration. Extensibility: what you can do is add customizations within the weblog functionality, side by side.

Adam Weinroth: also doesn't see blogs fading into the background, rather they're filling in a glaring gap at the end of the content management spectrum. Blogging is an amazing answer for nonprofits and other small businesses. Blogs by nature are very grass roots oriented, a natural fit for nonprofits, and small and local businesses. Other page building systems are, by comparison, "lame." Design versus publishing tension.

Bill French: group blogs will be important, but the platforms have to support. What's over the hill is a federationi of services, not an application. The federation will be built on XML standards, agility. What you want is something so agile it looks like a chameleon in a bowl of skittles (line possibly swiped from Dennis Miller).

John Robb: it's the interface.

Bill Stow: blogging really raises the awareness of the available information, then you want to be able to reuse it in many different ways.

Adam Weinroth: re the interface, it is huge. The ease of use is incredible. Consider what it takes to train staff on something like Vignette or Interwoven. Now think about using Blogger. Huge reduction in business switching costs. If you're on something that's completely Web based, with all these open based services running on it, the switching costs go down. Matthew Berk mentions Blog Litmus report. There are organizations who will see and adopt a lower end alternative, but that still leaves the fate of the big boys hanging.

Matthew Berk: Fascinating dichotomy here—content is everything, and the interface is everything.

Doc mentions he just hates the word content, gets applause. Information still sounds like something you can ship. It's something you load into a channel to deliver to an end-user...maybe call it stuff. What people do when they blog is not produce content. That's not what we live for. To be con-tent', is a different thing.

Strategies And Tips For Business Blogging Success

Panel information.

John Lawlor: about 23% of the people I talk to these days actually know what a blog is. I look at blogging as an opportunity, an intersection between a technological development and an amazing consumer acceptance of online communications. The expectation of what the Internet can do is coming in line with what we need it to do, it's very much a part of our days. Most organizations still don't know what a blog is, and more importantly, don't care. They care what it might be able to do for them. Blogging=Opportunity. Answering certain questions will give a busineess interested in this a strategy. Who should blog? Who is the target reader? What are you blogging about? What are the benefits we expect? What is important to my business? What needs to be restricted? Where will the blog appear? (Internal or external; makes a good personal filing cabinet, need not be public.) When are you going to have the time? It is a commitment. When will you see results? Why are we doing this, why do we need it?

Major Chris Chambers: discusses the America's Army site, a gaming blog done by the Army. (I missed most of this, sounds fascinating.)

Greg Lloyd: A weblog can be a conversation with a particular group, or with one individual and the rest of the world. The audience can be internal, or there are conversations with a company that are explicitly public. A weblog could be the shared space for everyone in public support, and individual customers can view that unified set. Middle ground is a company blogging about developmental projects.

Halley Suitt: blames David Weinberger for starting her down this path. David told her she had to stop emailing him her stuff, it was good so she had to put it on a blog. Someone here described her blog as sexy and spicy, which is ironic given at the time she started she was dealing with deep, heavy dark issues about her Dad's illness and death. I wrote a piece about that. Other things started to play out in my blog. The Alpha Male series. I also started working at Harvard Business School publishing, had a working life different from what was going on on my weblog. For work, I was asked to write a fictional piece that will come out in September about an employee-blogger who may have disclosed too much information. Four experts commented on the range of appropriate responses to the scenario (firing to promotion). Now with Yaga.com, working on electronic content management strategies.

Don White: Independent marketing consultant. Talks about brand managers, how they think. Fixed price better than low price, tend to look at risk from this point of view. One thing we're doingn is attempting to answer the needs of a real estate brokerage business with a blog tool. They needed to stand out in a business and a region with tons of competition in their area. Blogging tools enabled them to create a useful real estate site. The small real estate firm became The firm with expertise in fourteen different communities, and it was all done for less money than most people would have spent for one Web site. And, it can be operated by one to two people.

John Lawlor brings up the balance between the minimal management and control necessary for effective blogging, and the need to have certain information not go out into the public. Major Chambers: one way to manage the content is to make sure your bloggers are trusted agents (in our case, of the military), and let them self-edit. The army is a pretty risk-averse organization. The general principle is that if an agent has bought into the principles of an organization, it probably will be ok. We went in with a strategy that this was another tool for communication with our players. I was cognizant of this strategy and kept it in mind.

Halley: jumps in that the America's Army blog, against all odds, does just what a weblog should do in the way of voice. It was really interesting to see that given the constraints.

John Lawlor: the Afghanistan blog had a natural end, why didn't you blog the next war? Chambers: we wanted to continue it but had some problems. In an early stage operation, everyone is pretty busy. We couldn't really find someone with the time. In Afghanistan, we came in a little later, there was infrastructure in place. What we have done is continue on the developer side of our game product (kids love to talk to developers).

Greg Lloyd: the primary thing you're relying on is the integrity and trust of the people you've hired. Set guidelines, and give people more than one place to express themselves. Engineers might be more candid and forthright talking to other engineers than a wider audience, for example. People can know and recognize that comments posted to different spaces have different connotations. You can make people more comfortable, as well as avoid mishaps.

John Lawlor: one of the reasons business is interested in this is that blogs do well in search engines. Mentions the dispelled rumor that Google might remove blogs. There is room, I'm sure, for undermining the system. Panel?

Halley: I don't have favorites anymore, I simply use Google to find things. The search engines are used in a different way now. Of bloggers, search results and the other Halley: "He's not blogging enough" Audience comment: anywhere from 75-85% of search engine results come from Google, and weblogs have a significant impact on those results.

Audience question: do purist bloggers have an issue linking to a commercial blog? Jeff Jarvis: you heard it earlier, it depends on what you have to say. John Lawlor: if it has a human slant, that's all that's needed to interest people with a similar slant. Another question, referencing Major Chambers, about security. John Lawlor mentions that new tools or tool improvements are coming online to better address these concerns. ... "Anyone who's in marketing who's in this room is five years ahead of their colleagues. ... The people in this room are so far ahead regarding where this is going, it's phenomenal." (I'm sitting next to my firm's head of Web marketing, she gets a big pat on the back.) Question about the effectiveness of shipping the game related to the America's Army blog. Major Chambers: since this was a PR initiative, we saw qualitative indicators that it was being received positively in our forums and elsewhere. We saw we were resonating with our target audience: tends to be young males who like military things and guns. Our download peaks mostly were related to new realeases of the game. We did notice increases in referrals from our site to the Go Army recruiting site. The site had this scratch, unprofessional feel, mainly because it was me doing it over there, it had that kind of personal touch. Sort of by design, sort of because that's all I could do with the digital camera, etc. I had. ... Greg Lloyd: gives an example of blogs being used by law enforcement as a 24-hour operations log, and to keep people informed.

Don White, on where blogging will be in a few years' time: technologies usually first are used by the technologies, then the information professionals (lawyers, librarians, journalists). It's starting in the broader business community but there aren't many examples right now. Until we can address the risk aversion of those brand managers, we're going to have a tough road. We're a long way from having most businesses endorse a truly personal voice: "The manufacturers of Cheerios have no interest in having someone on the production line blogging the quality of oats coming in."

David Weinberger: Why Weblogs Matter

Blames Doc Searls for his always being referred to as "Doctor" David Weinberger. Why blogging matters? It really, really does matter. You can see it in the excitement level. Causes excitement at a level not seen since the beginning of the Internet. I'm not sure exactly why it's really important, but that's not going to stop me from talking about it.

The Bubble was never what the Internet was about. The Web is not primarily a commercial space, not even primarily an information space. The interest is not there because 800 million people woke up and suddenly decided they wanted to be research librarians. The bubble went away, but the Web absolutely didn't. The Web remains interesting and important. Nobody would have said a few years ago we'd have 20 billion pages on the Web. It's not just markets that are conversations, it's businesses themselves.

I am going to address the question, what is a weblog. They tend to be daily, tend to be a few paragraphs, often (almost always) reverse chronological, almost always very linked. Message is I want you to go away. Here's something I'm interested in, go take a look. These little acts of selflessness are what make many weblogs very interesting. They also have a voice. The paradigmatic blogs are full of voice. If it turned out that Dave and Doc hand coded their pages and uploaded them with FTP, they'd still be blogs. The technology enables the other stuff. The technical stuff does not help explain why blogs are interesting. If it's not the technology, what is it? Partially rhetoric, and as rhetoric it's important that it be written—badly. The reader knows then this is closer to the writer's actual self. Weblog readers also tend to be forgiving and helpful for this reason: prone to forgive bad spelling and gramar, write in about broken links or inaccuracies. Beyond rhetoric, their social. I hate this conversation: it's just like Usenet, only a little different. It's not like Usenet. It's a permanent, persistent place where indirectly and inadvertently, you are creating a proxy of yourself.

Are bloggers authentic? The normal view of self is an m-&-m view: an outer shell and an inner, private self. This doesn't work very well on the Web, because all you have on the Web is this persistent place in which you talk. There is non inner self, so what does this mean about authenticity. It's written, we're writing ourselves into existence on the Web, and with that comes all the virtues and flaws that go along with being an author. What does this mean? It favors good writers. It seems to push for self-exposure (mentions his nephew's blog). The recession also was timed perfectly for weblogging, because it favors the unemployed.

So, I want to talk about journalism in terms of this. Or really, blogging and truth, which is underneath the journalism question. Objectivity and subjectivity. Journalism strives for objectivity, and this has some strengths: multiple stories, expert sifting, providing a community baseline. The problem with this is journalism can't be fully objective. Objectivity admits of degrees, can be more or less. Same goes for subjectivity, and it's claim to be able to show us our world as it really is. The strengths are it acknowledges the observer and the situation, and captures more of the experience. On the other hand, it tends to be more scattershot, raw and individualistic. So why bore you with this? Blogs allow multi-subjectivity. What Dave said this morning. He wants multiple perspectives, likes reading the different reports. We have this now. For the first time, there aren't just little subjective islands scattered around. Now we can read myriad perspectives, from myriad locations, cultures, disciplines. Tis is part of why so many of us are so thrilled about weblogs. It's amazing that we can do this, we've never been able to do it before. So, what's not to like about this>

This is actually quite upsetting to many people. "This is an assault on knowledge, young man and young woman!" Particuarly true of businesses that mistake themselves as forts. They see knowledge as a weapon. Weblogs, as we heard in two panels today, are a way of providing insight, punching holes in the wall, letting in light. You can allow it to happen, but even if you don't, it's going to happen anyway. Another group of people not thrilled about this assault on knowledge are those traditionally who have been the gatekeepers of knowledge. There are notable exceptions: Dan Gillmor, there is not a person who more deeply understands, and is synthetic sympathetic! (sorry! the man himself pointed out this rather funny miscue) to what has happened. Over the course of thousands of years, the quest to discover what was worth listening to turned into a quest for certainty, and maybe I'm gerneralizing just a little bit, but we wound up with Descartes. Knowledge became so anorexic as to be uninteresting. Knowledge grew out of the body, and turned into an anorexic, purely rational thing that has no connection with the human body any more.

So let's talk about what constitutes knowledge on the Web. Time to market: increase the unit, then double it. Brings up Sears Web site. By the way, throw out the Cluetrain thesis about advertising not working. It's very effective for tricking people. We still know who the Shell Answerman is. Back to Sears. Nothing here tells you immediately whether the washing machine you want to buy will fit into the hole you just cut in your counter. If you search Google for Kenmore+Maytag+Discussion (or sub in Complaint for the last), you get a discussion forum that tells you exactly what you need, and more. "Jim," whether or not he works for Kenmore, is believable (and if he is a plant, he won't be able to hide it, will be found out in a matter of days). The Sears store or the Kenmore site will not tell you if there are issues with the annoying buzzer. They're trying to pitch and sell you. But Jim will, and a whole conversation thread may emerge from how best to deal with the buzzer issues. And someone named Rinso—a physicist of lint!—has even more to add. Another example: over the weekend, my blog went down, and then TiVo broke. (Audience groans). I know, you don't want to be next to me on an airplane right now. This was a really bad weekend. The Movable Type community (and any other weblog community) is amazingly supportive and solved the blog problem. Could the information have been wrong? Sure. In this case, the forum happened to be moderated by God (as Anil pointed out), but I didn't know that. This is what knowledge looks like on the Web.

So, why is the world turning upside down for this? Why are people so dedicated and excited. It makes sense in the context of a deeply alienated world. The Matrix, the AI Singularity: the fact we can even believe in this for an instant shows we live in an insane, alienated world. It's an insane, alienated reality to think we can go into work each day and talk like someone other than ourselves. Brings up AKMA's blogthread on forgiveness. You could maybe at this point read more about forgiveness by reading that thread than you could from any "objective" source. Weblogs exist in a new place, the Web. They allow us to have persistence in this space. With WiFi, the correspondence between this personal and public space will be mindblowing. (With that, someone IMs David's computer with a "Hi Dave!" Classic.) Any other questions?? We've never had anything like this before. And now we do.

Questions ("Or do you want to just take IMs?"): audience member asks about the fortress and knocking holes in the wall. How do you actually do it? David: Every time you link to someone you knock a hole in the wall. "Sticky eyeballs" concept, the most degrading possible way to think about a customer. Every time you put in a link, "you are Stickin' it To The Man." Question about Usenet, there's a computer group that has been runing for years on Usenet. It constitutes a kind of community blog among folks with a high level of knowledge about computers. You look at blogs, and you could go nuts trying to filter the computer information. Why are blogs an improvement on the Usenet group? David: they're not. Groups, mailing lists are really, really valuable. It's not a question of who's better. Weblogs are different. Question about another cultural phenomenon that has taken off—Yeah, American Idol, I know where you're going—no really, reality TV. Voyeurism, are blogs also connected to that. Not unlike watching someone suffer through a reality TV program. Phil Windley says his is like that, it's a lie. Dave Winer says this is ridiculous, blogs are not like that. It's like a telephone, the conversation is whatever you want it to be. If you want a blog like American Idol, you can write one that way. One can have a view of the world of blogs that substantiates either view. Brings up example of the Trent Lott story. The blogging world is so big, that Dave Winer, an "expert" on the blog world, didn't hear about Trent Lott on a blog, but on TV. Depends what's on your radar. Halley chimes in that sometimes what's for breakfast conveys a sense of the person: Doc, blogging about watching the stars with his son. The important part of most blogs is you get a sense of the person, that's what keeps people coming back.

Managing A Business Blog

Panel information.

Jimmy Guterman: mentions the personal connection you feel with someone when you follow their blog, but may not have seen them for awhile or perhaps even met them. ... (later) "Before I go on, I just got an IM that said, 'Introduce yourself, Moron.'" And he does.

Jason Butler: BostonWorks is the jobs classified section of the Boston Globe. They're running a collaborative HR blog with three people, finding information useful to their clients.

Adina Levin: differences between blogs and wikis. Wikis are a bit more conducive to communicating a group consensus. We don't see them in conflict.

Biz Stone, on developing a blog voice: starting out with one thing generally morphs into talking about whatever you're really interested in. Finding your voice is a little like jogging, something you do every day. Jimmy Guterman wonders if you have that same flexibility as a business. Adina Levin thinks perhaps yes; like diverging from a meeting agenda if that seems appropriate. We already have social constructs for this. If people are having conversations with co-workers or customers, it's bound to have business relevance.

Jason Butler has discovered an interesting side channel: some of their salespeople use stuff on the blog as an entree to go out and talk to the customers. Knowing the customers, they can point out items of interest.

Jeff Jarvis asks Jason Butler about the HR blog, raises fascinating management issues. How do you manage people who are paying you money? Jason: think about putting together a conference. You lay down ground rules about the speaker's role of providing information rather than shilling for a company or product. Follow up: do you have employees that spend too much time on the blog? Jason: "Only me."

Audience question about what happens to competition when you're linking, and/or seeing (through referrals) that your competitors are checking you out (perhaps on their intranet)? Adina Levin: good questions, haven't dealt with them as a problem yet, but sometimes on her personal site the referrers admittedly can make her nervous. Biz mentions referral blocking services. (Firewalls work too.) Audience member comments that it's valuable to know what your competition is thinking.

Biz Stone tells story about a co-worker where they started a blog "in her name." Not long before she was hooked and wanted to start posting herself. It's contagious. Adina Levin comments that peer pressure works well. And, identifying the projects and conversations that already exist and adding the blogging process.

About the tools, Jason Butler mentioned they went with BloggerPro because it was cheap, easy, and accomplished everything they needed. Adina Levin mentions that the personal blogger tools are really good if you only have a few people blogger. They (Socialtext) are trying to focus on serving the needs of teams, where there are concerns about administration and security. Biz Stone mentions that the information that some of the measurement tools provide (Technorati, etc.) is some of the coolest information involved in the process. Adina Levin: "Ev In A Box" is something that you probably never will see. The cumulative human intelligence is what's compelling.