Weblog Business Strategies 2003 XVII

Christopher Lydon: Live Blogging

Christopher Lydon is a radio host for WGBH and public radio international. He is the host of "The Whole Wide World," a wide-ranging radio conversation decoding the globalization of power, culture, and identity.

I've been in journalism since college. I worked through the '70s working for the New York Times covering politics. In the '80s I worked in public television. And in the '90s I worked on the smartest radio show called the Connection, What I want to talk about today is how to use blogs to create a new kind of conversation. I also want you to think of me as a low-tech Dave Winer. I'm Dave Winer without the brains and the money. But it's not the brains or the money that's most important about Dave. Dave is a student of the culture, and he's a relentless listener to democracy. He's tremendously distressed about it. I'm not an entrepreneur, I'm not a technologist. I'm a citizen. And I speak with a lot of misgivings about where we're at and how we talk to each other.

I talked to Dave about the perfect caller. First she called herself Crystal from Cambridge. Then it was Rose from Roslindale. Finally she settled on Amber from Boston. We always knew she was the same person and she took on all of our most powerful guests. I told our staff I wanted to find her. She made an enormous mark. Dave said that's the ideal blogger. I said that's the ideal caller. My mission in our new radio Internet blog incarnation is to give the Ambers of the world not just a place to vent but to speak her mind. She found on our program a place she could be as big as she was.

How do we decide on a blog live conversation with the human voice? I think that's desperately missing in Blogville. The vox humana is an extreme value add in this world. This world needs them in much greater volume, in a much more integrated space, and much more together.

Two general observations. One, I've been in media too damn long. I served for 10 years at the New York Times. This moment, the downfall of Howard Raines and Gerald Boyd is one of the tipping points of my life. Broadly, it's part of the failure of legitimacy and authority in this country. I don't worship the New York Times, but it is the best newspaper in this country. I think it's in total jeopardy. Like a lot of these defining moments and great events, we have no idea what the consequences will be, but it tells us where we've been. The collapse of the New York Times thing is the result of 15 years of electronic media gathering steam. If you were a martian coming to the United States and someone said have you got a problem in your media today, I would say hell yes!

Is it the fact that someone's calling in high? No. Is it unchecked editing? No. Is it affirmative action? No. We just had a war that was started without discussion and during which everything they told us was wrong. That to my mind is a genuine media crisis. We were not talking about what we were doing. This country doesn’t know shit about the world. The British knew about the world, Yet we're implicated way way way beyond our knowledge. To me, Jaysn Blair is a tiny little individual around which we've decided to thrash out the fact that we don’t believe what we hear any more.

There's also a problem around the New York Times, and that's the encroachment of electronic media. It was things like Jim Romenesko's media gossip Poynter page that kept the issue alive. It partook of a fundamental discovery we've all made that this is not the best way to share information about the world. When we can connect with a blogger in Iraq. When we can interact with someone in Chad or learn about what's really going on in Kashmere, we have many better ways than the New York Times to learn about the world. The New York Times doesn't want us to know this.

My dream pre-blog was to create a radio show where you had very few people. In Boston, every Pakistani is emailing home. Everyone from all over the place is in touch with what’s really happening all around the world. Get them involved in a radio show in which they bring in what they learn on the Web and broadcast it out on the radio as well as on the Web. It's a probing conversation about what's going on. What if we had blogger intelligence making its own New York Times every day? We could put together a two-hour radio show tomorrow that's just as interesting and just as relevant as the New York Times. The New York Times does not have a culture of candor. It never did. Another problem is this whole deregulation thing. I can't believe the brass of the FCC. They're basically saying that they're stacking the deck. This is a tipping point. We are being induced to shake off the phony authority of the old media. I wrote for the New York Times for 10 years and I misquoted people. I'm sorry about thatt. I've been misquoted in the New York Times. For people to be shocked by this now is a little amusing.

Lest you think I'm just a total Winer head or have totally fallen into Blog City, there are a lot of things I don't feel at home about yet. It's too techy for me. There's too much quoting and not enough writing. It's a little high-sticking, hip-shooting, knee-jerk stuff. There's also a lot of right-wing ideological response. They haven't even read what I wrote. I'm envious of the tech stuff. I wish I could understand it better. I go to Winer's thing every week, and I feel like a martian. I don't even know what RSS stands for.

The good thing about the blog world is that it's tremendously democratic. To Tony's credit, a blog and a superblog is totally differently. An ant, that's a blog. An ant colony, that's a superblog. It's wildly open to development. How do we aggregate that talent, that diversity of views, that energy, without sitting on it. How do we liberate it but also share it? We're in the process of designing in a university setting a radio program that would draw on blog smarts. How should we define ourselves? What's the subject of the conversation? What time of day would get the bloggers' attention? Will the techies listen when the poets are talking? Will the poets listen when the techies are talking?

The Connection was about everything. That was its glory. We did books. We did music. People called. It was a program of absolutely unrestricted range of subject. It had high enthusiasm. It had what I came to understand was an Emersonian dimension. 150 years later, we've still got the din of mourners and polemicists in our world.

How do you make it purely international? I want our new program to do something about the awful alienation in this country. We are now a global culture. SARS, poverty, medicine, security, the habitat, the Internet, everything we find interesting relates to every place right now. But the Bush administration is trying to get everybody in the world back behind the police line. We need to treat everyone as though we're part of the same mind, same species, same desires. Let's operate in a one world dimension.

From the In Box: Weblog Business Strategies 2003

Just wanted to let you know that I was checking out your site, and I appreciated your coverage of the blog conference. -- Jason McCabe Calacanis

Weblog Business Strategies 2003 XVI

Ireland, Perry, Regan, Roell, Seitz, and Windley: Using Weblogs in Large IT Organizations

Tim Ireland is founder of Bloggerheads, Paul Perry is a director for Verizon Communications, Rock Regan works as CIO for the state of Connecticut's department of information technology, Martin Röell is an independent e-business consultant, Bill Seitz runs Wikilogs.com, and Phillip J. Windley is former CIO of Utah and founder of the Windley Group. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion:

Philip Windley: I got into Weblogging when I was CIO for the state of Utah. I'm no longer in a large IT organization, but that's where I got my start.

Paul Perry: I'm at Verizon currently in IT but working to deploy a WiFi network in Manhattan. I was looking for the intersection between IT and community. I knew I needed to leverage the rest of the IT community in order to get a summary every day. I started to use Traction software to see the community of people who would inform me of what’s going on.

Rock Regan: I'm the CIO for the state of Connecticut. I'm relatively new to blogging and got started through Phil. A month ago we had 1200 employees. June 1 we had 900 employees. We're going through a lot of budget churn and people churn, and I'm looking for ways to capture knowledge. We support 65 agencies in the state. I became pretty excited as I talked to Phil, and I've been looking around internally within the organization. How can we capture information, foster good ideas, act on those ideas, and drive out solutions and cost.

Tim Ireland: I came into blogs from a search engine optimization and marketing perspective but quickly realized they can do much more. I just got my first British MP on a blog, and I hope to get some more.

Martin Roell: For most Americans it's difficult to pronounce my name. That's fine. I was talking to Halley Suitt last evening. She saw my name tag and it didn't match my email. She thought I was someone quite different, and it was quite fun. I run a German language blog about e-business strategy. That's what I did until two months ago when Weblogs started to become popular in Europe. So I started doing some research. I can tell you a little about how companies see Weblogs in Europe

Bill Seitz: Within the internal enterprise process, the core unit is the team. And these new tools should be used to maintain a team voice and a shared vision of what you're trying to accomplish. An individual voice is dispersive to that process. And a top-down knowledge management approach stifles that team communication,. The tools have to be what the team is going to use. It's all about the process of generating insights. That generates more context and changes the context. Using a Wiki-based framework is better than a blogging approach, but that's not crucial. All these things increase transparency, and that raises some problems. What is perceived as a crisis is often the end of an illusion. Weblogs can accelerate that process.

Windley: You have used blogs in your organization. What were your goals? What were your tools? When I was CIO of Utah, I bought 100 licenses to Radio and offered them for use. Maybe 10-15 are till actively blogging.

Perry: I knew that a lot of emails were going around about what was going on in the industry. Sometimes I was in those threads. Sometimes I was not. The problem with cc lists is that you have to decide if the email is spam or if you've hit the right audience. I needed to find a way in which I would be fully informed but I didn't have to decide who to inform. Another problem with email is that it's gone. I didn't want to have to go into everyone's email to see what had been read or not. I also needed the right technical people to highlight what I thought was important and what they thought I needed to see. I looked at a number of tools, and Traction seemed to do what I needed to do. I needed to fit it into the workflow. Everyone lives out of their email in box. You can host server side, but you can notify people. When they're notified it's a digest. I started to seed it, and I knew from previous email threads who was always active. There's always a core, chatting. I sat them down and showed them how to use the tool. I also made sure I had upper management involved.

Regan: I'm the guy who makes the decision what we can and what we can't buy. But I don't want to shove anything down anyone's throat. One of the biggest challenges I had was with our middle management. Knowledge is power. We're making a lot of decisions with folks who don't really make those decisions. I don't just want our heads down, I want to look to the horizon. I was looking for ways we could start looking at things we have to discuss. We started looking at it in the process we call our architecture review boards. We've got probably 90 people using a blog to discuss the architecture of our organization. I have a liaison who deals with the 65 agencies, not just technical agencies but the business folks. It really started in my office. I'm not going to claim that I'm good yet, but I'm certainly open to ideas. How can we use this? How can this make your job better? For me, it's a critical function that's going to be instrumental in our survival. A 22% staff reduction in the last two months. We've got to do things differently. Change is good. One of the mantras we get in government is that I'm all for progress as long as there's no change. That's not going to cut it.

Ireland: Bloggerheads is just me. But I would like to touch on the political issue. MPs are more apt to publish because they can say whatever the hell they like. It's important that people see what they have to say. They're too busy to scratch themselves, really. And it's hard to take government documents and make sense of them. But if you're able to access them through your elected representative, you can bring the process to life. We need a hell of lot more doing it for it to work.

Roell: You said you would use Weblogs in project management. Have you already tried that?

Regan: It's the way we're aggregating some of the topics people post. We're doing it in a crude way, but we're learning as we go.

Windley: People are posting personal blogs, but then you're moving them to functional aggregations?

Regan: Yes.

Windley: Blogs have a certain culture to them. Blogs require -- more than inspire, they require a culture of candor. They require a culture of abundance. There's also a little bit of risk-taking involved. I'd like to ask the panel to comment on cultural issues.

Seitz: There's two big dimensions. Shock and awe for some people. One is the transparency and candor aspect. That can raise sore points with people. It also can force some feedback to things. People identify themselves as victims and slaves to their environments. Blogs empower them to have a voice, but it also gives them responsibility. The other issue is sort of the hierarchical issue of information flowing around bosses. What happens when a very senior person discovers something on the intranet and it's bad news. How do they react to it. Who do they involve? Senior managers need to be aware of the leverage that they carry. What could seem to be an informal conversation could have a lot of impact. Managers should maybe not react to what they read. Don't just jump in and start doing everything yourself when you discover a problem.

Ireland: The only reason to run it as an intranet rather than something more public is to encourage free speech.

Seitz: Part of that indicates that things are organized poorly. Flame wars are symptoms of a deeper organizational problem.

Ireland: There could even be a wonderful idea down in production.

Roell: Do you think the management blogs will stifle other blogs? Everyone will read a CEO's blog. If a CEO points to someone, do you think that that imbalance brings a danger?

Ireland: Real talent will rise to the top. Companies have reached a size where they're depending on someone and may never even meet that person. If problems are solved in a public way it can only help the corporate memory. The advantages far outweigh any fear of the dangers of the current hierarchy.

Windley: Can any of you point to experiences -- either good or bad -- in terms of blogs and the culture of the organization.

Perry: Even very technical people who were aware of blogs didn't want to post at all until they saw other people post. I created a private space for them to post in their own private journal. As soon as they were ready to open it up to the project, they could. It was important to post and make mistakes. You need to offer a ramp that is shielded and private. I don't see any additional candor. The organization size is very large. Verizon IT is 10,000 people. It's not like we can all share and have enough interaction person to person. With an organization that large, you are open to some misunderstandings if you don't offer more context first. We might establish trust over a call. That trust network develops as it always has.

Seitz: Having an environment in which ideas can be related to each other can be helpful in terms of managing upward. Things that get packaged in small units right next to each other can be useful. It can help people fill in the blanks. A little bit of formality allows that to happen. When everything happens through email and instant messaging, everything just flows past.

Regan: We're beginning to see some great discussion among people who don't communicate well together. We've had some discussions recently to make some differences in core technologies that will allow groups that don't communicate well know what the other groups are doing. You've got to open up the opportunity for people to know what's going on in those different functional areas.

Windley: Let's talk about knowledge management. How important is that to you? Are you using any other knowledge management tools beyond Weblogs?

Perry: I could never buy, understand, or know what knowledge management was. But I needed to hook people up. For me, knowledge management is the ability to go back in and find the best summary you can. Another aspect of knowledge management is tagging a story with a category. At minimum, it's easy to sort projects.

Roell: Are you using a centralized taxonomy to categorize posts?

Perry: You have to start with a taxonomy which I just put in there. If it's harder to create a project, people just start a category. With our tool you can just start a new term.

Ireland: Another aspect is accessibility. A lot of times a report is sent out and no one reads the damn thing. If the report is written in a voice, it might reach more of the people it needs to go to -- and people it wasn't even intended for.

Perry: Distributing across the group so it's in the repository and can be summarized -- that becomes knowledge.

Weblog Business Strategies 2003 XV

Tony Perkins: The Open Source Media Movement

Tony Perkins is creator and editor in chief of AlwaysOn. He is also the creator and editor in chief of the now-defunct VC magazine Red Herring, which he founded in 1993.

Alright you guys, I'm wearing a loaned suit, so if you have a tie, let me know. It's a pleasure to be here. How many people have been on the AlwaysOn Network? How many people have written about the AlwaysOn Network? How many people have been contacted by my PR guy? Not enough. What I'm going to show you in a second is a summary of what I want to talk about.

The first thing I want to talk about is why I shouldn't be a keynote at this conference. Second of all, I want to talk about why it's a great time to be an entrepreneur. In addition to writing the book "The Internet Bubble," I got my own ass handed to me when the magazine I had founded ceased publication. I always want to talk about the opportunities of building participatory journalism as I call it into a great new media brand. It can be leveraged to do great things. Finally, I'm going to talk about the AlwaysOn Network from a business perspective. We've been blessed to go cash flow positive in the first month we launched the network, which was in February.

This is the first time I've used Keynote. It's the easiest PowerPoint I've ever used, which is pretty fun. Let me talk about the first point. In essence, I have been a casual observer of the blogging movement for three years or so thanks to guys like Dave Winer. I always feel like what guys like Dave are doing is a foreshadow of the future. As you may know, I'm not a blogger, per se. I come out of the journalism background. But what I am is a media entrepreneur. The first media brand I started was Upside. And then more recently Red Herring.

After I sold my book in 1999 and sold most of my stake in the company, I was itching to do something new. Entrepreneurs sense trends and try to build businesses around interesting things in the market. While I'm sort of a poser in this community, sort of like the wannabe punk rocker, I have never been so excited and I've never had so much fun in my professional career as I have with AlwaysOn. I want to share some of that excitement with you and solicit some feedback from you, the pioneers, so I can learn more.

Before I get into all that, I want to share with you why I think it's a great time to become an entrepreneur. I've come up with a fictitious representation of what it costs to start up a company. It doesn't consist of any real data, but it's a painting of where I think we are. It wasn't until the fourth issue of Red Herring that we even mentioned the Internet. We were then covering what was called the interactive highway, and interactive cable TV network that never came to be. It was too damn expensive. The good news was that there was always an information highway and that it was called the Internet.

You are the folks who created this new medium. It's at this really interesting time in history where it can be taken and harnessed. Why is it such a good time to be an entrepreneur? If you look at this chart, today there are close to 700 million people who are online. Whatever we did during the bubble, we educated 700 million people about something different. Funding the changing of people's behavior to do something different is a loss leader. That's why we lost so much money in the first stage of the Internet. But now we have a huge market. You had a very expensive proposition. Secondly, you had rough technology. You had a small population of people. AlwaysOn Network I built with a $150 piece of software. That same project back in 1996 would've cost a lot of money to get a lot of people involved.

Here we are today sitting on a huge market. Moore's Law has blessed us. RAM is very cheap. Salaries are very cheap. That's why we're at the bottom of the curve. Why does the curve go back up? Now is the time to establish the brand because of the whole concept of first-mover advantage. The second movers have the real advantage because they're starting their companies now. It's going to become more expensive because it'll become more expensive to build companies and challenge those brands.

These are my daughters. In recessionary times, pull out the family album. This story was part of the inspiration for starting my company. They're teenagers. The blonde is named Kristen. At the time she was a senior in high school in Menlo Park. The brunette is named Julie. At the time, she was a sophomore at Duke. Kristen's boyfriend is named Brandon. He'd started at Duke. I asked he if she'd talked to Julie and if Julie sees him around campus. She looked at me and said, "Dad, do you have instant messaging on your computer?" Mr. technology editor at Red Herring.

I found two studies. That generation is a completely distinguishable generation that's going to lead a lot of opportunity. Just like when I was a kid living around Silicon Valley during the birth of the personal computer era. The most interesting thing here is that 17% used instant messaging to break up with somebody. What other statistics get me excited? Most of the numbers associated with the Internet are going to double. The advent of wireless and its proliferation is going to be a huge driver.

On the business-to-business side, in order to become an always-on business, about 99% of the businesses have not equipped or designed their operations to work seamlessly and automatically on the Web. If I don't become like Dell, I am not competitive any longer. The statistics really support the case. B2B commerce: $3-6 trillion by 2005. Always-on companies will radically increase their productivity.

I'm basically an entrepreneur. I wrote a book. I so believe this editorial position that I started over a year ago based upon observing the great work of a lot of people in this world. My principles for media startups are that it's better to boot-strap than go to a board of directors meeting, build a community that advertisers care about, create multiple revenue streams, build a virtual team, trust your gut but listen to your readers, and building a media brand is black magic. For AlwaysOn, the target community is the exact advertising group we had at Red Herring.

Forgive me for not really being a member of the grassroots community. Some of my observations may seem basic to you. These are the entrepreneurial lightbulbs that went off. There's this trend toward reality TV. We're bored with scripted actors. We perversely like this idea of getting people together in an arena we create. The second thing is the open source movement. The thing that keeps Steve Ballmer up at night is Linux. What I see is applying that concept to the media world, what I call open-source media. We as media can get the guys that journalists would normally interview to post their thinking for the world to comment on. My average viewer stays on three and a half times longer than the viewer of RedHerring.com . The final thing is the Ebay-ization of media. That's what you all are about. You're giving people opportunities to add value to your site. And there's a way to monetize that.

The uniqueness of what you all do is great black magic. Part of our ethic at AlwaysOn is to be completely open. We allow people to post comments. We require that people be members so there are no anonymous comments. Based upon great feedback, members can now post original blog entries themselves. Members are transparent to each other. You can click on their name and email them. Members can also recommend links.

I talked about multiple sources of income. This is how we view the world. We have great sponsors. They're all in for six-month contracts. We're also in the business of creating events. We're holding a big event at Stanford, and we'll take that money to pay off the costs of building the site. In the next version, we'll have a premium paid membership. We're going to be reselling other information products and services. We're building a build-your-own classifieds service. And we're looking and other network opportunities to build other communities we can interrelate.

Why am I here? Most importantly, I wanted to get feedback and meet a lot of people. I want to engage developers. What are the real issues we should look out for? I want to look for new network opportunities. I'm really not a bad guy. I'm out there preaching the gospel of what you've done. I'm very cynical about the media business at large. But I know that because I'm this fancy guy, reporters who want to talk about blogging come to me. I'm an entrepreneur. I've got 10,000 members. There is no limit to what we could do with the AlwaysOn Network. We're going to be doing video journalism and radio segments. I don't, someone else is going do it, and it's going to be a lot more expensive.

Question: If you wanted to learn more, you could've come yesterday and learned a lot more. You used the word "blessed." What do you mean by that?

Everyone sitting in this room is blessed. There are a lot of people who would like to sit in this room but can't be.

Question: You mentioned that you were going to offer pay-per-view for archived events. Have you looked at any micropayment schemes?

Clearly, we want to have a mechanism to power the classified ads so people can pay 5 cents, 10 cents. We fully intend to have a fully integrated e-commerce solution.

Question:You certainly look at the blogging world from the perspective of a businessman, Could you quanitify the size of the oppiortunity for us?

Good. Someone else here likes money. If you look at almost every magazine on the newsstand today, there's a network opportunity. There's the ability to allow the community to participate in a variety of ways The most expensive part of publishing a magazine is building your readership. But if you can get people to add comments and get Eric Schmidt to reply to their comment, you're going to gain a very loyal reader. It's about building a critical mass of people. Most people who want to participate in the New York Times just can't. What I think is really interesting is that there's a window of opportunity before these large media brands are going to let people participate.

David Winer: If you're successful at what you do, how will what you do resemble Weblogs? Won't it resemble Red Herring or Upside?

What I'm borrowing from blogging is giving people the ability to participate.

Winer: How will what you do be Weblogs? Do you know what Weblogs are?

I've read yours for a couple of years. I've never said AlwaysOn was a Weblog. It borrows elements from you. It encourages participation. We had 200 posts in our first four weeks and thousands of comments. That's borrowing on the tradition of what you guys created.

Jeff Jarvis: [I think -- HR] You say that your aim is to build a sustainable media brand. Is that what you think Webloggers are trying to do?

Why would you care whether I know what Webloggers do? Just teasing. I'm a media entrepreneur person. I look at the experience that you Webloggers have created as a very interesting attribute to throw into the overall media offering mix. There are numbers of bloggers who want to keep their blogs in a very intimate way. I understand how the process works. That's a great thing to do. Being entertained is fine. I have to work for a living. I'm not here to tell you all to be like me. I'm just saying here's what I've learned from you and mixed into a business I've been involved in for 15 years.

Halley Suitt: When you have Accenture and Sun and advertisers liking what you're doing and people posting to your site who don't like what they're doing, could you talk about the separation of church and state?

The whole church and state idea sort of breaks down under this sort of model in the respect that the journalistic standards are set by the members. Every morning I get up, go to the site, and remove the stuff that's not gaining traffic. I go with my members. I produced an issue of Red Herring with an interview with Michael Dell, and I'd have two people tell me they thought it was a good interview. I put an interview with Michael Dell on AlwaysOn that was marketing speak, and the members jumped on his ass. As an editor, you know what they like and what they don't.

Question: What happens if Sun signs up for a six-month commitment and there's a discussion in which people are criticizing Sun. Sun threatens to pull. What do you do?

That's what they're signing up for. They understand that that's the tradeoff here. At the same time, our members own their words. Michael Dell got creamed for talking in marketing speak. When I saw him next, he said that he'd learned a lot. I'm learning more as an editor about what really resonates with people.

Among the Literati XXXVIII

I have a silly little list in Zulkey today. The headline should, in fact, be "Notable Team Names in the Minute Man Dart League, the World's Largest Steel-Tip Dart League." There are no such things as steep-tip darts, says he of little dart knowledge with some confidence. My bad.

Weblog Business Strategies 2003 XIV

Hesseldahl, Howell, Palfrey, Reuben, Ringel, and Young: The Law of the Blog

Arik Hesseldahl is a senior editor for Forbes.com, Denise M. Howell is counsel for Reed Smith Crosby Heafey LLP, John Palfrey is executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, Catherine E. Reuben is a partner in Robinson & Cole LLP,
Maurice J. Ringel is founder and president of Ringel Law Group, and Mark E. Young is communications counsel for PARTNERS+simons. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion:

Mark Young: We're going to take you on a forced march through some of the legal issues. At what point in time does the power of the written word go too far? And balanced against the increasing importance of this technology as a business tool. One person said corporations should be completely hands off until something stupid happens. They also said there was no difference between a business blog and a personal blog.

You're going to understand the tort landscape from Denise Howell. We also have with us John Palfrey from academia. He's teaching cyberlaw and the global economy in fall 2003. Addressing the various advertising and marketing legal issues, we have Maurice Ringel. We also have Catherine Reuben, who's an employment lawyer. Finally, we have Arik Hesseldahl, a senior editor at Forbes.com . He's a non-lawyer.

Denise Howell: Here we are, the lawyers, to bring down the thunderclouds on all the enthusiasm. That's not necessarily the case, although there are concerns and risks around maintaining any kind of Web presence. Those concerns and risks are heightened when you look at what we've been talking about the last couple of days. When you do any Web site, you immediately go beyond the realm of what you do day to day. You're a publisher, a broadcaster. Businesses one way or another are going to need to take control of this. If you're going to compete with blogging voices, best be one.

If there are risks that exist in Web sites that are static, it's easy to see how the risks increase when you add the elements of blogging. These risks can be managed. What are some of those risks? Once you have greater employee involvement, speedier updates, enhanced interaction, and visibility, you're exposed incremently to torts and liability that you'd be exposed to with Web site in general.

Some considerations come to mind. Defamation. Libel. It's not too difficult to avoid, and we've heard about journalists self-editing so what they're posting is accurate. Corporate disparagement is just the business forum of the defamation tort. There are also first amendment issues that are pending in the Supreme Court involving Nike. Protection of corporate speech is lessen. Misappropriation can occur in a number of ways. Privacy is another consideration. Employees within companies don't have much of a privacy interest.

You can see, too, how the risks shift around a little if the corporate site is just a few internal blogs. If it's an external site with other people contributing content, then you have to be more aware of the legal issues. It's a whole different can of worms.

The only corporate Weblog policy I've seen, and it's quite a fine one, is at Groove Networks. The company has spelled out in advance what its expectations are. The other link I have up is the policy statement from Macromedia. It also is interesting in terms of how they manage risks. The laws don't go away.

Young: A new media gives people the opportunity to test the limits of the law.

John Palfrey: I'm going to take a page out of Dave Winer's book. If you want to learn what's really going on, step in the shoes of a user. I'm going to talk from the perspective of someone who's working with a lot of others to get blogs going in a university setting.

About three or four months ago, we started a blog space. It was one of those throw some spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. One of the keys to this thing is that anyone who graduated from Harvard can get a free email address for life. That means that we could get hundreds of thousands of alumni with blogs. That's analogous to a multinational corporation.

We've learned three things. One is to watch out about becoming an ISP. If you have any Web presence at all, you are probably under some measure oof the law, an ISP. Secondly, be ready for takeoff. Third, blogs are good for the Web -- and for you.

How should we think about ourselves as we provide Web services? Looking in the US law alone, I've found seven different names for what an ISP is and eight completely different definitions. There are 31 cases in which a court is trying to define what an ISP is. Much less get into international law. There are at least 40 different ways someone can consider you an ISP. My only answer to that is hire a lawyer. The law in the US is a complete mess in the Internet space.

Two, be ready for takeoff. We launched this initiative several months ago, and we already have hundreds of blogs. Donna Wentworth does a great blog called CopyFight. She's on the Berkman staff. Chris Lydon. As soon as you make it possible for people to do this stuff, you need to be ready to take off.

The last thing, blogs being good for the Web? I am convinced that it's a good thing. When does the written word go to far? Virtually never. The answer is to push more good speech out there.

In terms of intellectual property rights, my strong recommendation is to use a Creative Commons license any chance you can. Get CC licenses into the RSS feeds so they're baked in.

What should you do if you're thinking about launching a blog initiative? One, do it. Two, hire a lawyer. And three, be clear about your copyright.

Young: Speaking of copyright, one of John's colleagues puts you on notice that anything you send to him via email can and will be used against. I want to turn to Catherine now. Dave Winer expressed yesterday quite eloquently about the internal tension here. Employers shouldn't approve every blog post, but they need to be very careful about employees' blog posts.

Catherine Reuben: There are two things to consider here. The first is an employee learning something from a blog and making a hiring decision based on that. Also in that category is an employee badmouthing an employer. People say, what about free speech? The Constitution applies to actions of the state, not of a corporation. Third, an employer sees that an employee revealed some confidential information and takes action. There was a New Jersey case in which a company was able to force an ISP to reveal the name of an anonymous posting that included confidential information. There's the issue of employees blogging on company time. We all know about that. Then there's the case in which employers see value in what's being blogged.

Employee side: Don't do it on company time or equipment, That's obvious. Don't mention your employer. Don't just put something out there. Don't sign confidentiality agreement forms when you get hired. They're overbroad. Same with the intellectual property agreements. People are routinely asked to sign those agreements. What are the dos for employees? Look at the confidentiality agreement. Look at the Internet use policy. If your job is that of an analyst or someone who creates content, get independent counsel to know what you own. And finally, if you're an employee and you want to express yourself, there are some legal ways you can do that. There's protected concerted activity. Union organizers get far more protection. There may be legal ways to do this, but it's a fine line.

My tips for employers: dos and don'ts. Do have a confidentiality agreement. Have a policy in regards to use of computer equipment and employee Web sites and blogs. Talk to your intellectual property counsel to hone down who knows what. Don'ts for employers? If you know about an employee's blog, don't access it under false pretenses. Two, get counsel before you do anything involving a blog. There are state privacy laws. There are whistle blower protections. There's old-fashioned discrimination.

Those are my dos and don'ts. It's a very exciting area.

Young: Next up is Maurice Ringel.

Maurice Ringel: I'm a lawyer. Don't let that fool you. I had a career in advertising and marketing. I've been asked to speak on one premise today. Some blogs may be considered to be a form of advertising, and to the extent they are, they may be subject to local, state, federal, and international regulations. In addition, the ad's sponsor -- the advertiser, the ad agency, the ISP -- may be subject to regulation.

The laws and regulations that may apply can come from multiple sources. It's these bodies that may take an interest in whether blogs are advertising or not. Which bodies will take an interest in enforcing their regulations against bloggers.

The laws and regulations that can apply can invoke specific requirements for compliance. This is a laundry list. Mark alluded to comparative advertising claims. Contests and lotteries. Solicitations for charities. Pricing discounts. Warranties. Guarantees. Disclosures and the standards for making disclosures. Taxation. Customs. Prohibitions. Interest rates. Truth in lending disclosures. Earlier today there was a reference to comments made by public companies. What might be considered a prospectus or a forward-looking statement?

The bottom line is that if it's an ad, it really has to comply with regulations. If I were to start a blog, it would be subject to the Grand Judicial Court of Massachusetts. I'm bringing up issues. I don't know what all the answers are. One broad solution is to use disclaimers. If I were to put up a blog, I would disclaim that it was legal advice.

Arik Hesseldahl: Let me start by stating for the record that I am not now nor have I ever been a lawyer. In fact, as a journalist, every word that I've written for my employer has been read by a lawyer. Every so often I'll get a call from our lawyer about something. Usually it's pretty small. When you're a journalist, you find that you usually don't want to hear from lawyers. Externally, it'll ruin your day real quick. It's important to be close to the internal lawyers. And if you don't have one, make friends with one that you can call real quick. It's good to know who you can call.

Not being much of a blogger myself, I've written a little bit about it. And I'm reminded of the days in which the Internet was new. A lot of the wonderful things people are saying about blogs in 2003 are the things people said about the Web in 1993 and 1994. Big media, large companies including my own, don't quite get blogging. They're eyeing it and trying to figure it out. Right now, they're more of a mind to not have anything to do with it.

There are some important legal questions that need to be worked out. Where does the public persona as a media organization begin? Where does it end? My boss produces his own Web site. He enforces all the corporate policies, but he produces his own Web site on cricket. There's not a lot of interference between his cricket site and Forbes.com. But does that mean that I can write my own personal technology column on a blog? There's a policy in place that says you don't write extra versions of articles for other publications. What goes on in the office stays in the office. Editing is not for public view.

Journalism might be the first draft of history, but that doesn't mean that blogging should be the director's cut of journalism. That also doesn't mean that blogging can't be the first draft of journalism. As a reporter, the legal issues I face apply to the blogging community. If you're going to run with the wolves and challenge the wolves, you're going to have to think about libel, slander, and fair use. I spend a lot of time looking at the Associated Press Stylebook and the legal section. At Forbes, we have a rigorous fact checking policy for the magazine, but not so much at the Web site, where we don't have as much time. Those are the legal faces that I face.

Weblog Business Strategies 2003 XIII

Ali, Crosbie, Jarvis, Shnaider, and Spiers: Weblogs -- New Syndication Models Or Uncontrolled Platforms?

Rafat Ali is editor and publisher of PaidContent.org, Vin Crosbie is managing partner of Digital Deliverance, Jeff Jarvis is president and creative director of Advance.net, David Shnaider is former president of ZDNet and founder of Prodigy, and Elizabeth Spiers is editor of Gawker.com. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion:

David Shnaider: I think that I'm like the donkey on Animal Farm, who says we live a very long time; have you ever seen a dead donkey? What effects are Weblogs having on traditional media? We got into this a little bit last night when we talked about is a blogger a journalist? No one can tell me that what's happening here in terms of people reporting isn't journalism. I, for one, am fed up with bad, fuzzy writing that leaves out information I want to know. I'm sick of egos. I'm absolutely fed up with people opining on subjects that they know nothing about. That is why I am no longer going to watch the 10 o'clock news on my local Fox affiliate, because that's what you get.

A piece came out 35 years ago called "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved" written by Hunter Thompson. People then said this isn't representative journalism. But if you read it today, it's representative of a blog. Then there was a newsletter editor in Washington named I.M. Stone. No one would have said that he wasn't a journalist. With that background we're going to talk a little bit about what Weblogs mean to traditional media.

Are they just a passing fad? Are they a new model? Are we looking at a new market for creating content? Like Doc Searls, I bristle at calling it content, but that's what we're going to look at. First we'll hear from Jeff Jarvis, who represents Big Media. But he's also very smart and he was out ahead in terms of Weblogs. Does anyone else in the whole Newhouse publishing empire get it? Do they even need to? Next we'll hear from Elizabeth Spiers, who in just a few months has created a must-read publication in New York media. As much as we can decry traditional media, who can't feel a little pride to be covered by mainstream media? Then we'll hear from Rafat Ali, who's created what I regard as an essential daily experience for people in this business, more so than some of the traditional vertical publications. Do you represent the leading edge of a movement that could threaten the empire? Then we'll hear from Vin Crosbie, who's an extremely well-read consultant and commentator. Is there really a business here?

Jeff Jarvis: I'm a journalist. Don't shoot me. I'm a newspaper guy, a magazine guy, I've been in TV, but I've been online for nine years. I work for a guy who really understands it, and we look at the Internet as a new media. The Internet is the first medium owned by the audience. It's not us and them, It's all us. For us, it all started with forums. In wrestling season, high school wrestling, one topic, one market, you can get 25,000 page views a day. We value that. That's a third of my traffic. It's the audience reporting news. The audience gives scores of the little league teams, stuff we can't afford to cover.

Blogs to me represent the highest form of audience content. A Weblog is not like a forum. A forum is like Saturday night at the bar. A blog is crap in your neighbor's yard. You own it. It's your yard. Through linking, the cream rises to the top. Are Weblogs making a difference? I'm going to do just one thing, Iran. Here was somebody who was arrested and thrown into an Iranian prison for doing something we do every day casually on our couches. Weblogs could make a difference in Iraq. They're making a difference there. They're making a difference here.

Elizabeth is making a difference here. She's being quoted in the New York Post. What makes Weblogs better? Speed. What I write tonight is meant to be read tomorrow. The variety. Thanks to the Internet, the fact that we can go anywhere in the world to get what we want is new. The voices. They're wonderful to hear. The tools that we use. Technorati. Blogdex. These are tremendous tools that will get much much richer. Finally, interactivity. I love my comments. We've been involved in forums a long time, but in my comments, I've only had to kill one post.

But Weblogs are nothing magical. It's just a tool. They're cheap publishing tools with the widest distribution ever. Still, they do different things. If you look at Livejournal, it's a community. There's nanomedia like Gizmodo and Gawker. Advertising, and lastly, personal. People will post my photos, my movies, my shopping list. Then there's video. I'm Andy Rooney. Video adds a lot. If I were MSNBC, I'd be looking for the next stars online.

Who should give a damn from a business perspective? Have a business reason to blog. Don't blog just for the sake of blogging. You've got to have a business reason. Let's talk about us in big media and why we're doing Weblogs. My boss was into Weblogs, and he was on my butt. I couldn't even figure it out. Frankly, it was after Sept. 11 that I had something to say. I had a reason to blog. I learned a tremendous amount. I had to learn that first hand. That allowed me to become a coach to others in the company.

We've started a series of blogs within the company. Some are good. Some are not so good. But they're learning. During the war I did a blog about the war that we syndicated across all the sites. There's not a lot of money to be made. There's no money to be made for me. It's traffic. The reason we're doing it is because it's so darn cheap.

Marketers. Dr. Pepper didn't make a mistake by sending the drink to bloggers. The mistake was lying about it and keeping it secret. Bloggers have influence. And marketers should treat bloggers with the respect that you all have an audience. Treat them as you treat media. Starting your own cow Weblog is dumb. Trying to keep it secret is dumb. But if people who do Weblogs see your movie early, that is good. It will create buzz.

We see small businesses like restaurants using blogs. They can update their specials every day. Companies that sell expertise. Nanomedia I think will work. Gawker will be a big and important success. Big defined relatively. What's that other site that calls itself a Weblog? AlwaysOn. It's just a guy who couldn't afford paper. It's not a Weblog. It shows the lower ambition of media. Weblogs can become media properties. Is anyone here from AOL or Yahoo? That's a mistake. Consumers are interested in Weblogs. They'll start to do that.

Elizabeth Spiers: I'm the editor of Gawker. Editor's a bit of a misnomer as I write everything and edit little. My publisher Nick Denton is editing Gawker today and tomorrow. You should email him and tell him how much worse it is when I'm not doing it.

Gawker has gotten quite a bit of response from media. I talk a lot about media, and it being a narcissistic industry, when you talk about media, they tend to listen. The first example is [a major New York daily with a popular gossip column]. Gawker is kind of a gossip site. I read the local gossip rags and do a digest. I started to realize that the [paper] would have nine items up and five would be items I'd put in Gawker the day before. I met several of the [gossip columnists] a few days ago and teased them, and one said, "Yeah, it makes my job so much easier."

The second example is [a somewhat snooty New York-based newspaper published on non-white paper that has a sizable media focus]. I've had four or five reporters come up to me and say that they want to do an article on Gawker, but their editor won't let them. The resistance is that they're afraid of you. The big guys are sitting up and taking notice. A lot of them are pretty smart about it and figuring out how to co-opt what we're doing. A lot of them just want in on the joke. I have editors sending me gossip about each other. I think that's really funny.

I had a little experience with Tony Perkins. I don't get a lot of press releases, but I've read few press releases that 30 seconds later I didn't wish I had those 30 seconds back. The exception is that the editor of Stuff got fired, and he wrote a press release saying that he'd been promoted. He's a prankster. I excerpted that. When Tony Perkins launched AlwaysOn, he hired a PR firm to pitch blogs, positioning AlwaysOn as this grassroots phenomenon. I thought that was funny. If it's such a grassroots thing, why hire a PR firm? Do it the blog way and publish content that's worth reading. If you can't do that, your blog is probably not going to be worth reading anyway.

Another anecdote. The [aforementioned tabloid newspaper] guys. We don't get censored. I have a filthy mouth. I say fuck. The [gossip column] guys said that they can't say fuck. They can't even quote it.

Rafat Ali: My name is Michael Moore. I want to thank the Academy for this award. I have 100% of bloggers in solidarity when I say this: AlwaysOn sucks.

I run a site called PaidContent.org. This is my one-year anniversary or whatever. I started at Silicon Alley Reporter, and I just started throwing stuff I couldn't use onto the site. The site is about digital media and how to do things beyond advertising. I'm a journalist, so I started to break stories. That got bigger and bigger. Then I started getting emails from vendors about whether I wanted to put an ad on it. I didn't because I was a full-time journalist and I didn't want my boss to call me on it.

Since November, this is my job. I blog for a living. It's been going well. As an adjunct to the site, I have an email newsletter. They're extremely complimentary. As a trade media, it's an important thing. Trade people may not be so technologically savvy to always go to your Web site. That's the main site. I live off it, basically.

Then I launched MobileContent two weeks ago. And two days ago I launched DigitalMusic. I have other sites, but I'm too scared to launch them. I need to hire someone. I'm dead.

My whole theory is that trade Weblogs are going to replace trade Web sites. As an expert in the field, you break news, have commentary, and offer original content. How many of you have ever read an official publication on wireless media? How many read blogs on wireless? Point proven. MarketingFix is better at attracting media coverage than AdWeek and AdAge. SmallTimes is a trade site on nanotech. They just started SmallTechAdvantage, which is kind of a blog intelligence service.

Why would trade Web sites work? Relevance and timeliness. Leanness of operations. Saturation o fcoverage. You just have to link to it. Saturate the market as much as you can. In branding terms, there's what they call a flanking strategy. Weblogs can do that effectively. When you combine Weblogs and original stories, you have a killer app.

The non-obvious advantage is that the profit motive for a formal operation is too high. Journalists have always been underpaid and underfed. All I want is enough to live. For me to have some sort of a Weblog trade thing is not that profit funded. Trade Weblogs also have the whole open source ethic. After awhile, if you're a journalist, people start asking you if you want to consult. I don't because you get into issues I don't want to get into. Understand what you're not: a consultant.

Vin Crosbie: I get paid to tell publishers things that would get me fired if I were an employee, particularly about their business models. Lately, they're asking me about blogs. They're really scared or dismissive of blogs right now. It's really, really pervasive. They don't think this is journalism. I have to remind them what business they're in. There were people like Henry David Thoreau, Lewis & Clarke, James Boswell, and Charles Darwin who kept journals and published the stuff. If these guys had blogs back then, you can bet your ass that they'd be online.

Basically, there's a natural human nature to keep a journal. It's also part of the basic human nature to publish journals. Nowadays people are publishing them online. This isn't something that's going to go away. People will use the cheapest and easiest technology to do it.

If you think about whether this is journalism, what is journalism? Keeping a journal., That's what it is. There are more people keeping blogs than there are professional journalists who get paid. There's no conflict between what bloggers do and what journalists do as long as you're honest and accurate about it. Sure, there are going to be bloggers who are opinionated and untruthful. But then we've got Jayson Blair.

Can media organizations use blogs? Dan Gillmore keeps a blog. The Guardian's blog is a blog. Some people will say that the Drudge Report is a blog. He says, "Don't call me a blogger." I don't think he's a blogger, but he's gotten great play and publicity by putting his voice out there.

Can a blog be edited? Yeah, it can be. Large media companies are probably going to edit stuff to make sure it's not libelous. But it's primarily edited for proofreading. I don't know any journalists who do blogs have anything yanked.

My advice is not to assign them. These things should be done spontaneously and enthusiastically. Can you imagine Maureen Dowd doing a blog on politics? It's a great thing to do. You're providing a service to your readers. And as Rafat mentioned, they should also be doing this as a defensive measure. I know people who don't read Editor & Publisher's Web site because they're reading Rafat's blog. If they don't do this, who's going to look at their own stuff?

The question of whether there's a profit in it comes down to whether the publication is business-to-business or business-to-consumer. In business-to-business, you could come up with a paid blog. I don't like the paid model, but it could be done. In business-to-consumer, it's more difficult to do. They're not making much money on the Web site any way. It has to do with the Web as an advertising medium, not with blogs.

Media will start using blogs when they understand blogs. They should do it not for profitability but because it's a strategic necessity and a service to their readers. The smart media companies have already begun.

Mixed Drinks and Mingling VI

Members of Boston Blogs gathered with Weblog Business Strategies 2003 participants last night for a low-key gathering at Caveau, part of Marche Movenpick in the Pru. While the food seemed slightly expensive -- $20 for tortellini, rotini, and tomato sauce; a piece of bread; chicken soup; and a Sam Adams -- the group was large and lively -- and I met some interesting people from Boston and other parts of the country.

The people who were there:

Anil Dash

Elin

Adam Gaffin

Jesper

Kushal Dave

Johannes Ernst

Gabriel Jeferey

Scott Johnson

Adina Levin

Lorissa

Michael

Joseph Reagle

Rock Regan

Heath Row

François Schiettecatte

Bill Seitz

Shannon

Sooz

Steve

Joe Todan

Phil Windley

Thanks to everyone who came out!

Weblog Business Strategies 2003 XII

Jason Shellen: Where Weblogs Matter

Jason Shellen is associate program manager for Blogger. He works with the Google technology team to drive and manage enhancements and new features for the Blogger service. Here is a rough transcript of his comments:

We've already heard about the why and the what, so maybe I'm being cheeky by asking where. We think about blogs in several ways at Blogger and Google. We think about writing, reading, and connecting. Blogs connect individuals into groups. They build bridges between content.

There was a lot of talk yesterday about what is a blog. We think about what is a blog post? It's an atomic form of self-expression. It's the most granular we get in the blogging world. Every blogger has an audience in mind. Sometimes it's an audience of one. Sometimes it's a personal journal. But we've found that most blogs have an attended audience. It's assumed that they'll be read.

We've got these camera phones that can post to a blog now. This is just a quick hack so you can post to your blog from your cell phone. It's called moblogging by some people. Mobile blogging. People will be able to blog video. Audio as well. We've got a service called audioblog where you can post MP3 files. All of these are blog posts.

That gets us to the second item: reading. Blogs are meant to be read. They're shared, passed around, linked. Writers get to know much of their audience pretty well. The most avid blog readers have clamored for other ways to access this information. If I want to read all of the blogs in this room, am I going to go to a Web site? I need to access this another way. You probably have one of these. It's a news aggregator. Feeds have sprung up.

Matthew Berk is right that a lot of these are in an email-like format. It's no happenstance that they're called newsreaders, but we're reading blogs. It's very email-like. It's newsy. It hearkens back to newsgroup postings. BlogThis lets you post directly from the newsreader. The reading and the writing are very connected.

The technology is moving toward to connecting blogs. You can listen to blogs in your car. There's something called Read It to Me that converts a feed to MP3 audio and synchs it up from iTunes. It sounds a little bit like Rosie from the Jetsons right now. All of this is very early stage technology, even the phone cameras. The composition of a blog post is changing and evolving. Fotoblogs are definitely coming to the forefront. People want to upload photos and comment on them. But it's a very old concept. How can I get galleries online? What constitutes a blog post?

How do people connect with relevant blog content? If you can't find it it might as well not be there. Where Weblogs are located and linked is an important part of the experience. People do part of this through blogrolls to show what's relevant. Blogstreet is another example. You enter your URL and it tells you who your neighbors are -- what blogs are similar to you.

It's the links in and the links out that are key. Today, people find blogs primarily through Google, I would argue. As an aside, just for the record, from the center of the room, Google's not removing blogs. What blogs are great at are being fresh, relevant, and recently updated. You can't really blame the media for being fresh and relevant. Any content like that Google would like. The tools in this space are very good at that: push-button publishing. We are at Google now. It would be silly of us not to take advantage of some of their technology.

We're here to explore blogs for business. People read blogs for many reasons. There are a growing number of people who are keeping track of a certain space like finance or bonds. They have some sort of vertical that they're writing in. Where can business intersect with blogs? As a tool for collaboration in teams. To follow what's happening in your industry. Blogs lend a human voice to business. It's nice to hear individuals talk rather than entities. I hate it when entities talk. It's hollow.

Blogs have been around for a long time. Especially in Internet years. But I believe that the proliferation of the form that we recognize as blogs, the tool providers sprung up in 1999. Blogging is a long-standing community. It has standards, a code of ethics, and a dedicated membership. There's a big sense of community. I'm a reader of this. I'm connected to this site.

Here's the big fear. The big fear in the blogging community is that big business is going to come in, mow down the farm, and put up a Wal-Mart. As Joni Mitchell said, "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." The blogging community is going to watch everything you do very carefully. There is a community, and there is a bit of apprehension.

I'm going to pick on Kathleen's blog and look at some examples. I believe this is linked off the Jupiter events page. Kathleen set up this blog. There's a lot of good stuff up here. There's a lot of data. There's lots of good things happening. To nit pick, there's a section that says "one blogger pointed out." Maybe she has a good reason not to link to that blogger. Maybe it was me! I want that link. Also, if you look at the timestamp, you want some sort of permalink so I can point people to that. Still, I would call that a good business blog because it follows most of the best practices.

Business blogs don't have much to do with blogging, really. They have a lot to do with your other content. You can't really link easily to flash. But Jakob Nielsen's working on how to better link deeply into flash. E-commerce systems are also difficult to link to because they have these big URLs. It might as well not be if you can't find it.

Who's using blogs in business today? Macromedia is using all sorts of tools. Groove Networks' Ray Ozzie keeps a blog, which I find fascinating. They're working on a group collaboration tool, and they're using blogs. MSNBC is doing something called Blog Central. Who's using blogs internally? It's hard to tell. Traction might have a good number on that. What we've installed before is an install at Cisco way back in 1999. We did an install, and then we never really heard about it again. It's behind the firewall. There's no way for me to know what's going on. We did a trial install at Sun. They're using it in their customer center. And last summer we worked with Stanford University on a trial program for students and faculty.

Let me show another good business blog. As people mentioned yesterday, it's experts sharing knowledge in a business blog. In sales, the common goal is to become the perceived expert. It's hard to argue that you don't know anything about the VC space if you've been keeping a blog for five years. This is VentureBlog. Right now the places where there's an expert space is marketing, Web design. It's taken a leap into the financial world. There are law blogs. We'll start to see this seep into other areas. In a few years, we'll see things like the 1967 Shelby Cobra blog. It'd be nice to see people not tied to the Internet professionally in some way. Mechanics. That'd be nice to see. But it's not just big business. HTML newsletters are hard to copy and paste into my blog, but something like LooseTooth.com will easily spread throughout the blogosphere.

What are we doing about this? How is Blogger doing this? How is Google doing this? The first thing we said is that we need an internal version of that blog that we've been keeping since 1999. We did a version of Blogger for Google. We were pretty clever about the name, and it's behind the firewall. It's called Blogger in Google, BIG. The Shellen Conspiracy is a popular blog. Ev Does Stuff is another popular one. This is all behind the firewall. On Blogger.com we keep a blog called What's New. But BIG is internal.

It's been interesting to see what becomes popular. The Internet becomes more popular. The Internet lets you link deeply to information you haven't seen for years. You can keep a loose association with groups you find interesting just to keep up with what they're doing. People emerge as blogging enthusiasts within their groups. There's an engineer who's doing a blog on search quality.

What's also interesting are cultural blogs within the company. We've got a blog called customer love notes, emails from users to customer support. "Google saved my dog." That sort of thing makes it to Google Love Notes. We've got a list of interesting search strings. Why aren't they public? Sometimes they're private. There's a consent thing we can talk about.

We don't have a product yet. But now that we're at Google, we know that a great blogging tool and a great search tool can make a great intranet.

Weblog Business Strategies 2003 XI

Matthew Berk: Digital Self-Fashioning

Matthew Berk is a senior analyst for Jupiter Research. He focuses on infrastructure and operations, which includes coverage of content management and site technologies and operations. Here is a rough transcript of his comments:

Yesterday I had the post-snack crowd, and this morning I have the post-sleep crowd. Today I'm going to try to take you through some thinking I've been doing. If it seems rough, it's because it's thinking. This is a roughly open forum and experimental, so we'll give it a try.

What the heck is content? That's a question I always ask. These are pretty big questions: How do people represent themselves online? What is the nature of content? How do communities arise out of connected content? "Community" is an idea we borrow from the off-line context. I've stolen the term "self-fashioning," and I'll tell you from where in a minute.

Community is a borrowed metaphor. We meet face to face. We form groups. Online, it looks sort of different. I want to optimize for the medium. I took a press call for movie sites, and it was a really odd press call. I said, this is all about ticket sales, right? And they said, no, they don't care about ticket sales. It's all about paid content. Maybe personals are the same way. You can form a two-person community and then take it offline. Personals sites are communities of many that pair down to two in the end. Those are paid content sites as well.

What I cover at Jupiter is content management, so that's my lens. I don't want to focus on people meeting people. I've dug through the academic literature, and there are two ways people can represent themselves online. One is anthropomorphic. Bodies are transported and reconstituted in the virtual world. The second metaphor is the network as a virtual place. The network is an extension of place. Community transforms online, and it's an extension of place. That opens up the opportunity for people to form so-called communities.

These two things are crossed with two other axis. They're kind of political. There's freedom of the self, freedom from the physical, freedom from the constraints of the self. Then there's alienation of the self, people who reconstitute themselves online. The more you use it as a mediator, the more you rely on it. Literally this room, 80% of the people are mediating this experience. Usually I cling to the podium and hide behind it. Looking out into the audience, it's kind of nice to cling to the laptop.

I mentioned that I stole these concepts about self-fashioning. More or less I got them from Michel Foucault. He calls them technologies of the self. And he thought about ways in which in social situations, people are produced by collections of documents. Today the evidence that we leave behind is much richer than what we might have left behind 50 years ago. I also ripped off self-fashioning from Stephen Greenblatt, who does work on the Renaissance. He says that we defined what it means to be a person. Hamlet is a man who fashions himself out of a very peculiar cloth, but a lot of people argue that Hamlet is one of the first self-fashioned men. The state and the church and all of the social institutions all contribute to develop that self. It's kind of a reciprocal formation of what it means to be a person.

I wanted to take this and import it online. If the online self is content, what is content? Our technology has gotten very good at storing and moving date. We don't believe that's content. When we wax poetic, we say that content is the human-legible destiny of data and information resources. It becomes content when it becomes legible to a person. Most of the time when we look at content management systems, they forget that content is meaningful to people and they abstract it to data. There's lots of talk about structured content and unstructured content. All content has structure, whether that structure is internal to that content or external. The other thing to fold this third thing back on the firrst is that content has some sort of action potential. It can enrich or cement ties between people and perhaps put them at risk.

There's a lot of rhetoric out in the field about managing content just because it's content. If it's not meaningful to you, why would you want to manage it? I call these rules, but they're very loose because I'm still thinking about it. On the Internet, people constitute themselves as assemblies of content. On AOL, everyone has a screen name. Those have become very rich profiles. On the network, a person is content. No. 2, content is intrinsically structured. The greater the depth of structure, the greater the nature of interrelatedness and the greater the action potential. This action potential is derived from the richness and structure of the content. No. 3, content is always plural. People always have more than one profile, more than one screen name. They also have multiple Web sites. Eventually, people will have multiple blogs.

Now I want to come back and think about community. For me, online you have a content management application that takes advantage of the fact that people are representing themselves in a certain way. Look at the power of something like Classmates.com. They are applications where people go to share content.

We finally come back to blogs. Blogs are a new technology of the self. They are a new way for people to create themselves in content. I like blogs because they're very pure. This purity takes two form. There ain't no markup. Or the markup comes last. What matters is that you're producing entries. You're in the act of producing text of some kind. Let's think about the activity. This is self-expression.

When you think about Web sites, I'm still trying to figure out why people blog instead of making Web sites. Blogs have conventions, but they have few metaphors. They don't have any metaphorical hangovers. There's also a great tension between people expressing themselves online and communities. Technorati is now keyword searchable. There will be links between blogs. Blogs aren't anything without references to other blogs. Underneath it all, you have a standard for syndication. Your content is now portable, transposable. This tool is by definition networked.

Weblog Business Strategies 2003 X

Bricklin, Dash, Frankston, Gartenberg, Robb, Searls, and Shellen: Blogging Technologies And Platforms -- Today And Tomorrow

Dan Bricklin is CTO of Interland Inc., Anil Dash is the new vice president of business development for Six Apart, Bob Frankston is an independent consultant, Michael Gartenberg is vice president and research director for Jupiter Research, John Robb is president and COO for Userland Software, Doc Searls is senior editor of the Linux Journal, and Jason Shellen is an associate program manager for Blogger. Here is a rough transcript of their discussion:

Doc Searls: It already feels like the end of the day. Long day. We'll try to lighten it up a little bit. The topic is blogging tools today and tomorrow, and I'm going to try to focus on the latter. I'm going to give each of these gentlemen the opportunity to explain not what they're doing in life, but where they're going. What are the technologies they're adopting? What are the issues they see? What are the potholes in the road?

Jason Shellen: A little bit of what Blogger is doing is playing catch up, honestly. We had a very small team for very many years. The space that we were in we felt like we were building a tool for Web designers. It quickly spun out of that community into a more mainstream audience. They're no longer all designers any more. That means that our tool changes. It's probably more akin to Geocities. That means that we need to change. We're undergoing a code revision that we're rolling out right now, and we really see that as the platform for the future. What's nice now is when we see something that would be great to tie into the community, we can put it together in a week. We're also at Google. We can use the resources there and bounce ideas off of really interesting folks. A core area of our focus for the future is definitely the community side. Blogger used to be the core for people to find new blogs. That didn't scale well. Now we have access to as many servers as we can eat. We're definitely looking at the way that people find blogs. The way that people write blogs. I think Tim was saying that the tools were fading into the background, not that blogging was fading into the background.

Bob Frankston: I want to distinguish between two opposing issues. One is improving the blog by some definition. Those are all mechanisms that make blogs better by some measure. But we don't know what that measure should be. We need to be open to looking at blogging in a much more general sense. There was a period in which the Web was confused with the Home Shopping Channel. I use Blogger for one site. For another, I built my own tools. The advantage of using Blogger is that I get a lot of advantages from Blogger such as the RSS feed. We need to encourage both trends but be aware of conflicts. We need users, but we need to encourage people to be developers.

Dan Bricklin: The tools we had at Trellix showed that blogging was important, but blogging is part of your Web site. You've got to integrate the tool together, the look together. I see something about blog tools. If you look at Tripod and Geocities, there are millions of sites made using those, more than blogs. The blog tools automate a lot of the tedium. Just like spreadsheets like Visicalc. That's what Blogger, Manila, and Radio did. They tool tedious housekeeping. Then 1-2-3 came along. It didn't just give you automation. It gave you better output and better stuff. Then we get to Excel. We're not there yet. The guys at Lotus couldn't imagine what Excel would be.

One important thing is media forms. I believe in photos and stuff like that. Multimedia is important in many aspects. When we think about communicating, not everyone can write well. Not everyone can photograph. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Anil Dash: Our today is Moveable Type, a tool that is very powerful, has a lot of great features, but is a pain in the ass to get started. Our immediate future is TypePad, which makes it easier for people to make Weblogs. We think that the anatomy of a Weblog has been decided. They've emerged over the last few years. Permalinks came out not long ago. And the tools haven't kept up with this. As a direction, the goal is going to be working backwards from the format to what people are doing with it.

Michael Gartenberg: I'm not a tool vendor. And there's something I haven't heard. At Jupiter we talk a lot about digital ubiquity. We carry multiple devices. People don't want one device. Our research indicates that the magic is number. And in some cases three devices. The challenge here is not only the tools on the PC side. We've got to take images, content, etc., to cell phones, PDAs, and other devices.

John Robb: We're about to come out with version 9.1, which Manila rides on. It includes RSS, email to Weblog. It's much smoother and very, very slick. If you've looked inside Manila, you'll know that it has a huge set of features. You can tweak almost anything. Our goal is to keep up with the interface. Soon, Radio will be able to synch with multiple desktops. The other thing is that I've been looking at P2P systems that you can hook up with Weblogs, a system that would augment your ability to upload large files. A link would go up, point to the file on your desktop, and other people using Radio could access the file. There is room for the desktop client.

People talk about having Weblogs everywhere. My time is too valuable to have my Weblog in multiple places. I'd rather have one Weblog that I can publish to multiple places.

Shellen: What we're saying isn't that you'd have multiple blogs. The concept of blogs living in different places doesn't mean that you have different data stores.

Dash: You have a cloud presence that embraces your entire identity online. It's broadened out to passive things that you're doing. People are using pedometers that hook up with Bluetooth to your computer.

Shellen: This fellow back there has Qblogger [???], which is a very interesting example of a personal data store.

Dash: We talked in another context about recording all your audio -- everything you've heard all day. Then I can decide what I want to share on my blog. Or with Jason.

Frankston: That's an interesting social experiment. People are going to get very good at creating synthetic personalities.

Dash: People already are!

Searls: I think we're going off in another direction. It's interesting that you can create a different persona, but if you try to use that persona in the real world, you can have trouble. It brings up issues about identity.

Dash: If everything about you is in your blog, is it a blog? I think so. It's not about the publishing tool. It's a social contract.

Searls: To me, controlling access to your blog is a tertiary thing.

Bricklin: In the business world, knowing who can read your blog is going to be a big thing.

Dash: Access control is a big part of it.

Searls: That's easier for me to understand than social contract.

Dash: We're trying to differentiate from Geocities. A permalink is a promise.

Shellen: My permalinks are much nicer to me.

Gartenberg: That doesn't change the very nature. Nothing gets more stale than a day-old Dunkin' Donut than a Weblog that doesn't get updated. It's not about social contract. It's about what you're trying to communicate. A business Weblog will have different goals than a personal Weblog. And they may be the same.

Searls: Let me take this down to a very mundane level. And it'll touch on problems that I have with your tools. John, is Radio Outliner going to come out soon? I want to hit a keyboard command and place a link.

Robb: It's not an immediate thing.

Dave Winer: Doc, I can build that for you.

Searls: Blogger, I've helped start maybe 15 blogs, and permalinks don't work right out of the gate.

Shellen: That's a feature.

Searls: A feature?

Shellen: Maybe first blogs aren't all that good. It was a problem with our old template, and we're rolling out the new version now. But I can't say that yours will roll out Thursday.

Searls: I have an ideal being a fotoblogger as well as a text blogger. What I would like to do is take a lot of pictures, put them on my computer, and serve them up. Does blogging have the leverage to make that dream happen?

Frankston: That reminds me of the fact that one of the first things I did was write a server app in javascript that allows me to publish photos.

Searls: Do movies in your home make that happen?

Bricklin: It's not blogging that's going to make it happen, it's digital cameras that are going to make it happen.

Dash: The tools are not keeping up with the way they're being used right now.

Weblog Business Strategies 2003 IX

Amundsen, Appnel, Berk, French, Robb, Stow, and Weinroth: Blogs and/as Content Management

Mike Amundsen is president of EraServer.Net, Timothy Appnel is an independent writer, Matthew Berk is a senior analyst for Jupiter Research, Bill French is co-founder of MyST Technology Partners, John Robb is president and COO of Userland Software, William Stow is president of Tsunamin Corporation, and Adam Weinroth is founder of Easyjournal. Here is a rought transcript of their discussion:

Matthew Berk: We have the after-snack crowd here. I hope your blood sugar hasn't bottomed out. Content management is a pretty huge part of what I cover. I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about search technology and stuff like that.

Tim Appnel: I've been an IT consultant for 12 years. The last year I've been a freelancer. Before that I spent over five years working for a company called Agency.com. While there I did a lot of advising on content management, portals, and things of that nature. One of the last projects I did there was a corporate Web site. That was 18 months ago and was my first taste of Weblogs. I can tell you about what makes a corporate Weblog fail. Here's your walking case study right here. I also keep an O'Reilly Weblog where I occasionally write an article time to time.

Mike Amundsen: I'm president of a company called EraServer.Net. We do a content management service called EraBlog.

Bill French: If you don't know me, you're lucky because I really tend to stir the pot quite a bit at the conferences I attend. I come from a relatively old school of computing. Everything I learned about conversation I learned from Doc Searls. About a year ago I left a company called StarBase. My former CEO is right here, and he's the only CEO I know who encourages Weblogs. I partnered with a guy and decided we'd look at content management in a slightly different light and look at knowledge management with XML standards. We realized we were really onto something that made a lot of sense. We put the services out on the street and realized that people wanted to blog with our technology because it really looked at objects in a different way. You can think of them as virtual blogs. I am now self-unemployed.

John Robb: I'm president and COO of Userland Software. I joined Userland when I saw the concept of blogging three years ago. I thought it was a great way of sharing knowledge within organizations. It didn't have the stumbling blocks that a lot of knowledge management had. Userland sells primarily to organizations, corporations like Dupont, Nokia, Intel, and Apple, as well as universities such as CalTech and Harvard. Lots and lots of small businesses, nonprofits, government organizations. Working with all these customers, I have a pretty good perspective of what works and what doesn't. The topic of this discussion today is interesting. Within bigger organizations I don't really see anyone buying content management systems any more. In smaller organizations, if you have a blogging tool that is a content management system -- and most aren't -- you can save money and have a complete system.

Bill Stow: StarBase was my third company, and I've worked mostly in team software. In my last six months before StarBase was sold to Borland, I spent a lot of time with customers. There was a kind of product that everyone talked about, a tool that allowed for communication across the entire corporation across departments. Blogging is the foundation of that communication. I started a new company called Tsunamin. In order to this, we'll see blogging transform itself into multiple forms of communication and multiple views of information. Teams become really great when people have voice in their teams. Content management tends to repress voice. It can't be that kind of a repressive large package.

Adam Weinroth: I run a little Web site down in Austin, Texas, called Easyjournal. I'm kind of the new kid on the block. I started the company last year and came out with a product that I basically built myself. We have about 65,000 users, and we're kind of playing catch up in terms of business strategy. In the spring of 2001, I decided to travel through western and central Europe solo for four months before entering business school in Austin. Nothing really let me share my experiences with family and friends back hone,. I developed my own content management system and used it to manage my personal Web site. It became quite popular among the people who knew about it, and we're trying to deal with that popularity so it doesn't implode. Blogging is essentially content management, personal content management. What do these tools offer in terms of alternative to the other large systems that are out there?

Berk: I have to act daft. What is content management? On the one hand, blogging seems as a subspecies of content management. But when you look at it really hard, it seems to pose all of the essentials.

Robb: Weblog software is built on content management. It's an application. It's Web publishing for the rest of us. When you look at what you can do with Vignette versus a Weblog system, you may be conflating the issue. Maybe you should say what can you do with a low-cost content management system? Weblogging is an app that's pretty well defined. The feature well is pretty deep. There's a community.

Berk: Blogging is a vertical application that's generally content management?

Robb: What you'll find is that it's a truly horizontal application that can be used in many instances. There's lots of different ways people are using the tool. But if someone builds something on Word, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a straight one-to-one relationship.

Berk: Bill, would you consider knowledge management as part of that core set of services?

French: When I look at this space, our company decided to take a step back. We took a step so far back we fell off the dock. What is the goal of content management? We're trying to help people make better decisions at a great velocity. We are trying to create the capacity to act. That's what people do with blogs. And it's what people do with content in a very abstract way. When you think about content management, you think about deployment, rigid rules, approval. Those don't make content management very high velocity or high capacity to act. There's a third element: the ability to derive an insight. Content is information. There is no way to escape that fact. But the one thing that blogs bring to the world is the ability to bring people an increased awareness. When I think of CMS or the term blog, I get particularly aggravated when people attempt to pigeonhole it. That essentially puts a straitjacket on your thinking. You're taking your brain and putting it in a vice. Most of the blogging tools have the capacity for the concept of reuse. At the end of the day it's information.

Berk: There are conventions. Blogs have a relatively rigid set of conventions. Web sites have fewer conventions.

Stow: I fully agree with Bill that we need to abstract our perception of the blog. We started with our product at StarBase, StarTeam. Many large organizations require control and process. Even though we might not like the idea that we're going to be controlled and repressed, this is what corporations look for in their software. If you take what Bill's talking about high velocity and try to transform it into content management, you'll destroy what blogs are all about today. You've got to see this new thing. It's going to have to appear in new forms. If we can find ways of reusing and reforming this wonderful notion, we'll see new forms of communication.

Amundsen: We're not talking about something that's very important here. And that's putting words like blogs and content management together. These are conversations we've had before. One of the things I notice quite a bit is that we do this goofy acronym thing. We had HTML. Now we have RSS and other meta markup and meta tagging of information. Instead of people authoring information and marking it up about where it should go, we have people marking up information about where it comes from, what category it's in. Annotation. From the content point of view, content is no longer as stuck as it used to be. Content management may be a silly notion in a few years. Maybe it becomes content capture, search, reformatting. We're all going to be thinking wow isn’t this amazing that this content can be displayed on my PDA, my phone, my laptop in ways that make content management systems almost superfluous. Content management may be a quaint thing. Instead of empowering users, we're empowering authors.

Berk: This industry has ta