(From ICanHazCheezburger)

Sounds a bit like a lead-in to a joke, doesn’t it? Like the difference between you and a media company is that you haven’t laid off half your staff, or the difference is that the media company has likeable characters, or . . .

Actually it’s a great blog post by Joe Pulizzi – The Difference Between You and a Media Company:

The only difference . . . is that a media company leverages content in order to sell paid content and sponsorships . . . A non-media company needs to create that same type of content, but they do not get paid content or sponsorships — they do it to sell products and services

(His title also reminds me of one of my all-time favorite album titles: The Difference Between Me and You Is That I’m Not on Fire, brought to you by the same folks who also released My Pain and Sadness is More Sad and Painful Than Yours).

Pulizzi also points to eMarketer’s – 2011 Trends: Content Marketing is Critical – in which Geoff Ramsey writes:

Marketers should base their magnetic content ideas on well-researched customer behaviors, attitudes and lifestyles. This entails altering your emphasis in marketing from “selling product” to identifying and solving a consumer need or want that transcends or complements the physical product or service you are selling. Ask yourself this critical question: Besides your product, what can you do for the consumer?

Content produced by retailers must drive awareness and ultimately sales, but in order to do so it is important not to lose sight of the fact that it is still content and must be interesting, helpful, fun, appropriate, and engaging.

Maybe at the end of the day the difference between you and a media company is less significant than you think, given that media companies are also increasingly finding that subscription and sponsorship revenue is not enough . . .

Key question: What do you, dear reader, think about cross-posting to multiple blogs as a solution to the challenge of maintaining both a personal and a corporate presence?

Chris’s post focuses on “trust agents” who have a personal presence in a given community but also represent a company, and raises the issue of what happens when they move on to another company. Some folks blog on the corporate site, with the company for which they work providing the platform. His own situation?:

My own blog has been mine since day one. When I worked with Jeff Pulver, it was still my blog. With CrossTech Media, this is my blog. They might ask me to be mindful of our company and occasionally post information germane to my business, but that’s expected. I’m their guy. Why wouldn’t they want that of me? And I love writing about the work we’re doing, like the New Marketing Summit (plug plug).

But the blog is mine. It’s my shingle. It’s where I conduct my business. Most of this business is on behalf of my organization. I’m grateful to have a company to work with, and both CrossTech Media now and Pulvermedia before supported this stance.

At Optaros, we’ve always tried to encourage consultants to maintain a presence in various communities on their own, independent of the corporate platform. We’ve never wanted to project a kind of “corporate voice” that is impersonal and anonymous, and having people speak in their own voices on their own platforms helps project a more authentic, created-by-real-people-working set of voices in the communities with which we interact.

In addition to encouraging external blogs, we also started supporting blogging on the corporate site when it relaunched in early 2008 and on the Enterprise Open Source Directory, which Optaros sponsors.

It’s an extension of the same logic – kill the bland, anonymous corporate voice in favor of real personalities who write in their own voice about subjects with which they have deep experience – with a minor change in that we’re using the corporate platform. Optaros’ VP of Marketing Marc Osofsky describes the approach in a blog post: What is a Web 2.0 Corporate Website?.

(We did consider simply aggregating content from the external blogs of Optaros employees, but providing our own platform creates new opportunities for employees who don’t maintain external blogs, and creating quality content directly seemed a better long term strategy than simple aggregation).

I’m a big believer and supporter of both these positions: supporting employees who have an interest in maintaining an external blog as well as allowing employees blogging on the corporate site. But what happens when you’re writing a blog post that really applies in both places?

Do you:

1. Post it (exactly the same content) in both places, maybe even using an XML-RPC client to automate that process.
2. Post it to your personal blog, and refer to it from the corporate blog?
3. Post it to the corporate blog, and refer to it from the personal blog?

Sometimes I’ve posted the same content to both places – most recently my review of Groundswell – and I’ve done the “post once and reference elsewhere” approach as well.

In an ideal world I’d have time enough to craft (frequently) meaningful personalized messages for each appropriate channel – valuable content for each audience, uniquely tailored to that audience – but I’m not sure that’s ever going to be realistic. It also gets complicated by the additional presence of the Enterprise Open Source directory blogs – which means some posts I write (focused on open source software platforms, frameworks, and projects) could have three “venues” in which they make sense.

(I also bring all three together by reference at JohnEckman.com which is an aggregated lifestream – but that’s likely too much me for anyone to really subscribe to).

The easiest solution is to just cross-post, but somehow, honestly, that just feels not-quite-right to me, at least as a constant stream. Not everything I write on Open Parenthesis makes sense on Optaros.com, and vice-versa. Maybe the only real solution is to continue to muddle along, choosing each time based on what I’m writing about whether it belongs on my Optaros.com blog, here on Open Parenthesis, and/or on the Enterprise Open Source Directory blog, and whether full copies or references make sense.

Who would you hold up as successful examples of blogging on and off the corporate domain?

It ought to be required reading for every marketing exec or entrepreneur thinking of starting a “myspace for _____” or “facebook for _______.” (OK, maybe not fair to pick on marketing there – any exec thinking of doing such a thing).

Key questions he provides:

1. What business problem are you trying to fix? What’s broken? What does success look like (without mentioning features)
2. There are different tools for different problems, Are you sure a Social Networking site will fix this?
3. Where are your community/market/users currently?
4. Not sure? Then look again, don’t proceed farther until you find them.
5. Have you considered joining that community before creating your own? You know of the Walmart 10 week fiasco right? Trying to recreate MySpace doesn’t make sense because it already exists.
6. How open/closed to you want your community? Think about long term, does it scale?
7. What incentive are you creating with this SoNet that will drive users to your site and share?
8. How do you plan to kick start your community, you know that just because you build it, doesn’t mean they’ll come
9. Consider joining the Web Strategy Group in Facebook to meet other web decision makers, you’ll be able to ask questions in the forum.
10. Leave a comment below if you’ve suggestions.

OK, so numbers 4, 9, and 10 aren’t really questions, but 1-3 and 5-8 are dead on.

A few I’d add:

11. What is your plan to manage / moderate the community’s activities assuming a large community arises? What terms of service / acceptable behavior guidelines will you rely on, and how will they be enforced / cultivated?
12. How will you involve people outside your organization but from within the target community? What will you do to actively recruit, encourage, and even potentially incent “good” user behavior from your target community?
13. Consider assembling the community on a platform of open source software rather than licensing a commercial package or renting a service. You’ll get the rapid time to market of buying or renting but also the ability to customize in order to create a differentiated experience.

Ok, maybe the last one’s a bit of a pitch . . .

Although the video hasn’t yet surfaced, some interesting commentaries have.

Stephen Walli’s “Tim O’Reilly, Eben Moglen, and Jane Jacobs” links the tensions between O’Reilly and Moglen to the “two value systems” which Jacobs argued are at the root of all communities:

Jane Jacobs (originally famous for “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”) wrote a small Socratic dialog called “Systems of Survival”. The characters debate that there are exactly two value systems in existence. One leads to politics (protecting) and the other to commerce (trading). These value systems are not opposite ends of a spectrum, but rather different and incompatible. For each value in one syndrome there is no equal and opposite value in the other.

For Walli, the Moglen / O’Reilly confrontation is the embodiment of the debate between these poles:

Tim is the embodiment of the trading value system. Indeed, I would suggest that not only was the attack on stage unwarranted, but that the Free Software movement has been able to deliver its important message to a broader audience faster because of the stage Tim built with O’Reilly Media.

Likewise Eben is a veritable intellectual and rhetorical lion for our political value system around software freedom. Eben may be the perfect person to engage in the necessary debate going forward around conflicts of rights that I believe are invariably created by friction between the two value systems.

Matt Asay, on the other hand, argues in “Pendulum has swung in the open source debate” that Moglen’s criticisms were a “wake-up call”:

The wake-up call about the necessary freedoms came from Eben Moglen at last week’s O’Reilly Open Source Conference. . . . I wasn’t in the room to hear Eben. At any rate, I’m not one for handwringing and am just glad it was said.

Ultimately, I do think it is important – at OSCON of all places – to keep the discussion about freedom as part of the conversation, but I agree with Tim O’Reilly, who commented on Matt’s post:

Eben didn’t want to talk about freedom – He just wanted to talk about his idea of freedom, which is different from mine.

O’Reilly was trying, this year as he did last year, a conversation about what freedom means in a software-as-a-service world. Eben wasn’t interested in that conversation, and chose instead to use the moment to create buzz and be provocative in support of his agenda.

If you’re interested in the actual discussion, I’d recommend taking a look at:

1. My notes from Eben’s session on The Republic of Open Source for more of what Eben means by freedom and what he thinks we need to be focused on. (I know, two links to my own blog in one post – but I can’t resist).
2. Tim O’Reilly’s keynote from the next morning on Degrees of Freedom

On Friday, Ethan Zuckerman posted The 5-4-3 double play, or “The Art of Conference Blogging”, including an extensive set of tips on how to do blog from conferences more effectively. As one might expect, it’s a comprehensive list that makes me realize just how underprepared I’ve been in the times I’ve tried to do it.

The highlights:

• The kit: I come to conferences with my beloved Mac, two charged batteries, a power strip, a digital camera and cables, granola bars and a lap desk. . . .
• The location: Bloggers rarely sit in the front row to blog conferences. . . . It’s usually better to sit to a side, near the power plugs. . . .
• Preparation: Conferences usually give you a speaker program ahead of time. Use it. Over breakfast before the day of a conference, I’ll type the names of each speaker and their talk title into a text file. If I’m really good, I’ll do quick Google searches on each of them and link their names to their blogs, research institutions, arrest records, etc. Prepare sufficiently and you’ve got the first paragraph of each post written ahead of time.
• Macros: . . . This is a way of storing pieces of text that you use frequently and linking them to key combinations. . . . Even if you’re composing online, within your blogging platform, or if you don’t feel comfortable setting up macros, it can be a big help to put some useful snippets of text in a text file and cut and paste them into blogposts.
• Keeping Up: I have a hard and fast rule for myself – I complete posts on a conference session within fifteen minutes of the end of that session. . . .
• Hard Talks: . . . Experienced speakers are easy to blog – they follow a narrative path through their talks, speak at a pace the audience can understand, emphasize key points with visuals. . . . It’s much harder to blog inexperienced speakers. . . .
• Use your commenters: Because I’m blogging ten or more talks a day, I get things wrong. Sometimes I get things egregiously wrong. Comments allow other attendees – and sometimes the speakers themselves – to correct me. . . .
• Collaborate: . . . My goal in blogging a conference is not to be the sole, authoritative voice of the blogosphere. It’s to do what I enjoy doing: writing detailed summaries of each sessions. . . . It’s a whole lot more fun to blog these events in groups, even if that means sitting next to someone trying to liveblog at the same time as you are, arguing about how to spell a word the speaker has just uttered.
• Digest: I go to conferences because they give me a wealth of new ideas to wrestle with, sometimes for weeks or months to come. . . . So that I have a chance to wrestle with the big ideas, I’ll often try to write a summary or reactions post a week after a conference. . . .
• Have Fun: Not everyone enjoys blogging at conferences. I have many friends who’ve tried it and discovered that it stresses them out or detracts from their enjoyment. There’s an easy solution to this: don’t do it. Most people don’t keep score at baseball games. That’s okay, as there’s an official scorekeeper, a scoreboard and at least one journalist in the stands. We don’t need everyone to become a conference liveblogger – just a few more of us.

Although I’m reading these points after OSCON, not before it, I think my approach was much closer to what Zuckerman describes than my own previous liveblogging from Enterprise 2.0.

In a few sessions I took some live notes (see posts tagged OSCON), but in most sessions I just felt like trying to liveblog was getting in the way of enjoyment for me. I posted a few key notes to twitter (as when the OSI announced approval of the CPAL) but didn’t try to keep up with any of the other OSCON twitterers in terms of detail or frequency.

But I did have fun.

Look for some digest / summary / follow up posts over the next few months.

This weekend is WordCamp, in San Francisco. Chz and Tofu from ICanHasCheezburger, one of my favorite blogs, will be there. (Yes, I have a doctoral degree in English and ICanHasCheezburger is one of my favorite blogs. Deal with it.)

The full schedule is online, and it many folks will use trackback to add their blogging about sessions they attended to the session’s page in the schedule.

Some sessions which look to me like highlights I will be sorry to miss:

• Getting Involved with WordPress, by Lloyd Budd and Mark Jaquith
• Kicking Ass Content Connections, with Lorelle VanFossen
• Blogs vs. Journalism, with John Dvorak and Om Malik
• Blogs at the New York Times, with Jeremy Zilar
• Past, Present, and Future of Web Publishing, with Dave Winer
• State of the Word, with Matt Mullenweg

Definitely a high powered set of speakers and in a relatively intimate forum. I’ll definitely add WordCamp 2008 to my “hopefully attend list.”

Starting this morning is Ubuntu Live, which runs this morning through Tuesday in Portland. Their schedule is also online and also impressive.

(A Sunday morning keynote trifecta with Mark Shuttleworth, Stephen O’Grady, and Jeff Waugh, as the first session of teh conference? Impressive. In fact, O’Grady’s already posted his slides and script.)

Finally, the rest of the week will be OSCON 2007, which I will be attending.

As usual, OSCON is enormous (check out the schedule – there are literally 15 parallel tracks much of Wed and Thurs), and that’s just the official sessions, not to mention the parties and events.

Drop me a line if you’ll be in Portland next week too.

Deborah Weil has been around the block a couple of times and she must have known when GlaxoSmithKline’s agency approached her to consult on a new flog for its Alli weight-loss product that it was a dishonest, insincere attempt to cash in on the social media craze and that the parameters set for it doomed it to failure.

He’s referring to Weil’s post where she requested of her readers:

head on over to GlaxoSmithKline’s official corporate blog for alli, the first FDA approved, OTC (over the counter) weight loss product. Take a peek and, if you’re inspired, leave a Comment.

She also, to be clear, disclosed the relationship:

Full disclosure: I’m working with GSK on the blog. And this was my idea to ask for Comments.

However, as Kevin Dugan points out in the comments, the email version of the post included the sentence “No need
to say that you know me, of course.” See also Weil’s followup post: Using the backchannel of email to invite Comments on your blog.

While I’m not sure that Bowles’ personal attacks at Weil and her “inexplicably popular” blog help his argument, and alliconnect doesn’t fit my definition of a flog (since it declares directly it is written by GSK folks), the core of the issue is the extent to which traditional PR and Marketing techniques are conflicting with next generation Internet conversations. On this, I think Bowles is right on:

Many companies still don’t get it. To them, social media represent just one more set of marketing tools to sell more stuff. They believe they can have it both ways–control the message AND build relationships of trust with potential customers. They are wrong and, when engaged to provide advice, communications professionals who understand the new realities have a obligation to tell them so.

Echoing the question Weil asked, is it acceptable to use email (what Weil calls the backchannel of the blogosphere) to suggest to people you know that they visit your own blog, or the blog of a client, and leave comments?

I’ve certainly emailed folks I know and asked them to check out the Optaros Enterprise Open Source Directory – and encouraged them to leave feedback. When I’ve written a blog post or a white paper I’m proud of, I’ve emailed popular sites and asked them to check it out – for example, when Ajaxian.com “picked up” this post, that was at least in part because I had emailed them directly, telling them about the post.

I’d argue that part of the launch campaign for any new service or site these days should include a “market to the influencers” component, which includes plans for how to get influential bloggers early access to the invite-only beta.

Is the difference that Weil was encouraging traffic to a corporate blog. rather than her own? Is it that she suggested, albeit lightly, that they not disclose their relationship to her, despite the fact that she consulted with GSK on the blog?

(See for example Dennis Howlett’s Holy Crap!, which cites the product itself as one of the issues, and Weil’s suggestion not to disclose as another).

Is the real problem the fact that GSK is abusing the blog concept? Bowles argues:

You can’t have a successful conversation when personal anecdotes and negative comments are banned and the few comments that are left are so obviously scripted and uninspiring.

What if Weil had suggested explicitly that people visit the Alli blog and leave comments positive or negative? What if she had suggested that they disclose directly that there were doing so in response to her invitation for comments? What if that invitation for comments had been posted directly on the blog in question?

(In addition to disclosing the relationship on her blog, she is listed as a contributor on the Alli blog)

If I posted on the EOS Blog and then came here and asked you all to comment on it, would that be a conflict of interest, or effective marketing?

Ultimately, I’m as concerned about astroturf and bad corporate-pr-blogs as anyone else, but the issue comes down to whether authentic and transparent conversation is being had at the site in question, not whether people were encouraged to go there.

(For some real, unfiltered, and clear feedback about Alli check out: alli: miracle diet pill with teeny tiny side effect and Laugh? I nearly shit my pants. I wonder if the Angry Aussie has tried posting comments on the alli blog).

It’s well worth a read, even if you’re not in the PR world.

At first I was concerned it was going to be all too Dr. Pangloss (or Pollyanna, to make the same reference in a different register):

The public relations industry finds itself at an historic juncture. It always has been about social influence – i.e., “relating to the public.” Now that the rules of social influence are gaining precedence over other approaches, public relations looms larger than ever. Working together, internal public relations departments and agencies can better serve their organizations while resetting the mandate and direction for an entire industry.

I was worried this was going to be the story of a “difficulty” turned into an “opporunity” – rather than becoming irrelevant, PR is more important than ever!

But it’s really a very measured and methodical paper – they later write that:

social media must become part of the way public relations practitioners do business or they will become obsolete

and

public relations practitioners . . . should recognize that defining, or redefining the role they will play in this changing communications landscape is critical

In other words, things are changing, and PR either needs to get with the changing climate or risk becoming irrelevant.

Other useful notes:

84% of participating firms they surveyed were “employing blogs on behalf of clients” – that’s an even higher number than I expected. (For the record, no PR firm employs this blog – I write it).

They also lay out changes in skill sets, personnel, and business models agencies and PR firms will need to go through.

(Quick Summary: there’s more value in more commentary and analysis, less in transcription).

My own liveblogging from Enterprise 2.0 was inspired by many useful liveblogs I’ve read from events – especially David Wienberger (who is able to liveblog while participating as a panelist and chatting on backchannel IRC). Noting the presence of power strips in the seating areas and a working, stable wifi network (as opposed to SXSW), it just made sense to me to share the notes I was taking.

But then a comment by Andrew McAfee made me think more critically after the fact than I had at the time.

McAfee notes:

Finally, I used to think that short talks at conferences were low-pressure events, since they’d be heard by relatively few people and remembered by even fewer. A quick Google blog search, however, brings up about 30 blog posts commenting on my keynote. These will persist unless their posters take them down, and will add to the Internet’s record of my work. This is more than a bit scary for me as a speaker, but for me as a conference attendee this is great news; it means that the overall quality of talks will go up. No one wants to be examined from that many angles and found lacking.

(Just FYI – McAfee’s keynote is also freely available online in video from Altus – to me that would be even scarrier than the blogger’s reaction).

This got me to thinking, about liveblogging in particular, and asking a number of questions I probably should have thought more about a few weeks back:

• What’s the proper etiquette for liveblogging, other than sitting in the back and typing as quietly as possible?
• Does one need permission to liveblog a conference keynote? What about a conference panel session?
• Would that be permission from the speaker(s)? the conference organizer(s)? both?
• What’s the difference between blogging about an event – summaries, excerpts, and commentary – and liveblogging an event? Is it just the time difference, or the percentage of the event covered?
• Does liveblogging get in the way of more substantive commentary?

First, a bit of background on some of the controversies about Liveblogging. I can’t claim to have seen all the various threads on the topics, but here are some highlights.

Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations, liveblogged at the New Communications Forum March 08 of 2007: New Comm Forum–Winner & Sinners.

Steve Crecenzo, seeing Shel’s post, reacted by posting in the comments:

You know, I would rate the lunch panel as the worst session I saw at the conference, and I was on it!

But your “live blogging” of it was even worse. Maybe you ought to just stop typing for a second, listen to what’s being said, and THEN go back to your room and blog using your notes.

Steve also posted, on his own blog: The problem with “live blogging” and the “blogosphere”.

It’s a long post, but worth reading for its critique of live blogging (as well as a good picture of how conference panels can be put together and how they sometimes fall apart):

As people sit and “live blog” speakers and events, and get a whole bunch of shit wrong but publish it anyway, isn’t that a little dangerous? Especially when the person doing the “live blogging” is a very respected person who has the power to influence a lot of people?

The comments to the post include a pretty good cross section of pro/con on live blogging, perhaps a bit tilted to the con side.

Shel Holtz’s response, Live blogging: a new fact of life, sympathizes with Steve but ultimately disagrees:

The fact is, live blogging has become a core component of many conferences and events, especially those dealing with technology and social media.

Holtz argues that, rather than yet another sign of the decline of thought, this new fact of life is a good thing:

The difference between what live blogging really is and what Steve perceives it to be is dramatic. Steve sees it as reporting, and inaccuracies in the reporting leave misinformation on the public record. But blogs are far less about reporting than they are about conversation. Personally, I see live blogging as a service. As someone who cannot attend a conference (or a session at a conference), the ability to read the post about it offers me insights I would not otherwise have been privy to.

Paul Waldman, on the other hand, asks “Is it just me, or does liveblogging really, really suck?” (Tell us how you really feel, Paul):

I appreciate the value of up-to-the-minute information as much as anyone. But I can’t ever recall reading a liveblog of anything and coming away feeling like I learned something. I mean no offense to my colleagues who have liveblogged at one time or another, but I have to question whether the activity has any value at all.

Similarly, Allen Jenkins argues that Liveblogging is for irritating snots . . . real men take a Moleskine:

And here is the greatest shame: livebloggers tend to be the smartest, savviest people in the room. The people best able to absorb a presentation on Day One at a conference, absorb two on Day Two, and another on Day Three and weave all of their thinking into one excellent article or blog post. But what do we get? Off the cuff blog posts and “tweets” that they, let me call it, should be ashamed of. I will not name names, but I read the liveblogging of many colleagues from conferences I cannot go to: folks, take notes instead. Reflect. Talk to the other attendees. Then write your posts. You will be doing the world and your own reputations a big favor.

Seth Godin also weighs in on the side of the “is this really useful?” camp:

On closer inspection, it doesn’t work particularly well. I mean, not only was I there, but I was speaking, yet I can’t make sense at all of the posts. That’s because most people don’t take notes to be read. They take notes to write them. The act of writing things down triggers different areas of our brain, it focuses attention, it makes it easier to remember things. You can read your blog notes later and say, “yeah, I remember that slide…” But for an outsider who’s not there, the amount of information that’s imparted is small indeed.

Angelo Fernando wonders, in the context of setting up a conference, what the conference organizer’s role in this should be: “should there be some guidelines conference organizers should set?”

So between all these posts, and their comment threads, you can see a few basic camps emerging.

Some argue liveblogging is inherently bad, because it:

• Encourages those in the audience to pay more attention to their own notetaking and posting to their blog than the live speakers or fellow audience members
• Allows poor notetakers to post inaccurate summaries of events, potentially harming reputations needlessly or without real context to add value
• Dilutes the value of attending the events live, or selling access to conference proceedings and such – material to which the liveblogger does not have copyright clearance
• Gets in the way of deeper thinking – about, absorbing, reflecting, and then posting about the event offers more opportunity to add value than the relatively immediate (and unmediated) coverage of liveblogging

Those who argue in support of liveblogging point out that liveblogging:

• Provides a service to those unable to attend the event, capturing some of the “feel” of the event
• Is conversational, like blogs in general, and therefore should not be held to the same critique as journalistic reports of the same event would be. Liveblogging declares itself partial, incomplete, informal – therefore the audience understands these are not edited or formalized conclusions
• Creates an opportunity for people to react, correct, and respond to what was said
• Contributes to the worth of the event, by giving it more attention – paying organizers back in free publicity more than it costs them in exclusive content

My own experience was rather mixed. I definitely saw some value in exposing the content to folks who were not there – great increase in traffic, some good comments, and an uptick in subscribers – but those are just benefits to me. Did others benefit from my liveblogging? It’s hard to speak for anonymous readers – I did get some positive feedback from readers who appreciated the effort and the content, but I don’t know how many found it a flood of useless raw notes – useless but not annoying enough to complain about.

On the negative side, I did get the feeling that it interfered with my conference experience in a few ways.

First, the simple logistics of always getting to a power strip, getting onto the conference network, and starting the shell of a blog post into which to write ties you up right at the moment where you should most be talking to other attendees. You lose that 5 minutes right before a session begins or after one ends. It isn’t a lot of time, but it is key time – I could actually feel a bit disconnected from other conference goers due to managing the laptop. (Am I using the laptop or is it using me as a source of movement and constant power?)

Second, the sheer effort involved in trying to do a good job of liveblogging – capturing well what was being said – meant that by the end of the day I was far too tired of the experience to post any reflective thoughts. In my experience at least, liveblogging meant that I was not able to write more value-added blog posts in which I summarized, drew conclusions across panels, argued for a different interpretation or approach, and so on. (This wasn’t helped by the 1.5hr commute to the conference each morning and home each night, or the fact that I was also manning the Optaros sponsor booth when it was open, and doing other work – not complaining, just saying it made for some really long days and probably sapped my ability to make cohesive arguments).

Third, I found myself stuck in trying to cover everything – as though I was somehow letting someone down if I didn’t liveblog on e of the sessions. Why shouldn’t I only cover sessions I found interesting and insightful? Do I need to spend my time liveblogging a vendor sales pitch? I felt that it actually increased my urge to make snarky comments. Not that there’s anything wrong with well developed, constructive criticism – but I don’t want to focus on snippy comments interjected in the middle of someone’s presentation. Seems juvenile at best. (Ok, I don’t think I was that bad – but I could see how people could get caught up in the opportunity to say something funny for humor’s sake rather than as a sustained thoughtful critique).

So would I liveblog again?

I certainly will continue to blog about conferences I attend, and capture notes on presentations, keynotes, and panels I find interesting. But I don’t know that I will liveblog in quite the same way.

For me it’s less about the permissions issue (though I will certainly keep an eye out for what is explicitly allowed and disallowed at various conferences – as a speaker and as an attendee) then it is about the opportunity to add value, not just record transcripts.

Even if I do find myself with the urge to share my notes from a conference, I’d want to make sure that it is not interfering with my ability to engage the folks around me and that I’m preserving time and energy to actually reflect on the event, not just transcribe it.

While there may be value in sharing relatively unprocessed notes – for some occasions – I don’t think it is worth the effort, when compared to synthesizing, analyzing, arguing about, and engaging the material rather than just transmitting it.

In short: more commentary and analysis, less transcription.

What do you think? Should bloggers get permission before posting about conferences? Does this apply to all bloggers or just liveblogging?

Two side notes:

The funniest reaction I saw was a quip in the comments of a liveblog of Bruce Sterling’s rant from SXSW: “liveblogging is for sissies. when you’re cutting edge, someone else liveblogs it for you.”

Alice Marwick liveblogged from a workshop on “Ethical Surveillance” – the irony of which is not lost on her: “I’m going to selectively blog some of the sessions, since I didn’t bother to get anyone’s permission for this. Would this count as micro-surveillance? I wonder.” Is liveblogging a form of surveillance? What if you identify people in the audience asking questions?

Good references on liveblogging (more about how to do it well than whether to do it or not):

• Liveblogging post mortem (from July of 2005!)
• Live Blogging Best Practices (June 2006)
• Liveblog your next event
• Tips for Conference Blogging (a three part series)

* Moderator – Rob Rueckert, Investment Manager, Intel Capital
* Speaker – Chris Alden, EVP, Professional Products, Six Apart
* Speaker – David Cassady, EVP of Operations, SpikeSource
* Speaker – Greg Reinacker, Founder / CTO, NewsGator Technologies, Inc.
* Speaker – Ross Mayfield, CEO and Co-Founder, Socialtext

Panel introductions:
Greg Reinacker from Newsgator – founder, CTO – now, people come to us saying “I need these technologies” as opposed to us trying to expain to them what they need. What we need to overcome now is the “what about sharepoint” or “what about IE 7 and Vista” challenges as an RSS vendor

Ross Mayfield – founder, CEO of SocialText – the first wiki company. Perhaps the first company to call themselves enterprise 2.0. Four years ago we had to explain what wikis were, and what the could be used for – the four ps. Projects (this is the classical example), Practices (short of best practices – just write stuff down), People, Portals? (lost the last p there). Now there is a widespread understanding of the tools. Also generational -people who grew up doing their homework on myspace when it was called cheating, they get to work and it is called collaboration.

Chris Alden – heads the business unit at SixApart for movable type and typepad. Moving from punditry to productivity. As people find that these new ways of having conversations can be very useful – there is a whole new set of needs which emerge as you talk about taking blogs to the enterprise – ldap integration, getting everything working together. Ultimately I want ease of use, best of breed, but also I want them to work together.

David Cassidy, Spike Source. Could be open source, could be next generation / web 2.0 offerings, could be proprietary offerings. What we’re surprised about with suite two is that though it was targetted toward small and medium size businesses, large enterprises have taken notice – Shell, etc. Most of the companies have these technologies in place in one form or another, and the question they face now is what to do about how to control those pieces.

—

Q: Most of this seems to come in through the back door – someone just buys a wiki or a blog. What challenges are you seeing as you try to get to enterprise deployments through the CIO?

Ross – Bottom up was the way it was going to happen in the first place – so we had to organize business models around it. You’re going to get to the CIO one of two ways – either one day the CIO wakes up to the prevelance of the solutions or you come in through the front door. When you get clear goals, you get adoption. That’s the better way to get into an enterprise – with clear, concrete goals. IN that case, you’re the good guy helping the CIO meet his goals.

David – a need or initiative may form in one division, but were seeing enterprises where every new initiative touches a number of departments and there is a need for centralization in IT for efficiency if not compliance.

Chris – enterprises are used to buying big solutions, and making big bets – finding a big bang that will solve all their problems. We’re hoping enterprises will adopt a bit more experimentation – make many small bets. Start with some lightweight, easy to use, best of breed apps and grow from there.

—

Q from Audience: For a long time our goal has been to protect core information assets from the outside and even from the inside.

Greg – Security is core to all of these solutions. It’s not about “information wants to be free” – its about integration with active directory or ldap.

Ross – it’s not information that wants to be free, its people. If you think of information as a phsyical asset that needs to be divided for security, you will be preventing collaboration – you will be in the way. Web 2.0 is about sharing control in order to deliver value. Clay Shirky – processes is an embedded reaction to previous stupidity. You need to question whenever security is the default choice.

Chris – When you buy movable type, you’re not buying a religion. Some discussions are better in a controlled environment – people have a need for revision history, for user logins to read feeds, etc. Sometimes people want more transparency enabled by tracking – what was changed when by whom.

—-

Q: Along the same lines, in a SOX-compliant world, where people need to worry about information sharing and unexpected release of information, do we need to worry about this?

Ross – this was already happening with email. Many of these tools actually make compliance more possible because they track who changed what and when. They actualy increase transparency rather than reducing it – if something bad happens, you can find out who did it and when.

Greg – when we go in to work on an enterprise sale, we don’t lead with “change how you do things” – we let the enterprise tell us what they like and don’t like about what they are doing – we’re their to enable.

—-

Q from Audience: In my org, we are managing risk – we need the ability to control at a high degree of granularity – even if we never have to use it, we need to know that we can. What about the ability to manage on a granular basis.

Q from Audience: When and how will this go beyond a platform for pontificators to pontificate?

Ross – it’s already happened.

Chris – Plenty of examples on our site of different people using blogs as a mechanism for communication. We’re already seeing these used for very practical reasons. Citrix, for example, using MT to share data from campaigns for different products. TWA, an ad agency / communications firm – they use MT to communicate across offices. They used to send DVDs back and for – now they use MT.

Ross – this is our burden and our opportunity. People come to the concept of using these tools with expectations from the consumer side – they expect vandalism, for example, which has not happened yet in social text’s history.

Greg – there are also innovative solutions that are not what people are thinking of in general. BOA, for example, changed a fax-notification driven fraud alert system to a popup alert, blog driven approach which gets the information to the people who need it – not what the original tech was for.

—

Q from Andrew McAfee – what have you all learned about initial adopters? Who’s jumping on this stuff. New workforce? Geeky folks?

Chris – I don’t think it is so much technical/non-technical issue, so much as “how painful is your problem” – how difficult is it for you to communicate to the people you’re trying to get to. People frustrated by the slow timeline of more complex heavy tools – what we see is really based on the need, not the kind of person. We want authentic dialogue and real collaboration – the system has to be easy.

Ross – traditional early adopters plus four exceptional:
- therapist (organizations with crazy transitions going on),
- shopping mall (consumerization – first wiki customers were also early bloggers),
- bar, (literally – met employees at the bar – social/work blur),
- genius bar (some leader who wants to try something new to improve innovation)

Moderator – I’d also add to that last one – most of the new enterprises really have a group devoted to R&D.

Greg – we find it doesn’t take a lot to get someone to adopt it once you show them some content they like.

David – it isn’t a question of getting them to adopt these technologies – they already are using them – the question is just really how to get them to control / manage / deal with the technologies which are already there.

—

Q from Audience: What about information hoarders? What’s in it for me?

Ross – You don’t need everyone in the conversation. Don’t convince them. Get everyone else using it – it is ok to have a large number of lurkers.

Chris – You can answer every question individually, or you can answer it once in a permanent location and then you don’t have to keep answering it – it can reduce your work burden if you’re the person to whom everyone goes to.

—

What about a company where people don’t feel any pain – they think that they are already fine with email.

It’s about saying rather than doing x, do y – instead of writing the email, write it in the blog or in the wiki – but make sure you’re not creating additional work.

Ross – let them still use email! Most of the tools can convert an email into a blog post or a wiki page.

Greg – also don’t forget that lurkers can be valuable contributors in other ways – their attention is a value. Lurkers are people too.

—

Q from audience: Have you noticed a tension between corporate structure (hierarchy) and the flat web 2.0 model – does the tension exist?

David – collaboration as a whole has a flattening effect, yes. So the kinds of work for which this kind of technology is effective are naturally flatter as well.

Chris – a lot of companies are looking to us to help reduce the hierarchy – they want the tools because they like the opporunity to flatten. (In some places they need hierarchy that’s ok).

Moderator – in fact, Intel Capital invested in lots of collaboration tools throughout the 80s and most of those failed – because they were too hierarchical.

—-

McAfee – is there any example where the hierarchy wacks someone virtually?

Chris – more often what we see is that there are conversations out in the public that they want to control but can’t. But most of the time these tools you have an identity and that creates a more respectful conversation – it isn’t anonymous.

—

Q from audience – bottom up versus top down – which is better for adoption?

Ross – Bottom up, but with approval / consent / investment from top down – invest a bit in training – doesn’t have to be a lot but some – develop a shared language / approach to knowledge management in this way. If you’ve got consent to build a large scale enterprise wiki, take 10 people and do a quick start approach – invest a bit upfront so as to avoid problems down the road. Start with small group, hand out 5 invites to each, do another wave, keep going so that when you “launch” there is already a there, there. You’ve also created some built in connectivity and relationships in place to help manage the community before you get to a full scale connection.

David – with suite two, we’re seeing also some classic buying patterns – where a CIO says I want to get control of some of the uses of this technology within my organization.

—

q from audience: what about post-adoption recognition? Are companies seeing, after the fact, real changes?

Chris – I’ve mentioned quite a few already – but more are at the website movabletype.com

Moderator: When we created SuiteTwo we used our own wiki, and the product itself is an example of using our own approaches.

—

Q: Where’s budget coming from?

Ross – don’t forget about open source options as well – movable type, social text – Greg’s working on it.

David – people don’t recognize how cost effective these applications can be – a fraction of the cost of similar enterprise options- in many cases people can do this on an expense report?

—–

Q: Is this just preparing the way for incumbent enterprise vendors to offer these features in their applications (Microsoft, IBM)?

Ross – they’re going to have these features as checkbox feature lists,but when you go look at them they’re going to suck. It’s really the absence of featuritis that defines a good product in this space. There are experts out there, third parties, with real expertise – don’t just accept the enterprise vision of your favorite vendor.
—

Q from audience: what percentage of overall costs is license?

Chris – depends on what you want to do. Some people get started easily, some people invest a lot in post-install consulting dollars. A lot of what we do is take what enterprises need and incorporate it into the platform. Could be 0x could be 10x depending on what you’re doing.

David – we’re seeing some “small bite” mentality – might start with a 5k “quick start” for Suite two, but could turn into a large enterprise scale out with someone like unisys, or even someone like O’Reilly doing strategy about how you should be deploying suite two style applications.

Ross – Suite Two is an appliance in order to keep costs low. It has its origins in work (point to point) that many of us were already doing in terms of standards for moving content from wiki to blog to rss enterprise feed. Some of it is open source, all of it is API based – it is all easily integratable into your existing infrastructure.

David – you can use hosted, you can get an appliance, you can also get plain old software.

Greg – That doesn’t mean, of course, that there aren’t real costs to doing this stuff – like any traditional enterprise application.

—-

Q from audience: Isn’t a blog just going to be another data type? Blog is just a rich text editor with tagging capabilities. Why wouldn’t this just get folded into an existing application.

Chris – I disagree with how you’re defining a blog. I think of it more as a lightweight content management platform – managing multiple blogs, authors, users, forums – I think of this as a much broader concept. Some of this will get commoditized by the larger enterprise vendors – but we will continue to innovate on top of the existing state of the art.

—

Q from audience: 600 wikis – integrate or migrate to some future standard. Also ECM – how does ECM fit into this picture?

Ross: There are benefits to migrating to a standard. THere’s part of me that doesn’t like this because when you collapse them together you miss something. There are network effects and serendipity that comes from multiple different platforms moving in an enterprise – so don’t completely migrate to one and only one.

Chris – many customers use movable type as an ECM. We’re constantly added more features which head in that direction. Not addressing the high end, but the middle – those middle players are often served just as well by a blog-platform as by an ECM platform, at a lower cost.

Greg – ECM platforms are going to be around for some time – they do some great things and are necessary in many cases. But we’re seeing is people taking content out of blogs and rss into ECM, or takign content out of ECM and feeding into the RSS feed.

Accompanying the beta site, they’ve launched a blog, Behind the Scenes at CNN.com, where they are encouraging discussion of the redesign.

It’s a great concept – specifically highlighting what the team is trying to accomplish in the redesign, and going beyond the constraints of carefully chosen focus groups under NDAs for a far more transparent and open forum.

Not all the comments will be terribly valuable, of course; the first comment on the first post says in its entirety: “It’s too white. Not enough color. print is too small. Make it more colorful like USA Today. com or MSNBC.com.”

But when all the comments are taken together, they will undoubtedly get insights and guidance from their most vocal constituents which will help guide their evolution, and which they would only have received too late (or not at all) under the old “design and build under a cloud of secrecy, then reveal only when it is all complete” approach.

They’re also explicitly working on what Dermot Waters characterizes as “being a good web citizen” by pointing to local news sources and blog posts which are outside CNN’s domain.

The idea, which sounds almost self-evident but isn’t always well understood by online media sites, is that:

. . . by being a good web citizen, we fulfill our core mission by doing whatever it takes to help you get the full story — even if it takes you away from CNN.com. If we do that well, we believe you’ll keep coming back.

It will be interesting to watch the site (and the discussion about its goals and their fulfillment) evolve.

(In the interest of full disclosure, Turner Broadcasting is an Optaros client – but that doesn’t influence what I’ve said above except that I’ve had a chance to meet some of the folks behind the effort and know that they get it and mean what they say.)

Plug-ins I’m trying:

• Bad Behavior – an anti-spam plugin to compliment Akismet.
• Dagon Design Form Mailer for WordPress – to enable the contact page and let people send me email without publishing an email address
• Kramer – which claims to add inbound links to each post as pingbacks, even if the person linking to the post does ping, using technorati.
• Automatic Stats – which enables wordpress.com’s stats package even for hosted blogs

All goodness.

I’m also thinking about enabling Flickr photo and del.icio.us links into my feedburner feeds – so you may see some changes in the feed.

The first (as described on Charlene Li’s blog) is Forrester’s Social Technographics report:

At the heart of Social Technographics is consumer data that looks at how consumers approach social technologies – not just the adoption of individual technologies. We group consumers into six different categories of participation – and participation at one level may or may not overlap with participation at other levels. We use the metaphor of a ladder to show this, with the rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation.

The second, more recent report is from the PEW Internet & American Life foundation: “A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users.”

They break down the participants into three major categories:

• Elite Tech Users (31% of American adults)
• Middle-of-the-road Tech Users (20%)
• Few Tech Assets

Each of those areas has subsegments as well – for example, the Elite Tech Users are divided into Omnivores (8%), Connectors (7%), Lackluster Veterans (8%), and Productivity Enhancers (8%).

The PEW report I think is ultimately the more valuable of the two – the Forrester “ladder” metaphor helps to explain the basic concept that you shouldn’t think of either your audience or “social media” as monolithic ideas: different audience profiles can and should lead to different priorities in terms of site design and development – but I find the overlap between the different rungs of the ladder confusing at best and misleading if not read carefully.

The PEW report comes with lengthy appendices with all the raw data, as well as clear delineation between the different groups while still recognizing how different behaviors and attitudes are shared across segments.

It’s also available free of charge, unlike the Forrester report.

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words. Words. Words.
- Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii

I’m not normally prone to quoting Shakespeare – more of a Modernist and Americanist by (academic) training and by inclination. But a few blog memes this weekend have me thinking of Hamlet and his antic disposition, and the potential for words to be meaningless.

First, James Governer and Nick Carr talking about Twitter.

Governer’s posts (“If Markets Are Conversations Then Twitter Is Money” and “Somebody shot the president! Twitter: Nothing To See Here, Get Back To Work“) argue that the 140 character limit on Twitter is a virtue, leading to greater precision and reduced verbosity:

“if you can’t say it in 140 characters its not meaningful”

With Twitter I can get up to date with my network in less than half an hour – the beauty of the 140 character limit for messages.

Carr agrees to the premise, but turns the conclusion on its head (“The Tweet Filled Void“):

I think he’s right that there are far too many words in circulation today, and I also think he’s right that meaning and even profundity can come in tweet-sized packages. But I think he’s wrong to suggest that Twitter is the friend of brevity. For that to be true, we’d have to assume that the messages streaming through Twitter are briefer than they would have been otherwise – that they’ve been pared down to their essence, like telegraphs. I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I don’t think that most tweets are substitutes for longer messages. Rather, they’re additional verbiage layered atop all the existing verbiage. Twitter adds to the great landfill of words; it doesn’t subtract from it.

Twitter, in other words, is the real “evidence of the verbosity of our culture.”

I have to agree – the things most folks say (my impression, of course) on twitter are not replacements for things they would have said in longer form elsewhere. They’re more like thoughts people might have kept to themselves, or IM’d or emailed with equal brevity.

To me, twitter sounds too much like chatter. But you’re probably tiring of hearing me say that.

Lest you think I’m twitter-obsessed, the other conversation that’s leading to me to think of the Danish prince is the one about the presidential debates.

CNN has announced that they will release the upcoming presidential debtates they host without restrictions:

The presidential debates are an integral part of our system of government, in which the American people have the opportunity to make informed choices about who will serve them. Therefore, CNN debate coverage will be made available without restrictions at the conclusion of each live debate.

While this lead Arlen Parsa to conclude that this means a Creative Commons license (since updated to a “creative commons type license”), in reality there isn’t a specific mention of what license will be used.

In fact, the announcement suggests that the only way to allow free circulation is to waive all restrictions – a major mistake given the whole structure of Creative Commons and the notion of “some rights reserved” in which you explicitly retain copyright while enabling specified uses.

There’s also no mention of what technical / functional mechanisms will be allowed for redistribution – will CNN do something to make video available, or simply promise not to take action against anyone who manages to record the debate and circulate it? Will they pre-seed edited videos into popular sharing channels?

Regardless, I think it is an advancement to enable the footage to circulate.

The question is, though, what will the real benefit of a freely-circulating presidential debate be, if the debate is run like most presidential debates: carefully restricted questions, soundbite answers with no substance, minimal follow on, and lots of evasion?

If all we get are more opportuntities to send soundbites to each other, is that really progress? Does being able to follow Obama on Twitter make me any clearer on his policies, or any more informed about the issues?

Brevity may be the essence of wit, but it provides no guarantee of wisdom.

I’ve been thinking a lot about – and playing around with – Twitter. These Dylan lyrics came to on the plane this morning, as an apt description of why I’ve had a hard time “getting” the value of Twitter:

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
. . .
Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’,
. . .
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.

No, I’m not suggesting that Twitter is an omen of some rapidly upcoming flood. It’s the middle line there I’m thinking of.

Annalee Newitz writes in “The Trouble with Twitter” that:

Twitter’s popularity reflects the accelerating pace in cities: people use Twitter as they stroll around with mobiles, and the rapidity of their updates reflects a sense that new, exciting things are happening to them every minute, not just every few hours (blog time) or every day (newspaper time).

But the problem I have with Twitter isn’t that it is too fast, and thus discourages reflective thought, or that the messages are too short, and thus discourage contemplative rhetoric. Those things are true, but not the problem. (They’re equally true of SMS and of IM).

The problem is that no one is listening.

More accurately, the problem with Twitter is that there is no conversation to listen to. To borrow Gertrude Stein’s description of Oakland, there’s no there there.

Twitter is basically a giant publish and subscribe universe which renders conversations independent of location and medium by smashing them into little 140 character bits.

When you “tweet” you put your words out in the giant ocean of all conversations in the system – and the people who are subscribed to receive your words will see them, and perhaps read them.

It’s like yelling into the wind – albeit with a sophisticated routing algorithm that enables specific people downwind to hear you.

Others who tweet are sending their words into the same vast ocean (or wind, if you’re bothered by my mixing metaphors) – and if you are subscribed, you will be able to possibly read them.

It’s a conversation in which, at any moment, you may or may not be aware of those responding to you, and the people to whom you want to communicate may or may not be listening.

The problem is that aggregated monologues don’t make communities.

While irc and more recently IM-based chats sometimes have the appearance of a noisy room in which everyone’s speaking and no one listening, most chats actually have a clear set of threads. Multiple threads will be ongoing at once, and threads change (new ones start, old ones die out) without any formal logic, but there are generally threads of conversation involving participants who have some degree of likelihood of hearing each other.

Even when the majority of folks in a chat are lurking, there is at least a sense of who is participating in the conversation.

Blogs, in contrast are often accused of being monologues in slience – and for bloggers who are not on the A-list (or even the D-list!) blogging can seem like speaking into the wind. But blog platforms have mechanisms built in (permalinks, trackbacks / pingbacks, and comments) to encourage conversation over time.

If you have, on Twitter, a stable set of friends and followers – where those who are listening are also those who are talking – I could imagine real conversation emerging. I’m already seeing some folks using conventions like “@jeckman” or “jeckman<-” to show that their comments are directed at one user in particular.

But most of the time, you’re speaking with no awareness of who is listening – and listening to folks who weren’t thinking at all of you (except in the most generic sense) when they spoke. This practically eliminates dialogue.

Maybe the problem really is that I just don’t have enough friends – or enough friends who are actively twittering.

(Or is it that I don’t have enough followers? What does it mean, in terms of the social register, to have more followers than friends, or vice versa? I’m sure I read more blogs than there are users who read my blogs, but that doesn’t seem to have the quite the social relevance of the Twitter metrics).

One could also look at this as a fundamentally disruptive technology that I’m trying to frame in terms of known technologies. Twitter gives us IRC/IM but throws away the whole notion of who is “online” or “in the room” at the moment of conversation. It gives us the multiple simultaneous monologues that is the blogosphere without comments, trackbacks, or links between conversations.

But at the risk of sounding nostalgic or shortsighted, without those linkages I remain unconvinced that we’re getting something new out of this particular disruption.

It’s an interesting concept – Newspapers using Twitter as a way of reaching new media savvy consumers. Because of the 140 character limit, the stories are effectively limited to headlines and short blurbs anyway, so it isn’t that great a leap from the publishing of headline-only RSS feeds, in the sense that the audience would still need to come back to the newspaper site to get the full story.

There are some significant limitations, though, as Lawton notes in the piece:

Twitter is still primarily a new toy for the tech-savvy, so the number of people using the service is still small compared to other social networking services. “I have a suspicion that if it breaks out beyond the web-savvy crowd that’s given it a lot of recent buzz, it’ll be because people find really useful applications,” Friesen said.

Twitter continues to seem to me like a solution in search of a problem – how is this different than subscribing to receive push alerts from a newspaper site by email, except that this time it’s SMS? (Of course, a number of different services, including CNN, have offered SMS alerts of breaking news for some time).

But maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it – Twitter’s not just a mechanism for enabling subscribers to receive SMS messages (or IMs) – it’s also a social network, in the sense that you can see the favorites, friends, and followers of the people who are your favorites, friend, and followers – or of anyone else whose profile you come across.

(What’s the difference between a Friend and a Follower? A Friend is someone I am following – a follower is someone who has me in their list of friends. A favorite is a tweet – a twitter message- you received which you indicated you liked – your favorites get archived separately from the ongoing stream.)

There isn’t, however, any direct provision for commenting on or reacting to the tweets or twitter messages you receive from someone you’re following. You can respond by twittering yourself, but nothing directly connects your response to the original message.

Twitter also enables a certain flexibility, separating the question of whose stream you are following from the question of how you are currently receiving alerts. That is, you can move your receiving of notifications from Web to SMS to IM and back, without unsubscribing and resubscribing from a bunch of different services.

I suspect a relatively simple script could switch notifications to IM when I login to the appropriate IM service, and switch notifications back to SMS when I log off – making unnecessary any specific involvement on the user’s behalf. The goal should be get notifications I want delivered to me, regardless of device or channel.

I confess though that except for certain specific situations – attending a large conference with a group of colleagues who may want to attend a number of different sessions be still meet up from time to time (SXSW, anyone?) – I still prefer pull to push. I want alerts about breaking news events – but only when I ask for them.

Heck, I don’t generally even answer my phone – and for the same reason.

Can someone twitter me what it is that I’m missing?

[Update: Robin Good tries to explain why people love/hate Twitter: Twitter, a Beginner's Guide]

The presentation itself is available under a creative commons license via Slideshare – if you actually download the ppt file from there, you can view the notes on many of the slides as well – or it also embedded below.

It’s a compelling presentation, well designed, connecting the power of brands (and consumer’s emotional connections to them) with the rise of consumer-generated media:

In our a world where consumers hop from one medium location to the next, we need to follow them to as many places as possible, yet also need to recognise that the stories people tell about our brand are one of the most effective media to affect our brand’s performance both in a positive and in a negative sense.

Because those consumers your traditional media efforts may miss, will need to be reached through the friends that do talk to them.

In short, in a million channel world, the brands whose consumers tell the best stories, win.

(Thys also mentions in the comments on the Logic + Emotion post that he’s working on a update, which responds to “the memo that participation and adoption of Social Media isn’t as compelling as we think” – should be interesting to see.)

What stories does your brand encourage users to tell?

Unfortunately, most of the time, consumer brand experiences run from mediocre to awful.

He notes that, in a change from the old State of the Blogosphere reports:

With this report, we expand on this tradition by introducing information and analysis relating to the broader range of social media on the Web — what we and many others call the Live Web (another good definition). Technorati continues to grow well beyond its roots at the leading blog search engine; increasingly, we are the main aggregation point for all forms of social media on the Web, including blogs, of course, but also video, photos, audio such as podcasts and much more.

It’s odd to me that the links for “Live Web” actually point to Linux Journal – I’d always though of “Live” as a kind of Microsoftism – to go with Windows Live Search, Live Spaces, Office Live, etc.

(According to Doc Searls, the “World Live Web” meme goes back to 2001 and was coined by Allen Searls – I know Doc has been using this distinction between Live web and Static web for some time.)

Anyway, some conclusions:

• 70 million blogs tracked, 120 thousand new ones each day
• Doubling now takes 320 days, not 180 (continued lengthening from last report)
• In Q4 2006, there were 22 blogs in the top 100 most popular sites, up from 12 in Q3 – there is an increasing overlap / mixture of “mainstream media” and “blog” audiences

Interesting that Sifry doesn’t take on any of the reports that blogging will reach it’s peak in 2007 – or is already in the process of dying out. (See this BBC article about Gartner’s predictions, or see Bruce Sterling’s SXSW rant that Blogging will be dead within 10 years).

While I don’t see blogging dying anytime soon, I can imagine it might change forms.

Will Twitter surpass blogging? I hope not. What about tumblelogs, on platforms like Tumblr?

Perhaps I’m too old (at 37 I’m on the late edge of the curve for many Digital-era technologies) but I prefer the longer form blog to these microblogs, even if they are updated in near real-time.

It’d be interesting to plot average length of blog post over time – are we (collectively) writing more but shorter posts?

Is there no future in the long form essay on the weblog?

(Technorati has also set up a homepage for these reports, enabling users to review all of them in reverse chronological order, and clarifying the creative commons license under which the reports are published).

• Forrester Research published a report titled “CIOs Want Suites for Web 2.0“
• The McKinsey Quarterly published “How businesses are using Web 2.0“
• Optaros published the results of our own survey: “How will enterprises respond to the customer demands and competitive threats of Next Generation Internet applications?“

(The McKinsey and Optaros reports are free with registration)

So what should we make of all these surveys, and their conclusions?

I’ll take the Forrester report first. They surveyed 119 CIOs at firms with over 500 employees, and found that a majority of those CIOs:

. . . report a strong desire to purchase Web 2.0 technologies — blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS, social networking, and content tagging — as a suite, as well as an equally strong desire to purchase these technologies from large, incumbent software vendors.

They take this as a sign that that “the deck appears to be stacked against small, pure-play vendors” and argue that the future is in integrated suite, primarily created through acquisition by large incumbents. The problem, as Dawn Foster puts it in “What CIOs Want vs. What CIOs Have,” is that:

There is a big gap between what many CIOs want / think they have and what is really happening within their organization. . . . CIOs may want web 2.0 suites from larger, incumbent software providers, but I suspect that the reality of what is actually used within enterprises over the next few years will differ significantly from this CIO vision.

In other words, what CIOs have a “strong desire to purchase” isn’t necessarily what is available, what works, or what actually gets deployed. The problem is in the way Forrester asked the questions:

1. “Would you be more or less interested in these technologies . . . if they were offered as a suite of techologies?”
2. “Would you be more interested in these technologies if they were offer by a major incumbent vendor . . or if they were offered by smaller specialist firms . . . ?”

Asked this way, it is not surprising that CIOs expressed a preference for integrated suites and major incumbents. (Would you rather have to deal with 6 different vendors or just one? Would you like all your innovation safely packaged, without any need for customization, and without any disruption to your existing infrastructure?)

The false dichotomy is that the sets of technologies which make up Web 2.0 are not available in a fully integrated suite from a major incumbent vendor (Forrester’s examples are Microsoft and IBM), and besides, what would it look like if it were?

(Intel’s SuiteTwo is really the first candidate for the “Integrated Suite” vision, but I’m not sure how the whole is truly greater than the sum of the parts in that case – what is the benefit of linking your enterprise blogs, wikis, and rss feeds into a suite rather than integrating best of breed?)

The McKinsey report (subtitled “a McKinsey Global Survey”) has some interesting conclusions, among them:

• nearly three-quarters [of the executives surveyed] say that their companies plan to maintain or increase investments in Web 2.0 technologies in coming years.
• Asked what might have been done differently . . . Forty-two percent say that they would have strengthened their companies’ internal capabilities . . .
• . . . nearly two-thirds of those whose companies are investing in [these technologies] think they are important for maintaining the company’s market position, either to provide a competitive edge or to match the competition and address customer demand
• Executives say they are using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate with customers and business partners and to encourage collaboration inside the company

They also point out that sectors where investment lagged in the last five years are “poised to move more aggressively now,” using retail as an example.

The McKinsey survey is interesting to me in part because it aligns closely with my own experience, and with the Optaros vision of next generation Internet applications, but also because they included “Web Services” as one of the technologies under the “Web 2.0″ banner. This helps explain their final conclusion that “technologies for automation and collaboration appear to be gaining more traction than some of the technologies that have received more attention in the press.” Web services, as a core component of modern enterprise architectures, is clearly a fundamental building block and suggests a different approach to integration than the “integrated suite” approach Forrester suggests.

Finally, in the Optaros survey (full disclosure – I work there, if that wasn’t obvious yet), there are a few conclusions worth talking about:

1. More than 60 percent of enterprises are aware of customer expectations for two-way Internet interactions
2. Only 19 percent give their current online applications high marks for the ability to offer two-way interactions
3. More than 64 percent of companies that have added NGI functionality are achieving positive results
4. Custom development is being chosen by a ratio of 4:1 over off-the-shelf software to deliver NGI functionality

Seems like it’s that last one that has been most unexpected – for example This post on Read/Write Web. But I think our findings are consistent with McKinsey’s finding that executives would have increased their internal capacity, if they could change anything about how they’ve deployed web 2.0 technologies.

Really leveraging the technologies and techniques of the current generation of web innovation will require CIOs and their teams to look beyond packaged, integrated suites, to assemble best-of-breed applications and components into custom solutions which exactly fit their organizational needs.

The innovation in this area has clearly come from the open source community (and small startups formed to commercialize those innovations): not from large incumbent vendors bearing suites.

As Nat Torkington put it recently:

Web 2.0 is Open Source – the web is built on open source, and the scaling and platform challenges for Web 2.0 are the challenges for open source.

The mp3 of the interview is available from the SXSW podcast page: Dan Rather Keynote Interview.

Apparently the acoustics of the room were quite bad – Rather asked several times for Hamsher to repeat herself or couldn’t understand the question being asked, and also (the lights?) couldn’t see the folks in the audience with questions.

Nonetheless, it was interesting to hear his take on investigative journalism and why there is so little real investigative journalism in the US today.

He was always careful not to exempt himself from his criticisms of “journalism today” – not claiming to be above or beside it but addressing them as problems within the industry he is still part of.

Unfortunately there wasn’t really much time for discussion of his new show on HDNet, or how new media might be able to change the equation of access journalism – I wish there had been more time for good questions from the audience and for Rather to talk about whatever he wanted to discuss- the interview seemed very focused on what’s wrong with journalism today, as compared to some glory days when Rather was challenging Nixon – and perhaps how bloggers could change that.

(Update: There’s a great summary here – really looks more like a transcript! – Dan Rather at SXSW (Dogged) and another here – Dan Rather Keynote Liveblog from SXSW 2007 (Conversion Rater) )

My raw notes:

Q: What was it like to challenge Richard Nixon, when you refused to be dismissed?

I never saw myself as challenging Nixon – I saw my job as being an honest broker of information for people who were not able to get access to what was going on. What the president was saying was the situation kept being proven as consistently false.

Mr. President – what you are saying keeps being shown to be untrue. As time went on it seemed like I was challenging him- it was just that I kept asking him about the facts. “Watergate” – there was a widespread criminal conspiracy with Nixon at the center – those were the facts.

Increasingly, in some important ways American journalism has lost its guts. (And I include myself in this, for the most part). Many journalists would seem to have adopted the “go along to get along philosophy” – access journalism has degenerated to a dangerous state.

Patriotic journalism would be to be the one asking the tough question and the tough followup – to speak truth to power when the truth you have.

In many ways what we need in journalism (again not excepting myself from this) is a spine transfusion. There’s been an increasingly tight nexus between people in power in press and journalism with people in power in corporations and thirdly people in government.

[The "spine transfusion" line got a standing ovation]

In one way or another, a great deal of the time, the reporter is using the source and the source is using the reporter one way or another – but this is a dangerous arrangement when the report might feel that she becomes part of the team.

We have to rethink very fundamentally the relationships journalists have to their sources. It isn’t ultimately true that they control access – if you let them define it that way you are setting yourself up for failure.

There’s been a dramatic failure of the fourth estate to interrogate power. Do we still believe that the best journalism is Independent journalism?

It used to be fairly common even at presidential news conferences that the reporter second in line would put aside his own question and redirect to the first question if the president didn’t answer it.

Journalism has become a set of conveyer belts – the president today said this and such.

I’ve never really liked the phrase investigative reporter, because it seems like a redundancy. Being a reporter should always mean being investigative.

One reason investigative journalism has become an endangered species – one reason it has fallen badly out of favor – is the corporatization of news. Mostly huge international conglomerates. Among other things this has lead to very very wide gaps between the folks reporting the news and the tops of the corporations – less direct connection between the executive and the newsroom – but also broader needs – legislation that they need or want to block.

It isn’t the evil ceo or chairman – they are laser focused on stockholder value, which is not the same as truth. Some very small number of corporations (<5) own a great majority (>80%) of the primary means of communication – that’s the problem.

The press should be a watchdog, not an attack dog, not a lap dog. A good watchdog barks at everything that is suspicious. Not that they will always be right – but that they will alert us to things which might be worth investigating.

The internet is a tremendous tool and potential stage. We’ve gone though the elvis stage and we’re now at the Beatles stage – the potential is vast, and I’m excited about it. But somepeople think of the internet as “that’s where the bloggers are” – but there’s much more to it than that.

Whatever you think the development of the internet will be 15 years from now will be here in 3. (Sullivan, at the time of the Wright Bros – in 75 years we could be flying coast to coast.)

We have to be careful about generalizing about “the blog” – I respect journalistic integrity where I find it. I do think there is a problem with anonymity – it makes accountabilty an issue.

The form so often is: – gov or pres says this. You say to yourself, what a load of crap. But to present that, you say “heres what his critics say” rather than “that’s a load of crap.”

When is the last time you heard someone say “the government said this . . . and it is a lie.”

–
Q. What impact did the Libby trial have on reporting as a profession?

[The interviewer is trying to make some kind of point about the Libby trial - but I think she's referring to the 1st amendment when she means the fifth - lots of witnesses in the Libby trial plead the fifth?]

–

It wasn’t that long ago that we had a clear sense of what off the record, on the record, or on background meant. It used to be that the assumption was that everything was on the record. People had to ask, can we go off-record?

It was not that long ago that “off the record” really meant you cannot use this, under any circumstances – this conversation did not happen, these words were not spoken, we didn’t speak.

If these aren’t the rules any more, what are?

Difference between taking oneself seriously and taking the role of journalism seriously – independence is more important than access, ultimately.

We need to hold that ideal like the 10 commandments – everyone can’t live it 100% every day but we can keep it as a real living belief system we aim for.

–
Q. What about the fairness doctrine? What percentage of our problems stem from having repealed the fairness doctrine?

–

Good question. There are lots of factors at play here – I can’t really answer what percentage of it stems from that.

There are people who believe that journalists are already too independent, too aggressive in their pursuit.

It is hugely important that the bosses at those media companies hear from people who support and believe in investigative journalism – when people do actually do investigative journalism.

There should certainly be more, not fewer press conference with folks higher in power. This is actually better for the president as well – it doesn’t allow the pressure to build.