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Are You Blogging Yet?

Web journals could have business value.

By John Foley, InformationWeek
Jul 22, 2002 (12:00 AM)
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020719S0001

On June 17, the day after Father's Day, I got a book in the mail from my mom, the most wonderful person I've ever known--she raised seven children, six of us boys--but someone whose increasingly conservative views don't match my own. At first I thought it was a gift, but when I saw the book jacket, "Coloring The News: How Crusading For Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism," by William McGowan (Encounter Books, 2001), I knew better. Mom was sending hard-copy proof to support her side of an argument we'd had a few weeks earlier about the state of journalism or, as she would say, the sorry state of the liberal media. Chalk one up for Mom.

My mom

It's not the only time lately I've heard less-than-flattering views of my profession. There's a widening group of Web devotees who think they, through the power of their own observations and unfiltered analysis, can provide a better alternative to the traditional media. They're using electronic publishing tools to create Web pages, called weblogs, or blogs for short, that are heavy on opinion and that link to other Web pages to support their points. Link enough blogs, the thinking goes, and you get a far-reaching network of insightful views that diminishes the need for conventional media.

For most people, though, blogs won't be a replacement for conventional news outlets. It's more likely that bloggers and journalists will use the tools and techniques of weblogging to create complementary informational channels. Freewheeling thinkers and far-flung experts will link to the Web sites of news organizations, creating a real-time, interactive content matrix that's better than the sum of its parts. Journalists such as Dan Gillmor (http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/dan_gillmor/ejournal), a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, and Andrew Sullivan (http://www.andrewsullivan.com/), a writer for the New Republic and other publications, have created blogs, where they work outside the scope of print media, saying different things in new ways to more people.

As a journalist with more than 15 years' experience myself, I'm more excited by the prospect of blogging than threatened by it. So, my business is in the midst of transformation brought on by this new technology. Isn't yours?

There are two basic types of weblogs. Personal blogs are written primarily by a single person, and can range from articulate essays to trivial thought bubbles, while portal-like blogs tend to serve as content aggregators by offering links to personal blogs, news stories, discussion threads, and other electronic content. Among the earliest blogging practitioners are code-in-the-blood techies, such as the Unix and open-source programmers whose days aren't complete without a visit to http://www.slashdot.org/. Many personal blogs are part diary, part opinion page, part eclectic reference guide.

The vast majority of people who blog, and there are hundreds of thousands of them, do so on their own time. So far, few businesses have adopted blogging for use by employees on company time. But that might be the direction things are heading. John Robb, president and chief operating officer of UserLand Software Inc., which develops blogging technology, envisions individual workers using blogging tools to jot down their thoughts during the course of the day and as a platform for collaboration among colleagues. A doctor might make note of a new symptom that's begun to appear in patients during the summer months, or an insurance agent may observe that a series of accidents involved a certain vehicle model. "The basic organizational structure of a weblog--they're time-stamped and archived--provides a record of what people are doing and thinking," Robb says.

For years, knowledge-management applications such as Lotus Notes have been offered as a way to help companies harness the knowledge in employees' heads. But for a variety of reasons, technical and cultural, the reality has never lived up to the promise. To jump-start the use of weblogging as a new approach to knowledge management, Robb started a discussion group on Yahoo in October (groups.yahoo.com/group/klogs). So far, the give and take there is mostly theoretical and technical--gritty detail on how to use RSS syndication and search engines, for instance--and lacking in business-world examples. Robb admits UserLand doesn't have many big-name accounts, though he says Harley-Davidson Inc. is a recent convert. When I asked the director of knowledge management for a major company about weblogging, it was barely on his radar screen. All of which tends to support the view that weblogging will be a grassroots movement in business in the same way that, say, instant messaging has been.

GROUPTHINK

YAY OR NAY?

I found myself scooping major news outlets on arcane electoral details about chads and voting machines. Peer-to-peer journalism, I realized, had a huge advantage over old-style journalism. It could marshall the knowledge and resources of thousands, rather than the certitudes of the few.

Andrew Sullivan
http://www.andrewsullivan.com/
culture.php?artnum=20020224
© 2002 Andrew Sullivan

Isn't linear thinking so '50s? Well, yes and no. I don't think it's dead in our digital future, but I do think that the non-linear, Web-like, hyperlinked mare's nests of blogthreads can often be a better way to get a view of a topic. I'm just not an either/or type of guy, I guess. Color me wishwashy.

David Weinberger
hyperorg.com/blogger

What are the selling points for using weblogs inside a company? Ease of use, for starters. "It really doesn't take much in terms of learning to get people up to speed," Robb says. With their focus on a single person's point of view, weblogs are distinctly different from bulletin boards and discussion threads, which are group-oriented. And practitioners say weblogs are less disruptive than E-mail, which can demand hours of attention during the course of a day. Omar Javaid, chief technology officer and founder of mobile-computing consulting firm Mobilocity, says blogging has cut down E-mail chatter at his company. A prolific Web surfer, Javaid used to regularly E-mail the URLs for items of interest to colleagues and clients. Now he accomplishes the same thing through a weblog that he updates frequently (radio.weblogs.com/0101123).

Other Mobilocity workers have blogs, and the company even provides custom blogs to some clients as a value-added service. "For a lot of companies, especially for those that are looking to make investments in knowledge-management systems, it's something that's absolutely worth a look at," Javaid says. (It's worth noting that Javaid's blog tends to include fresher content than Mobilocity's Web site, http://www.mobilocity.com/, and there's no direct link between his blog and the Web site. That suggests business bloggers like Javaid are still figuring out the potential conflicts between their personal postings and the more formal face they present to the world through their company Web sites.)

What's more, and this is key, there's built-in motivation for people to participate in blogging: They get credit for their ideas. A blog is essentially a repository of a person's intellectual capital--a record of their thoughts, observations, contributions. People may switch employers, but they'll take with them electronic journals of their best ideas. Blogging is a way to protect the most important brand of all: yourself.

If you're wondering what blogs look like, they're essentially Web pages with some common characteristics: commentary, sometimes lengthy, but often only a sentence or paragraph per subject; hyperlink connections to other Web pages; discussion threads; a search-engine function; maybe even advertising. Within this story, you'll find references to other sources, including weblogs. Bloggers do that a lot--link to one another. A standard feature of many blogs is a recommended-reading list of other blogs. That leads tens of thousands of visitors to the most popular commentators. Not bad numbers for people with something to say.

NATURE OF THINGS

The idea of running a weblog always appealed to me, but over time I've become more accustomed to reading other people's weblogs than building one of my own. People like kottke, ev, heather, and haughey (probably recognized as the elite a-listers) have seemingly become friends to me, even though they probably have no idea who I am. I come over and visit every day, they talk to me, tell me their opinions, share pictures of their vacation, and express their feelings--sometimes even letting me respond--and yet they don't even know my name. A false sense of friendship is the necessary evil of one-way communication.

Aaron Christy
http://www.surfacedamage.com/
© 1975-2002 Aaron Christy

I know of at least three places you can find tools to create weblogs: http://www.userland.com/, http://www.moveabletype.org/, and http://www.blogger.com/. UserLand went commercial with its $40 Radio UserLand client software in January. The company's development environment, Frontier, sells for $900, and includes Internet server software called Manila.

Don't look to Microsoft for weblog tools--it doesn't sell them. Microsoft product manager Trina Seinfeld says the company's SharePoint Team Services--included in its FrontPage 2002 Web-site-creation software, which is part of the Office XP applications suite--and SharePoint Portal Server fulfill some of the same functions. Both, for example, support workgroup collaboration and idea-sharing. SharePoint Team Services lets a person quickly create an intranet, where things such as online discussions and surveys can facilitate communication. Microsoft says 10,000 impromptu sites have been created this way by employees in its own business. SharePoint Portal Server is a content aggregator aimed more at departments and business units. Among other things, Portal Server can link together the intranets whipped up by Team Services.

So, there are similarities and differences among the software tools you can choose from. My hunch is that it's possible to build something that looks and feels like a weblog even if the underlying technology isn't from one of the developers that specialize in this market. In this respect, the concept of weblogging would seem to be more important than the technology that enables it. If so, it's already passed the most vital business-value test.

BLOG SAMPLER

DEEP THOUGHTS

Dave Winer
davenet.userland.com

Doc Searls
doc.weblogs.com

Dan Gillmor
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/
siliconvalley/business/columnists/
dan_gillmor/ejournal

Boing Boing
http://www.boingboing.net/

Wall Street Journal Best Of The Web
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best

Network Computing
radio.weblogs.com/0104684/
2002/07/16.html#a165

Slashdot
http://www.slashdot.org/

When is a Blog a Blog?

Let us start with the questions first.

What is journalism?

What is writing?

What is a writer?

What is a reader?

What is a blog?

The first difficulty is answering these questions for ourself. Now try to arrive at a common understanding between two people with different levels of familiarity with the subject, thought processes and political leanings. Good luck.

Mike Sanders
keeptrying.blogspot.com/
2001_12_01_keeptrying_archive.html

Weblogs empower the individual, which is a mixed blessing. In addition to being magnets for a few deft writers, Web sites that aggregate blog traffic can be portals into some of the most painfully pedestrian prose generated by our say-anything culture. Here's a sample from a blog titled The Genuine College Experience: "Well, the night was long. We played with sparklers (fireworks are outlawed) and toyed with more beer. Our card game from the day lasted all night. We switched to golf. Which was something I had learnt, but can't remember now."

That excerpt, found on a quick visit to http://www.blogger.com/, was low-hanging fruit--there's lots more like it. Blogging is a way for public diarists to reveal things about themselves that really should be shared only with their closest confidants, or for people to broadcast eccentric views and shallow tidbits from an electronic soapbox. Professional bloggers (yes, some make money at it through ads and reader contributions) acknowledge that not all the output is well put. "A vast amount of drivel will no doubt find its way to the Web," writes Sullivan.

But when the same tools are put to productive use, weblogs can trigger a rich chain reaction of ideas and possibilities, which is why they hold such great potential for the workplace. Give individual employees within a company their own weblogs, encourage them to document their best ideas and personal experiences, link them, add search capabilities, and it's easy to imagine that at least some innovation will arise from the ordinary. "Blogging is a train-of-thought technology," says Scott Dinsdale, executive VP of digital strategy at the Motion Picture Association and a blog reader. "In corporate environments that are creatively oriented, there's probably some use for it." A potential application, he says, would be for newly hired employees to come quickly up to speed by reading the blogs of colleagues.

Andy Chen

For companies that go down this path, the trick is to capitalize on the mental energy that's unleashed by blogging. In the business world, after all, the destination counts more than the personal journey. "Unless people take the effort to get something else going, all you have is interesting discussion. It doesn't move much beyond that," says Andy Chen, a blogger (kumquat.weblogs.com) and chief technology officer at Quovix LLC (http://www.quovix.com/), a company that develops software and processes for building electronic communities. Chen has given a lot of thought to the life cycle of ideas, which he describes in three stages: water, slush, and ice. In the water stage, ideas are tossed around freely, but they tend to be intellectual exercises. The goal, Chen says, is to push ideas to the ice stage, where dedicated resources and action plans can lead to business opportunities.

Corporate cultures will need to change if blogging is to fulfill its promise as a tool for collaborative business. There's a "reluctance to open the floodgates of letting opinions fly around and not be able to control that," Chen says. Good point. There's little reason to invest in this democratizing application if strict authority remains the status quo. On the other hand, companies that blog need to be prepared for the bad ideas, disagreements, and general dissonance that might also be generated by the system. "If there's anything blogs aren't, it's succinct and direct," says Dinsdale. The flip side of blogging for business innovation would be this: hours wasted recording, reading, and responding to low-value meanderings. There's a risk of getting bogged down in blogs.

LET'S THROW A PARTY!

So what do big media groups stand to gain from adopting a format that delights in promoting competitors' content and relies on relinquishing editorial control? Such a question, say bloggers, misunderstands the force of weblogs. "Traditional publishing is about putting on a show; building a network of weblogs is like hosting a party," says Simon Waldman, head of digital publishing at the Guardian.

J.D. Lasica,
new media nomad
jd.manilasites.com

If they really want to be taken seriously, bloggers might think about using a different term to describe what they do. The phrase "I was blogging last night" is just as likely to trigger thoughts of impropriety as it is to impress a listener with one's philosophical side. Still, it's easy to have fun with the term. Writer's block: slogging through the blogging. Knowledge management: bloggin' with your noggin. High society: hobnoblogging. Lumberjack author: logger blogger. Or you can improvise to popular old melodies, like this: When the web, web logging goes blog, blog, blogging along.

We can see how weblogging has expanded the influence of the individual and envision the transformational effect it can have on the employees of a company and the company itself. Put those three dynamics together--the empowered consumer, the connected professional, and the collaborative business--and it's easy to see why there's so much buzz about weblogging. What professional wouldn't benefit from being part of a loose-knit virtual community that helps people share ideas and experiences? Already, the software-development community provides a model.

Now, it's journalism's turn. Newspapers, magazines, and other media increasingly use blogging techniques to provide information in new ways and not only extend their reach to broader audiences, but also bring new and different voices into their circle. InformationWeek and our sister publication, Optimize, will introduce blogs in the weeks ahead on our respective Web sites, informationweek.com and optimizemag.com.

RELEASE VALVE

NEW WAY OF THINKING

The 24-7 opinion sites offer free speech at its straightest, truest, wildest, most uncensored, most thoughtful, most strange. Thousands of independent information entrepreneurs are informing, arguing, adding information. ... Blogs may one hard day become clearinghouses for civil support and information when other lines, under new pressure, break down.

Peggy Noonan,
Wall Street Journal Online
http://www.wsj.com/
(subscription only)
© 2002 Dow Jones & Co. Inc.

Is the Internet creating vacuous, uncommitted information grazers or, with guidance, will it create post-Net thinkers able to combine traditional, contemplative thought with broad knowledge and pattern-matching skills? Net thinkers are said to generate work quickly and make connections easily. But they also value information-gathering over deliberation [and] breadth over depth...

Rebecca Blood
rebeccablood.net
© 1999-2002 Rebecca Blood

For nonjournalists, the playing field becomes more level. Rather than griping about the left-leaning, biased media over morning coffee and the paper, they can use blogs to provide commentary, counterpoints, and connections to alternative sources. It doesn't mean you and I--or even my mother and I--will always agree, but at least we'll hear each other and have a new way to explore our differences.

Want to give collaborative journalism a try? Let me know what you think about the blogging phenomenon and its potential to change your business.

Write to John Foley at [email-masked], or discuss this story online at informationweek.com/LP/columnists/johnfoley.html

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