IFTF's Future Now is a group weblog, founded by Institute research director Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in September 2003. Its contributors include IFTF researchers interested in emerging technologies, the future of Asia, and the social and economic impacts on new technologies; IFTF corporate affiliates; academic partners; and members of the Innovation Lab, a Danish futures group with offices in Aarhus and Copenhagen. A complete list of contributors is available here.
The first of many notes on this, no doubt. The Institute recently updated its Web site, and as part of this effort we're going to be moving our blogging activities to a new site.
This version of Future Now will remain up for some time, but you should visit the new location (http://www.iftf.org/futurenow) or redirect your RSS readers to the new feed.
A promising-looking source on globalization and higher education: GlobalHigherEd, a blog started by University of Wisconsin geographer Kris Olds, and Bristol professor Susan Robertson. They explain:
We are interested in how and why new knowledge and new spaces (including socio-technical networks) are being developed in association with the emergence of the ‘knowledge economy’, and what the implications of this complex development process are. Three examples of relatively territorialized knowledge spaces are Qatar Education City, Singapore’s ‘Global Schoolhouse’, and the European Higher Education Area, though even in these cases they are fundamentally dependent upon extra-territorial relations and linkages (e.g., see the Singapore-MIT Alliance). Examples of relatively more networked spaces of knowledge production include the Erasmus Mundus programme, and university consortia like the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) or the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU). There are also a myriad of fascinating and rarely examined spaces of knowledge production (e.g., non-profit think tanks, private research centres and universities).
A bit on the academic side, but that's perfectly appropriate for a blog about... academia.
Technorati Tags: blogging, business, education, university
Okay, not the cover, but we've got a nice paragraph in David Kushner's "Futurama." It's not online, but here's a bit of the piece:
Thirty-nine years ago, maverick researchers at the RAND Corporation broke off to found an independent, nonprofit group called the Institute for the Future. Today, the Silicon Valley-based think tank studies the impact of emerging technologies and chronicles its findings on the Future Now blog.... The stuff they're thinking about and linking to is wild-- a smog-eating building in Rome, retinal-cell replacement to cure blindness. Plus, you get insider analysis on key events, like the recent University of Michigan conference on how cities can survive a global warming crisis.
One small correction: Virtual China isn't a section of Future Now, but another member of the IFTF Blog Media Empire. Still....
Inkling, one of the Institute's technology partners, just launched Worthio - an sort of prediction market meets social site for stock market speculators. The site lets you rate stocks quickly on whether you're bullish or bearish, and presents the aggregate group opinion. You can also add people to your network and watch what they think. There are also discussion around stocks.
Interesting twist - will the "wisdom of crowds" devolve into "herd mentality" on the trading room floor?
There may be a hiccup or two as I play around with the templates. Please excuse any service interruptions, weird color combinations, etc.
Update: New design is now stable. If you're seeing all the content in one long, ugly column, you'll need to at least hit the refresh button on your browser, and possibly empty your cache (I think the old style sheet and new style have trouble getting along).
Somehow I stumbled on the new Law and Technology Blog this afternoon. It looks very promising:
Creators of new technologies seek to signal a message of novelty and improvement. Instinctively, many of us want to endorse the message and believe that this new technology will make our lives better. We want to believe that the new technology is special and unique. This causes us to look at each new technology in isolation. For example, scholars tend to specialize in the study of Cyberlaw or Law & Genetics or Law and the Neurosciences. Similarly, legislatures often formulate special legislation to deal with specific privacy threats. An example of a recent trend is legislation targeting privacy threats imposed by cell-phone cameras.
The goal of this symposium is to inquire whether we should continue to assess and react to each new technology in isolation or whether we could also implement a broader approach. In other words, should we have a general theory of law and technology that will formulate principles of how the law should react to technological change? Particularly, we would like to focus on whether it is possible to formulate a generalized legal approach to the use and adoption of new technologies. Is it possible to formulate a uniform approach to these instances where new technologies threaten existing social institutes and social values?
I'd recommend them, but because of one of their early posts, I've blown about two hours tonight listening to (and blogging about) Ms. Dewey.
Technorati Tags: law, technology
Peder Burgaard, who's been seconded to us from the Innovation Lab for the last several months-- he's too smart and productive to be called an intern-- is joining We Make Money Not Art. Way to go!
Microsofter (Microsoftie? that doesn't sound right) Don Dodge, inspired by a Boston Globe article, talks (on his blog, of course) about whether blogs can be good for your career. My sense is that, MySpace panic aside (a phenomenon that danah boyd comments on), the conventional wisdom regarding blogging and work may be shifting decisively away from the "blogging will get you fired" narrative line, to a new "blogging is essential to getting hired" one. (We already went through a "some crazy companies have blogs!" and "businesses have to blog" phase, and some executives have been doing it for a while.)
It strikes me that the CW is shifting just in time for blogs to morph into something else. There are, I think, two big things going on.
The first is a growing sophistication regarding the remixing of content. Corante's hubs are a good example of this: they mix feed from a whole bunch of blogs, layer some editorial content on top of it, and create something new. On the user side, RSS readers give readers a greater degree of control over how they approach their own universe of blogs, and what material they see (e.g., posts yes; comments no; that weird design, definitely not). As time goes on, those readers will doubtless get more powerful and smarter, and start to do smart things with folksonomies, natural language searching, and the like.
Second, there are self-conscious experiments with the medium of blogs, that challenge conventions about what blogs are. For example, we're starting to see blogs that are designed to be temporary. Amazon's new experiment in author blogs seems to assume that authors will talk about their books during the hype phase, but stop posting when the PR campaign is over; and of course there's the case of the Financial Times article on blogging that spun off a short-lived blog.
Further, the amount of automated content on blogs, displaying everything from where you are to what music you've been listening to to what you've bookmarked on del.icio.us, is rising: the more hot-wired ones are little Times Squares of automatically-generated, self-promotional, real-time author metadata. Eventually, the time may come when some people won't have to write anything: they'll just be, and information about themselves will show up on their blogs. (Nicolas Nova and Julian Bleecker even imagine a world in which things will blog.)
So yes, blogging as we understand it now may have virtues for the career-minded; but the nature of blogging is likely to change in the next few years.
Via The Publishing Spot, I came across FTMAGBLOG, a blog devoted to a recent Financial Times article on blogging. As someone who started a blog on the end of cyberspace after co-authoring a short piece on the subject, I was interested to find another example of an article-inspired blog.
The two most interesting things about the FTMAGBLOG are 1) it's got a lot of comments from readers, and 2) it consists of two posts from the authors: one announcing the opening of the blog, the other its closing. That's it.
Most blogs are like black holes: stable, strangely irresistible, and capable of absorbing all our time (even more so as writers than readers). Within the Institute, we've created various project-specific blogs (most recently Virtual China) that may have lifespans of months or years-- however long the project lasts. Perhaps FTMAGBLOG is a sign of something new and even more short-lived: the blog as exotic particle. It appears after some high-energy collision (the publication of a controversial article, or protests against a controversial piece of legislation, or March Madness), captures lots of interesting interactions for a very short time (say, a few weeks), then decays into nothing, leaving behind just tracks and traces for people to analyze.
My local paper - The Contra Costa Times - has a great article on TV character blogs. The blogs covered in the article are: "Schrute- Space" by the nerdy paper salesman in the show "The Office"; "Barney's Blog" from "How I Met Your Mother"; "Dave's Diatribe" from "Invasion"; "Emerald City Bar" from Grey's Anatomy and "Robin's Daily Dose" from General Hospital. From the CCTimes article:
"...the latest and most humorous trend is blogs penned in the voice of a character - usually a quirky sidekick type."
My favorites are "Schrute-Space" and "Barney's Blog". My kids' love "The Office" and like most things my kids love I don't really get it. But I have seen the show and like the blog. I've never seen "How I Met Your Mother", but just the fact that Doogy Howser is now a womanizing cad is enough for me to find the blog very funny. I may even watch the show sometime.
I've been running a blog on the end of cyberspace for about a month now, long enough to have developed some tentative thoughts on the utility of specialist blogs-- and more generally, the value of social media in certain forms of scholarship.
See Blackshaw on the Scoble Conundrum. Addresses the fundamental issue of employees blogging externally. They build credibility by having their own voice, but oppose corporate direction when they disagree with their employers. Specifically the case of Scoble disagreeing with MS on the Chinese weblog censoring case. Good links to other dicussion on this.
Because of an amazingly persistent TrackBack spam, I've turned on the TypePad feature that puts comments and trackbacks on hold for verification. Apologies to anyone who feels inconvenienced.
More and more, when I come upon some interesting article online, one thing I want to know is, "Who's blogged about this?"
In part I'm curious to see what other people have said about it; but the article itself also serves as a tool for finding interesting people-- much in the same way that del.icio.us tagging can help us identify people who share our interests.
Tonight I discovered a search plugin for Firefox that lets you search for URLs in Technorati. Very cool.
Technorati Tags: blogging, collective intelligence, Web 2.0, work
This is the thousandth post on Future Now. Just over two years ago we started the blog; after the obligatory explanatory (or exculpatory) posts, we noted Tech Review's Innovation futures market, law in online worlds, a talk by geoweb boffin Mike Liebhold, John Thackara's concept of the post-spectacular city, and China's plans for the Moon.
A substantive post to follow.
Technorati Tags: blogging
A new international non-profit think tank called the Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) was launched today. From the press release:
The group was formed to provide a forum for research and education and a source of expertise focused on the broad theoretical and practical implications surrounding new communications methodologies, tools and technologies.
Jennifer McClure, who runs the New Communications Blogzine, is SNCR's Executive Director and she has brought together a mix of academics and business professionals to study and research online social media and their impact on society. I've joined as an "honorary senior fellow".
Much of my work is focused on the impact of new media on corporations. One of the things that is clearly missing from this field is a solid body of research and best practices information. I'm very excited about the formation of SNCR and believe their research will help us all in better undertanding and working with new media.
Here is The Society for New Communications Research's blog.
...the new Google Maps Mania blog.
Technorati Tags: blogging
The Democratic Governors Association is setting up a series of conference calls between bloggers and democratic governors. Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer recently did a teleconference on energy. The Oil Drum has an in-depth article on the call.
I've posted before about Governor Schweitzer's blogging activities. Evidently the democratic party is picking up on his efforts and expanding them. This yet another example of newsmakers bypassing traditional media and going directly to bloggers.
Governor Brian Schweitzer of Montana has a blog diary entry on Daily Kos responding to questions from French energy blogger Jerome a Paris about Schweitzer's New York Times op-ed piece on synthetic fuels. This is the first case I'm aware of a major politician using blogs to communicate this way.
This is a great example of the power of blogs. Jerome a Paris asks intelligent, well thought out questions and Governor Schweitzer provides reasonably direct and detailed answers. The blog entries go much deeper on the advantages and disadvantages of coal-to-liquids than would likely happen on TV or other forms of traditional media. Everyone walks away better educated and informed.
The thread also does a nice job of summarizing the conversion of coal-to-liquid fuels using the Fischer-Tropsch process. For information on the energy and political angles on this, take a look at Frank Baitman's entries on IFTF's Energy and Environment blog.
I first saw this on the Oil Drum, which covers the peak oil debates.
Twice in the last couple days, people have prefaced conversations about projects or conferences they're working on with, "But don't blog about this yet."
It seems to me that we need a term to cover those states where you tell someone about an idea or piece of work; don't need the conversation to be bracketed with legalese; but also don't want it to be public.
So I'm inventing the term NBA, or Non Blog Agreement. It's simple, easy to remember, and doesn't add yet another acronym to our crowded vocabulary. It just creates confusion by recycling an old one. (Though Silicon Valley has made a history of creating specializes meanings for popular words. Anywhere else in the world, if you ask for "chips," you don't have to clarify whether you want potato, or silicon.)
NBA. Use it freely.
Technorati Tags: blogging
Now that most of the summer interns have gone off to college, or otherwise returned to their regularly scheduled lives, the Institute is starting to shift into fall mode: lots of travel, a busy conference season, and lots of articles and reports going out the door.
One thing I'll probably be doing is a subtle redesign of this site. Typepad has reforged the tools blog owners use to control the design and layout of blogs, and they've also added capacity for displaying RSS feeds from other sites, podcasting support, and a couple other cool new tools.
As nice as that is, just as interesting is the way they've decided to communicate this to the Typepad community: not through a FAQ or dry technical announcement, but through a series of interviews with Typepad programmers. In each interview, the programmers talk a little about what they do, what new feature they've developed, and why they wanted it (or why it's cool). Obviously it's a lot more personal and informal than a more traditional announcement, and is probably overdetermined (as the Marxists used to, and probably do still, say) for a blogging company; but I think it works, for two reasons.
First, most of us blog as a serious hobby, or are pro-am about it, adopting an informal, person-to-person mode makes plenty of sense. Second, Typepad is one of those institutions that doesn't so much have customers-- in the sense of people who just buy and use a finished product-- as a large mass of people who are constantly pushing, remixing, and creating with their service. For such a group, interviews probably work far better than a traditional corporate release.
George Goodall, "Masons, Polynesians, and Bloggers: Applying Social Organization to Bibliographic Objectives"
[T]he production of meaning created by blogs is similar to how cathedrals were produced during the medieaval era. I see some disbelieving faces but I’m going to ask you to consider how cathedrals were actually built. Masons used no formal drawings, they had no formal training, and engineering rigour didn’t exist. It’s hard for many of us to understand how a structure like Aachen Cathedral could emerge without any documentation. So how did these incredible structures emerge?
The sociologist and historian of science and technology David Turnbull has studied the practices of the mediaeval masons and maintains that documents weren’t necessary for the construction of these magnificent edifices. There is prima facie support for this statement given that so many cathedrals remain standing and they were all built in an era when documentary practices were necessarily primitive given the lack of things like literacy, numeracy, and—frankly—paper for cheaply producing drawings.
Instead, Turbull (2000) maintains that what was required for building these cathedrals was a means of transmitting knowledge. Given the lack of what we would now recognize as formal communication mechanisms, the mediaeval masons relied on different processes. According to Turnbull, they used: talk, tradition, and templates. Basically, “talk” describes the process of talking through problems, “tradition” encompasses the intensive apprenticeship required by master masons, and “templates” refers to various geometric devices that enabled the masons to design and build without detailed knowledge of engineering principles. Templates served as a way of incorporating or “black boxing” the tacit skills of earlier generations of masons.
Technorati Tags: blogging, collective intelligence, emergence, folksonomy
Officially. Actually, I'm someone who has "blogger in chief" on his business cards, so I'm hardly one to speak ill of such an article; I'm an example of the phenomenon.
Blogging Becomes A Corporate Job; Digital 'Handshake'?
In its short lifespan, blogging has largely been a freewheeling exercise in online self-expression. Now it is also becoming a corporate job.
A small but growing number of businesses are hiring people to write blogs, otherwise known as Web logs, or frequently updated online journals. Companies are looking for candidates who can write in a conversational style about timely topics that would appeal to customers, clients and potential recruits....
Gary Hirshberg, Stonyfield's chief executive, says he plans to hire one or two additional full-time bloggers within the next two years. "The blogs give us what we call a handshake with consumers, a bond of loyalty and mutual trust that's different than the typical selling relationship, where it's all about price," Mr. Hirshberg says. "With the blogs, we are giving a little bit more access to us as a people with a mission."
The notion of a corporate blog is a bit of a contradiction: Some paid bloggers get a long leash, as far as the topics and tone of their postings. Stonyfield Farms' Ms. [Christine] Halvorson [who writes four blogs for the company] says her job is unsupervised. "That doesn't mean you can give away proprietary info," she adds.
Stonyfield's blogs are an interesting mix: one (The Bovine Bugle) focuses on one of the organic farms that supply the company; another (Daily Scoop) is more about the company, though it's updated very erratically; and there are three lifestyle-related blogs. Together, they're a petting zoo of public-facing company blogs types.
Two things strike me about this story, and the Stonyfield blogs.
What strikes me is that there's a significant gap emerging between blogs at high-tech companies like Sun and Microsoft, and blogging efforts at other (particularly food and consumer goods) companies. Tech company blogs are mainly about... tech. That may seem obvious, but the people who read the blogs of Sun Java developers are, more likely than not, other Java programmers. You may not have many readers if you're blogging about chip design or Web security, but they're all going to be passionate and knowledgeable, and care about your work.
If, on the other hand, you make paper towels, what do you talk about? How many users of paper towels will keep coming back to a blog about paper towel manufacturing? Ditto for dog food, diapers, eyeliner, cardboard boxes... the tech blogging model doesn't scale, and the content approach doesn't transfer. Lifestyle-oriented blogs may seem like a comfortable middle ground, but I think it will remain to be seen how well they work
Second, it strikes me that a smart company would hire a blogger who can work as a kind of documentarian/ethnographer, telling the story of the company from the bottom up, rather than the top down. This would be a person who isn't stuck talking just about one part of a company, but whose job involves going everywhere, collecting interesting stories, talking some (but not too much) about how stuff gets made, how products are designed, how CEO talks are written, how shareholder meetings are organized, etc. etc. ad infinitum. Big corporations are hugely varied, and someone with a sharp eye for interesting stories and personalities, an ability to explain technology and business, and a willingness to travel a lot, could do something fascinating.
Daniel Pink recently observed that a surprising number of products in stores like Whole Foods have stories on their labels: stories about how this little artisan bakery was founded, about how this family got into organic cheese-making, about how that wine is donating part of its profits to a charity. These companies aren't trying to be cute, he said; they're trying to get you to connect to the product. (Indeed, Stonyfield CEO Gary Hirschberg makes the connection between these little stories and blogs in a recent interview.)
Blogging ought to be a medium for those kinds of stories. It should be a means for making connections between people and companies-- not by presenting a sleek, unified corporate front, but by revealing the terrific diversity of a big company, or outlining the distinctive culture of a small one. These are the kinds of things that are better communicated through stories than mission statements, that are made tangible by having one observant person writing in their own voice, rather than that of a committee.
[via brainwagon]
John Dvorak really dislikes social software, blogging, and folksonomy:
Enter yet another more baffling attempt at tagging. This one is fascinating since it's been gussied up with a new name, and for some unknown reason been given the blessing of a bunch of brain-dead bloggers. This is because a few of the favorite sites that the bloggers love have tacitly approved of the so-called—get this—"folksonomy tags." Oh, a new term! This one is a laugh riot, since there is nothing new here except the new name: Folksonomy. I mean even in HTML there was the "metatag."
No, no. This is different because, uh well, uh, lemme think. It just is!
The current fave sites amongst the cognoscenti have adopted the idea of public tags, and a number of influential bloggers have jumped on board pumping up the concept and re-promoting that old rusty saw, "the semantic Web." The semantic Web is a dead duck, let me assure you. You can look it up on Google and roll your eyes on your own time.
And why has this bad idea gotten traction? It's those darned "influential bloggers:"
These are people whom you've never heard of, but whom other influential A-list utopianist bloggers all know. I reckon there are about 500 of them. He (or she) influences other like-minded bloggers, creating a groupthink form of critical mass, just like atomic fission, as they bounce off each other with repetitive cross-links: trackback links, self-congratulatory links, confirmations, and praise-for-their-genius links. BOOM! You get a formidable explosion—an A-bomb of groupthink. You could get radiation sickness if you happen to be in the area....
Apparently it's lost on all of them that the term "tagging," in popular parlance, refers to the worst form of public graffiti. These people don't get out much, it seems.
I wish I had time to write a lengthy retort; for now, I'll hope that one of those 500 writes one that I can (self-referentially) link to.
I note in a recent article that Nokia is planning to produce a tablet which will include an RSS reader. I have been involved with a number of internal organizations thinking about how blog use can be integrated into their organizations. One of the things that often comes up is ... how do we get people to notice ... to read the content? I have experimented for some time now with e-mail alerting, but as email systems crumble around us, this is not a long-term solution. Talking about RSS often leads to another level of complexity that folks are really not ready for. But with readers integrated into a browser platform, it would likely increase the possibilities for the use of advanced technologies like blogs and wikis. Will follow this closely
...As has been reported on a variety of blogs around the net, IBM today is publishing an announcement on its Intranet site encouraging all 320,000+ employees world wide to consider engaging actively in the practice of "blogging". This move follows several years of persistent grassroots efforts by an informal community of IBM bloggers. Technical leaders like Sam Ruby, Grady Booch, Robert Sutor and business leaders like Ed Brill and Catherine Helzerman have played a very significant role in this effort by providing excellent models for other IBMers to follow. Behind the scenes, a small handful of technical innovators developed and deployed an internal blogging service that has grown in a period of just 18 months to just shy of 9,000 registered users spanning 65 countries, 3,097 individual blogs, 1,358 of which are considered active, with a total of 26,203 entries and comments -- all of which has been put together strictly through word-of-mouth promotion. And it's still just a pilot. Externally, IBM's developerWorks site is now host to 20+ blogs focused on a variety of developer-focused topics including emerging technologies, open source, the PowerPC architecture, SOA, autonomic computing, industry standards, and so on ...
Business Week gets blog religion:
Blogs Will Change Your Business
Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up...or catch you later
Incredibly enough, for all my own enthusiasm for blogs, I find myself skeptical of this argument. I'm using my Red Herring column to try to work out why.
Apologies to anyone who was trying to get to the category pages: I didn't have that archiving option turned on, but now it's working.
Not a lot new in this BBC News Online article on blogging, but it does a nice job covering two major blogging issues: (1) blogging and freedom in authoritarian countries, and (2) blogging and traditional media in the US and Europe.
The article says that at least 63 bloggers have been arrested in China, and an Iranian blogger recently got 14 years in jail for blogging. Sort of puts in perspective all the noise about bloggers getting fired from their corporate jobs.
Also worth looking at is BBC's always useful related stories list. It is on the right hand side of the news page and has a list of blog related BBC stories.
Via CNET's news page.
In Infoworld: The Enterprise Blogosphere, an article on the use of blogs and wikis by business. There is not too much new here, but its a nice overview, with pointers to applications, discussions of concerns and processes. Quoted Martin Wattenberg, IBM researcher, formerly worked on Map of the Market visualization.
...To qualify as intelligence, information muct be both used and renewed. Good synapses fire fast and standard groupware can be too structured and rigid to support real-time, off-the-cuff data collection for workgroups or projects. Easy and informal, e-mail and IM remain the knowledge-sharing tools of choice for many employees. But after a message has been sent and read, it often drops into the network netherworld never to be seen or used again.To facilitate the exchange of information and to establish customized, user-friendly data archives, companies such as Cisco, Disney, Hewlett-Packard, General Motors, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, Novell, and Yahoo are turning to a new breed of collaboration tools: blogs and wikis. Each helps fill the gaps left by traditional groupware in a different way.
Blogs and wikis play opposite roles, says Martin Wattenberg, a researcher on the collaborative user experience team at IBM Watson Research Center. Blogs are based on an individual voice; a blog is sort of a personal broadcasting system. Wikis, because they give people the chance to edit each others words, are designed to blend many voices. Reading a blog is like listening to a diva sing, reading a wiki is like listening to a symphony. ....
Charlene Li blogs about Yahoo's new blogging/social networking service, Yahoo 360. One line really caught my eye:
Central to the whole service is the concept that you want to communicate and connect with the people that you already know, rather than try to meet new people.
Why does this strike me as so, so terribly wrong? Isn't much of the point of things like del.icio.us and flickr-- and for that matter, blogging-- that they let us maintain our "strong ties" (to use Mark Granovetter's phrasing) of friends and family and associates-- our known, mapped universe of people who are interested in us and the things we know/do-- while also expanding our network of "weak ties" to people who share certain curious combinations of interests, people we have never met but whose work we've read, or just sometimes work at the same cafe that we do, etc.?
Or, might the world of blogs and social software evolve toward a bifurcation of inward-looking and outward-looking families of services, software, etc.?
The web works because it is broken and not owned.
Yes there is rubbish on the web but the availability of relevant, accurate information at your fingertips has exploded in ways that even ten years ago most people couldn't have imagined and which have never ever been delivered by "conventional" means.
There were nay-sayers then, and indeed there still are, but I would be cautious about assuming that the collective, applied intelligence of millions of people is more fallible than a small group of experts with the power to confer meaning.
Euan Semple, "Duck!"
[via Cutting Through]
Technology Review's Wade Roush has a short article about employee blogging that offers an interesting data-point on the growth of corporate-approved (if not directly sponsored) blogging.
I think it's safe to say that many companies are still trying to figure out what in the world they're supposed to do with blogs. Some companies have internal blogs, while others have a mix of internal and external ones. (The latter is the Institute's model. We have Future Now; an internal, employees-only blog; and program-related blogs for clients.) But the free-for-all character of blogging is still threatening. Or, as a recent Money/CNN article put it,
On the one hand, corporate managers recognize the power of word-of-mouth as a sales tool. On the other hand, they're acutely aware of the dangers inherent in the rapid and widespread dissemination of company information.
Also muddying the waters are a small but well-publicized number of cases of employees being fired for blogging about work. But as Roush notes, there are at least a few companies who are embracing blogs wholeheartedly:
Many dot-com nostrums are best forgotten, but the idea that honest, unfiltered conversation between companies and customers might actually be good for business lives on—and, in fact, is being embraced by dozens of large firms, from Microsoft to Maytag. To the degree that open conversation does happen, it’s happening largely through weblogs, or blogs....
Most companies are still cautious when it comes to communicating with mainstream media outlets; employees are seldom allowed to speak with journalists without media-relations chaperones. But blogs have emerged as an exception, with more and more companies concluding that the public-relations benefits outweigh the risks. One of those companies is Sun Microsystems, which promotes employee blogging more aggressively than any other technology firm. "Sun’s employees are our most passionate evangelists," says Jonathan Schwartz, Sun’s president and chief operating officer and the author of a company blog read by tens of thousands of visitors every month.... Sun’s Simon Phipps, whose job title is chief technology evangelist, says that researchers and developers can swap more ideas, build better software, and meet customers’ needs faster if they are active in online communities, where blogs play the dual role of soap- and suggestion-box.
There is a discussion on blogs, PR and new communications models at the International Association of Online Communicators blog site. If you are interested in the subject, take a look. Disclosure - I am one of the participants so this plays in the shameless plug category.
For those of you who read Future Now through an RSS reader, a present: actual, honest-to-goodness formatting.
Meaning paragraph breaks, indents, blockquotes, and all the other good stuff that you see on the blog itself.
I now feel like an idiot for not improving the layout of the feed long ago.
I've been collecting examples of work-related blogs recently (an enterprise that generally just requires seeing what Steve and Franz post), and via Gridskipper found one that completely fascinates me: English Cut, a blog by one of London's bespoke tailors.
I think that in addition to appealing to my barely-suppressed Anglophilia (I did write a book about Victorian astronomy, after all), what I find compelling about the site is its discussion of the craft of tailoring, and the street-level view of the business. (Of course, Saville Row isn't your ordinary street, but still.) I think it's safe to say that corporate blogs are still very much figuring themselves out; but blogs like this-- written by individuals, offering a window into their occupational practice and culture-- make instant, immediate sense.
Indeed, it's a good model for our own efforts to do interesting blogging with-- or for-- our clients.
Future Now contributor and Innovation Lab member Christian Lausten is blogging the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference (over on his personal blog). The bad news, for those of us who are linguistically challenged, or just holding up the stereotype of monolingual Americans, is that it's in Danish.
However, whenever any member of the Future Now group is up to anything interesting, I feel a responsibility to point it out (and bask in its reflected glory).
The Gallup Organization has published an article about a poll they have taken on blogging in the US. Some useful results ... about 75% of people in the US use the Internet ... just 12% of people read blogs at all ... and 56% of consumers dont appear to know what they are. Most of the results are regarding political blogs. Good piece.
Newsweek online has an article about blogger Jason Kottke quiting his day job and becoming a professional blogger. It seems that an increasing number of blogs across many segments are being authored by professionals. By professional I mean people who blog for a living or blog as part of their work. While this definition is not precise, my aim it to differentiate between people who blog for fun or as a hobby, and people who blog to make money or for business purposes.
This blog - Future Now - is an example of a work related blog, although the contributors consider this as much as a hobby as work. There are a lot of examples of work related blogs. In most cases these blogs have several goals, often including information sharing with potential customers or business partners and softly promoting the authors and/or their businesses. In some cases work related blogs are designed to sell things or make money. Maytag's Skybox blog is a great example of an effective sales oriented blog (thanks to Franz for spotting this). Work related blogs can be authored by the biggest companies in the world all the way down to one person shops.
Another professional segment is the entrepeneurial blogger. These are folks that blog for living. Kottke is now an example of a professional blogger. Another good example is Silicon Valley Watcher, which is an entrepenurial blog written by a former professional journalist. It seems a lot of former journalists are becoming entrepenurial bloggers (they are probably still professional journalists, but I'll leave that for others to decide).
The advent of blogger advertising models coupled with low entry costs and the distribution reach of the Internet makes professional blogging attractive to new entrants. Although there are still few examples of blogs generating substantial revenue, the opportunity to make money and have an appealing job and lifestyle. appears to be excellent. This opportunity is attracting a lot of entrepeneurs to blogging.
The opportunity is also leading to the creation of new media companies, and attracting traditional media companies to blogging. Gawker, Always On and Corante are all blog oriented new media companies. While traditional media seems threatened by blogs, they are also rapidly adding blogs to their product portfolios. It's hard to find a traditional media company that isn't at least experimenting with blogs at this point.
The reason I'm posting this is we are trying to understand how the blogging industry will likely evolve over the next few years. My working hypothesis is that an increasing number of blog segments will be dominated by a relatively small number of professional bloggers. Because these blogs are run as businesses they will be better resourced, more professionally produced, and will likely have more compelling content than amateur blogs. They will also be more aggressive about site promotion and traffic generation. For these reasons they will likely attract a large share of the segment's traffic and heavily influence related blogs through linking and referencing.
This is not to say that amateur and consumer blogging will not continue to thrive and grow. I expect that many blogging segments will be dominated by consumers and amateurs - especially segments where making money with blog content is difficult or impossible (personal and family diaries for example). There will also continue be many amateur blogs in all segments due to low entry and maintenance costs. However, I think in segments capable of supporting professional blogs, these blogs will capture a big share of the audience.
This already appears to be happening in several segments. I recently went through Technorati's Top 100 blogs and almost all of the top 50 are professional blogs. Wil Wheaton was an exception, but he is now using his blog to sell his books. The majority of the second 50 are also professional blogs. In the consumer gadget segment the combination Gizmodo, Engadget, and a couple of the new media company sites probably get substantially more traffic than all the other gadget related blogs combined - and there appears to be thousands of gadget related blogs.
Whether or not segments of the blog industry consolidates - and whether or not professional bloggers dominate many segments - will be a major driver of the social and business impact blogs will have. Please let me know your thoughts and reactions on this subject.
Thanks.
The IAOC (the International Assoication of Online Communicators) blog has an entry from an IBM employee discussing IBM's use of internal blogs. The post says there are roughly 2800 active internal blogs at IBM. No mention of outward facing blogs.
Here is another example of an externally facing blog, by Maytag, featuring its Skybox Personal Beverage Vending Machine. A chatty place, mostly about sports. Its interesting that this is brand, rather than corporate oriented, though the Maytag name is prominent. Does this kind of approach best address products whose proposition is unclear or unusual? Comments are enabled with filtering. Updated about twice a week. Just discovered here, but its apparently been in operation since last June. Skybox in Gizmodo. Also, more recently, AskJeeves has set up a corporate presence blog. This also led me to Rick Bruner's Business Blogging Site.
Interesting market share analysis of blog tools at Elise.com. It even uses a growth share matrix (the tool that sunk a thousand businesses) in a useful way. While the data and analysis are probably not real precise and only for the US (both are pointed out in the analysis), it is likely directionally correct and the study is nicely done.
Also worth looking at is the extensive track back list. The topic seems to have hit a cord with the blogosphere. I first saw a reference to this study at What's Your Brand Mantra.
The Economist has an article about corporate blogs and PR, with a focus on Robert Scoble's blog. It has this interesting bit: Scoble's blog
caught the attention of Lenn Pryor, who is—really—Microsoft's “director of platform evangelism�. Until then, says Mr Pryor, Microsoft had been evangelising mostly one-on-one, “which doesn't scale well�. But Mr Pryor had a radical idea. Afraid of flying, he had met a pilot at United Airlines who told him to tune into channel nine from his plane seat, where he could listen in on the communications of the pilots. Mr Pryor did, and soon “the irrational nature of my fear started to fade�. It had something to do with hearing real people talking honestly. He realised that Microsoft, the target of similarly irrational fears, should have its own version of channel nine, and that public blogging by insiders should be an important part of it.
It's an interesting metaphor.
Other than the name of Franz's new personal blog.
Whatever it means, it's a catchier title than "relevant history." Though I confess having the word "history" is a boon in random Google searches: anyone who's looking for the history of the iPod, for example, is tricked by search engines into thinking that they'll find it on my site. Not sure if either "eponymous" or "pickle" is going to have the same effect....
It also raises the question: how many people have/contribute to mutiple blogs? I've got my own blog; one about my children; Future Now; and my Red Herring column, which is published as a blog, even though it's not quite as blog-like as the other three. Ross Mayfield, Danah Boyd, and the rest of the Many 2 Many crowd all have multiple blogs (though maybe that's overdetermined for the social software crowd); there are plenty of design and electronic art people who have at least two or three; and the list could be extended.
Update. Oh. I get it now. Never mind.
Definite shades of Anne Rice: The Register has an interview with an English programmer who creates comment spam for a living. Given that I probably spend several hours a week deleting comment spam from this site, I found it an interesting read.
[via Learning Movable Type]
In the Jan 31 InformationWeek, an extensive article, The Weblog Question: On internal and external blogs and the new questions they bring to the workplace.
Regarding the much-watched GM external-facing blog. Does GM understand the blog? .... An associate pointed me to the GM blog's code of ethics ... and based on this, they appear to understand what its all about:
Blogger Code Of EthicsAlso linked to here, Charlene Li of Forrester's blog, which we have started to track and appears to be an excellent source of technology insight. Here is her post on blogging codes of ethics.
We will tell the truth. We will acknowledge and correct any mistakes promptly.
We will not delete comments unless they are spam, off-topic, or defamatory.
We will reply to comments when appropriate as promptly as possible.
We will link to online references and original source materials directly
We will disagree with other opinions respectfully.
I note that Future Now, classified as a Science Blog, is included in the new 'quick access to quality blogs' repository called Deep Blog, in what is striving to be a 'whole blog catalog' for newcomers to the medium.
How many CEOs blog? Should CEOs blog? A colleague pointed out a link to a wiki that contains surprisingly many exec blogging examples from the New PR site. Appears to be fairly up to date since it includes the GM example we posted. Most of the companies mentioned are technical or small, but its a useful set of examples.
On a related note Randolph S. Baseler, Boeing VP of Marketing, has also started a blog, talking about the competitive A380.
I am fascinated to see how major corporations, especially non-tech companies, can effectively use an outward-facing blog. Here is an example, just started by General Motors. GM's Vice Chairman posts.
One of the signal pleasures of Future Now's evolution since I started it as a side-project in 2003 has been that it's attracted a number of excellent, active co-authors from within the Institute, and among the extended IFTF community. We've recently added three more contributors: Christian Lausten and Peter Dreyer, both with the Innovation Lab in Aarhus, Denmark; and Mike Liebhold, an Institute affiliate with deep experience in geolocation systems.
Consumer generated media's impact continues to grow. The Pew Internet and American Life Project - one of the best sources of data on Internet usage - recently released a study on blogging. According to Pew:
By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.
Work ongoing at HP Labs in Bristol UK, at their Semantic Web Research Group. where they have done some interesting work that uses the simplicity of blog posting to construct intelligent repositories of what they call 'knowledge snippets' ... information nuggets we would like to store, annnotate and share ... Steve Cayzer of the Labs, in a provocative recent article (link below) discusses the interaction of this simplicty with the ability to store and retrieve knowledge based on embedded intelligence.
Any kind of knowledge management method presupposes you have some critical mass of knowledge to manage. Without having content, no one will use the source. With a simple blog you can easily add and annotate such snippets, but the only way to retrieve is a search. Improvements like Google Desktop Search, make this easier, but it still suffers from the strength of its precision and recall.
Blogs like the one you are reading also contain links, to augment the knowledge they contain by simple reference. This kind of knowledge loading can be improved by adding semantic metadata to the snippits and to their links. The querying and search can be aided by this knowledge. The result is a form of the Semantic Web, overlaid on a simple blog structure.
Of course, this does make the use of the blog structure more complex. It has to be loaded with the semantic knowledge, perhaps through the use of a pre-arranged ontology for classifying and sharing knowledge.
This is important work .. with the potential of linking very simple knowledge storing ideas, like blogs, with more complex knowledge management classification and retrieval methods.
Cayzer also usefully surveys other knowledge-loading mechanisms for blogs. For more detail, and updated research see Cayzer's Semantic Blogging site, which contains a demonstrator for a semantic blog.
And the full December CACM article: Semantic Blogging and Decentralized Knowledge Management, an instructive read. (Full article regrettably only available to ACM subscribers)
Salon has an article about online photo sharing services like Flickr. The innovative thing about Flickr is not that it lets you put pictures online, or lets others see them; what's new is that it allows other people to annotate pictures and add keywords. The paradigmatic example is wedding reception pictures: you put up a bunch of pictures, and attendees can go online and identify themselves and others.
This is interesting for a couple reasons. First, metadata is notoriously hard to create and maintain. It isn't necessarily very hard to add to a picture, but it's exceptionally tedious. Flickr opens the door to collective, open source-like energy with photo metatagging.
Second, Flickr doesn't have a formal taxonomy of tags that you apply to photos; people create their own, generating what Thomas Vander Wal calls "folksonomies," bottom-up taxonomies. As Gene Smith explains,
[In systems like] Furl, Flickr and Del.icio.us... people classify their pictures/bookmarks/web pages with tags (e.g. wedding), and then the most popular tags float to the top (e.g. Flickr's tags or Del.icio.us on the right).... [F]olksonomies can work well for certain kinds of information because they offer a small reward for using one of the popular categories (such as your photo appearing on a popular page). People who enjoy the social aspects of the system will gravitate to popular categories while still having the freedom to keep their own lists of tags.
On the other hand, I can see a few reasons why a folksonomy would be less than ideal in a lot of cases:
For indexing and library people, folksonomies are about as appealing as Wikipedia is to encyclopedia editors. Still, I think there's no denying that, their problems aside, there's some interesting stuff happening around them.
If you're not a subscriber, the Salon article's worth putting up with an ad to read.
Late last month, Franz pointed to the ACM Communications special issue on blogging. I've been meaning to point out that the lead article, "Why We Blog," includes a picture of my daughter wearing a T-shirt (my shirt, actually) that says, "I'm blogging this."
So my five year-old has been published in ACM Communications before me. Kids in Silicon Valley grow up fast.
We've been tracking the growth consumer generated media (chat rooms, blogs, personal websites, etc) and its impact for several years. Over the last 18 months we've started looking at how consumer generated media is changing the way consumers research products and make purchase decisions.
Along this vein, Wired has an article about a teacher named George Masters who has created an ad for the Apple Ipod. You can also go to his site to see the ad and his work. Masters evidently did the ad for fun, and considers design a hobby. The ad has generated 44,000 hits so far.
In many product categories we are seeing the emergence of sophisticated amateurs that are impacting and influencing consumers. Some become product experts an