The wonderful David Weinberger gave a great keynote this morning. Contained below are really short notes to myself. They may not make total sense to you, but there are some nuggets of truth and beauty about blogging.
Talk:
Juicy fruit blog its shit 9:16am (David has railed on Juicy Fruit on his blog before).
Wikipedia vs. Britannica. Britannica is limited – finite- 32 volumes.
Wikipedia; a distributed encyclopedia created by everybody.
Blogs are a distributed communication systems
Blogs are not about Cats
Blogs are not journalism
People at top/front of the tail that is effectively mass media
People at back with a few links and few readers many more of them
Blogging is a blank page
Media see long tail as competing journalists irresponsible amateurs. Bloggers are like stringers occasional stringers.
The intersection of blogosphere and journosphere is that bloggers are using blogosphere to filter the news (editoral function).
David believes the editorial function has slipped from newspapers to bloggers and he considers closely what sense they make of it. He gets his Judith Miller news from Jay Rosen.
The editorial function has slipped from the media to the bloggers.
The media was interested in front/top of tail. But, now they realize the long tail is much more interesting. They ARE your market. The area underneath the long tail is bigger than the area at the head of the tail. It is basically everyone! One to one marketing – Markets of one.
Only problem with blogs and one-to-one is that its not one to one it is computers and computer personalization no person in personalization not what blogging is about.
Long tail is convoluted people talking to and linking with each other.
So, Blogging is not about individual bloggers. It can look that way blogs construct public selves. We’re creating a new public space. Every element of that is new and important.
The importance of bad writing on blogs people will forgive the bad grammer, writing, poetry, etc. The intimacy created is something that professionals would kill for.
Doc Searls blog as an example lots of links inviting you to go away, generously, and giving you recommended places to go.
Multiple subjectivity multiple points of view and you can get a sense of how the subjectivities play together. Things that we would have, in the past, relied on objectivity but you get limited to good enough ideas and limited points of view.
Multi-dispute-ism there’s room for difference. Room for arguments that can continue as long as needed, drift apart and let go. More tolerance with ambiguity.
Blogging is not about you, where you is the company. We’ve been in the fort business closed in mentality when company releases info it was marketing and info to employees was management. Customers know more about your products and services than you do. You can get the wisdom of crowds if you connect with your market.
So, what should businesses do?
Internal use of blogging is important. Great tool for collecting knowledge around products and teams.
Blogging — Businessphere
Listen to customers, blogs
Audit find out who is blogging, in non threatening way and what they read.
Engage be careful and don’t assume that CEO or senior people, or
Marketing team are best people to blog
Give Up give up control, you can’t control what is going on on the blog and in the
reaction to it
Make mistakes You’ll insist on being right but you won’t be and your customers know more than you do. They are the ones using the product
You’ll insist on being boring and you will be. When you give up control, you will become more interesting.
Blogging looks like Risk.
Blogging connects us to each other and to our market.
Enter the blogosphere conversation as a fallible human being.