At Fast Company, an article about using weblogs to communicate during a crisis.
From Shel Holtz at Holtz Communications:
There's always a symbol in a crisis. For the Exxon Valdez, it was dead birds. For Enron, it was people leaving their offices with boxes. Your priorities need to be with the affected party or parties. A key example is Odwalla. The philosophy at Johnson & Johnson is that shareholders are last.
Respond quickly, accurately, professionally. Treat perceptions as fact. Acknowledgement mistakes that were made. Tailor messages with the angry public in mind. And acknowledge the other side's concerns. Don't confront anybody, though. That just doesn't pay off. Take advantage of existing relationships you have.
So, why a blog in a crisis? You have the ability to offer updates instantly. You can use a human voice to accommodate the public's emotional response. And it produces a record of your response.
He goes on to say: "Stay on focus. Have one author represent the organization. Make sure the posts are approved."
I would revise that last--"Make sure the posts are approved." In a perfect world, I would want to make sure that the person posting to the weblog was the person with the power to approve the posts. The poster ought to be someone with the full trust of the organization and complete authority to act. If the highest level individuals are too busy managing the crisis or if they don't feel they have the right communications skills, then they should put someone in charge who they trust completely and who they will keep full informed. And then they should stand back and let them do their job.
Requiring approval, while extremely tempting and seemingly prudent, makes it too easy to give in to siege mentality (don't tell them anything, everything's fine, we're working on it, just trust us) and risks losing the 'real' voice and the real value that a quickly updated, informative weblog can provide.
On the other hand, giving your crisis blogger a pool of people who are ready and willing to review posts, provide perspective and generate ideas can only help. Everyone needs a second or third pair of eyes, especially when dealing with rapidly-changing information and stressful situations.
Cutting Through points to Beyond bullets, which talks about research by Virginie Van Wassenhove, concerning the importance of visual communication:
In an age of online this and virtual that, it's nice to hear a little news about the value of a face-to-face. What about webcasting you say? According to Virginie,
"If visual movements lag (instead of naturally preceding) the auditory signal by as little as 50 to 100 milliseconds, the benefit of having visual speech is already diminished."
The average webcam hasn't quite reduced lag by that much, so while you're waiting for technology to catch up, the next time you have a face-to-face, pay attention to the visual speech you see, and how much it contributes to the auditory speech you hear. You just might find that you can understand quite a bit by reading someone's lips, not to mention the rest of their face.
We're having a lot of discussions in our office right now about weblogs vs CMS, what makes a blog, the risks of blogging, when blogging is the right tool, the uneasiness some people will have with blogging and other fascinating topics with no easy answers.
Related to this, Shel Israel and Robert Scoble have a proposal for a book on blogging and business which they constructed on line at The Red Couch. The book proposal includes such topics as: Blog or Die; Word of Mouth Engines; Too Many Influencers: Not enough Influence; and Who Shouldn't Blog:
Companies who believe their current communications programs are meeting their goals at a reasonable cost should just continue doing what they are doing. Companies who have something to hide from the public--such as governance or compliance infractions, or knowingly ship products that can hurt their customers had better not blog. Companies who have a disdainful view of customers, prospects and their own employees should avoid opening the door to blogging. Companies whose executives%u2019 micro manage their employees had better not allow it. Companies who are perfectly comfortable in the language of "corp. speak" and think their customers are as well, can just keep going along as they always have should not blog. The authors wish them well and predict that the business world will soon say farewell to many of them.
Norm Carr and Tim Meehan talk aboutusing 'use cases', which look at actors (those who will use a site) and their goals, to help deliver a website:
The crucial benefit of use cases is the way they encourage a directed method of considering project requirements. From the very beginning, we are designing a product by concentrating upon the needs and wants of those who will use it.
...via elearningpost
The Shifted Librarian quotes from a New Yorker essay, The 1992 house:
I learned that one of the biggest hardships endured by people back in 1992 was not being able to use cell phones. I had thought that maybe I could just cut back on the number of calls I made, thinking that usage plans were more limited. However, my research (at the library!) unearthed the fact that cell phones really were only humongous car-phone versions, prevalent among early executives in the hip-hop industry….Not having the use of a cell phone piqued my curiosity regarding how schoolchildren communicated all those years ago. Since my mother was not speaking to me and Larry wasn’t around (he did end up going to Myrtle Beach), I turned to primary sources (in the form of classic cinema) for answers. I found ‘The Breakfast Club’ and ‘Pretty in Pink’ in the library – on videotape. I learned that back in the eighties and nineties students would hand-write things on little pieces of paper called ‘notes’ and try to pass them to each other in class without getting caught….
Mitch Ratcliffe provides notes on Robert Scoble's presentation at the Blog Business Summit:
How to start a blog: Read 50 blogs for two weeks. Find blogs about topics you care about and read them. [This is analogous to the response to a young writer: "Read authors who speak to you."]If you are a plumber in Seattle and you're the first to blog, you will benefit from Google's search placing you higher in its results. Robert found a plumber that way recently.
Two things that make a good blog: Passion [how often you post and go to information sources, like trade shows] and authority [knowledge level and clarity]. He knows a guy who blogs on his Prowler [note: Scoble said the guy blogs, but there's no evidence of a blog at the link he points to] and knows the rate of pay of the people who built it, the color of the factory floor and much more. "After a half hour of talking to this guy, I wanted to go buy one."
...via Tom Peters
Phil Windley, former CIO of the State of Utah, has some words of wisdom for those who want to reorganize IT.
I don't agree with him on everything--or, more precisely, probably, everything doesn't apply necessarily to all organizations, but it's interesting stuff:
While I think there’s some merit to reorganizing State IT functions, there is much that could go wrong here. There are a 1000 ways to do this wrong and only a few that will ultimately work.
We've recently purchased Movable Type 3.14 for ISU Extension. As part of the process of making weblogs more generally available in the organization, we've been having a lot of conversation about policies--about rules, conversational style, risks, culture, and when a weblog is really a weblog. As part of that conversation, I've been collecting organizational policies on blogging where they exist and I can find them.
In the left sidebar, I've listed several of the very good or very pertinent ones because I expect to be referring to them a fair amount over the next few months.
Richard Farson talks about management by design:
Design has always had great influence on personal experience and the course of human affairs. We all recognize the inspiration that comes from the architecture of a great cathedral. Stage sets and costume designs enrich the drama of theater. Industrial design of accessories and tools augments our powers and makes our lives safer and more comfortable. Interior design can provide settings to improve sociability. Landscaped green belts contribute to the civility of neighborhoods. Graphic design can shape our thinking and motivate our behavior.Because it is so powerful, design also has a dark underside. If mindlessly conceived or corrupted, design can produce depressing consequences. The design of cities that plan giant shopping centers can erode traditional communities by forcing neighborhood businesses to close. Massive highway construction can divide and rupture a neighborhood. Kafkaesque office designs of row after row of monitored employees, or maze-like cubicles, can dehumanize. Graphic designs in advertising can be dangerously misleading, promoting unhealthy products or unworthy candidates. Some designers think these bad designs greatly outnumber the good ones.
Danah Boyd writes about the pleasure of browsing paper course catalogs and some of the ways digital catalogs don't measure up.
The Fastest Stuff in the Universe:
Among thee speed demons of the universe are Jupiter-sized blobs of hot gas embedded in streams of material ejected from hyperactive galaxies known as blazars. Last week at a meeting here of the American Astronomical Society, scientists announced they had measured blobs in blazar jets screaming through space at 99.9 percent of light-speed.
"This tells us that the physical processes at the cores of these galaxies … are extremely energetic and are capable of propelling matter very close to the absolute cosmic speed limit," said Glenn Piner of Whittier College in Whittier, California.
Comment spam is one of the banes of weblogs. Spammers use the high Google rank of weblog entries to boost their own rank. They waste resources, abuse the system, and interfere with regular people trying to communicate with one another.
Six Apart, Google, Yahoo Search and MSN Search have worked together to develop a new link attribute, nofollow:
The search team at Google approached us with the idea of flagging hyperlinks with a rel="nofollow" link attribute in order to alert their search spider that a particular link shouldn’t be factored into their PageRank calculations. The Yahoo and MSN search teams have also indicated they’d support this new spec, and we’ll be implementing and deploying this specification as quickly as possible across all of our platforms around the world.
Jared Spool talks about what makes a design seem intuitive:
In our research, we've discovered that there are two conditions where users will tell you an interface seems 'intuitive' to them. It only takes meeting one of the two conditions to get the user to tell you the design is intuitive. When neither condition is met, the same user will likely complain that the interface feels 'unintuitive.'Condition #1:
Both the current knowledge point and the target knowledge point are identical. When the user walks up to the design, they know everything they need to operate it and complete their objective.Condition #2:
The current knowledge point and the target knowledge point are separate, but the user is completely unaware the design is helping them bridge the gap. The user is being trained, but in a way that seems natural.
...via elearningpost
Lee Bryant at Headshift has a great entry on social stuff that isn't blogs:
...Looking beyond blog and wikis, many other types of tools are adopting socially connected characteristics, such as photo sharing, social bookmarking, notetaking and many other types of applications. We will need better aggregation and concept matching tools in order to pull together an increasing amount of online interaction that is becoming spread across too many places right now. Ton touches upon this in his response to Stuart Henshall's announcement that he is moving away from 'traditional blogging', Marc Canter has been talking about digital lifestyle aggregators for some time. Seb Paquet recently wrote about commentlogging, which involves using del.icio.us to create a personal trail of comments and discussions that a user takes part in, and del.icio.us backlinks to see who has bookmarked a given page. The meticulous Phil Gyford also scripted a tool recently to pull together his varied output into a composite RSS feed to make it easier to follow his tracks. Finally, of course, Technorati is doing an excellent job of tying together weblog conversations and themes, and we can expect a lot more from the sleeping giant in this space: Google.Several related techniques that rose to prominence during 2004 will become focal points for technical development during 2005 to support the requirements of more active, more sophisticated communities of people using social software to help them manage their lives and work.
One of these is folksonomies (aka social tagging or ethnoclassification). We have been using this approach for over a year in a social knowledge sharing community and it has produced some very interesting results that we will be reviewing soon to inform future development in this area. It is not without its limitations, and it should not be seen as competing exclusively with traditional metadata structures, but more than any other idea last year this one captured the imagination of those of us who strive to give people more control over the language, relationships and structure of their own information. This technique is a close relation to collaborative filtering - social bookmarking tool del.icio.us is driven by social tagging, whilst Digg is driven by user ratings - and we can probably expect new and exciting combinations of the two approaches in new social software tools.
Another is the pursuit of simplicity, adaptability and tolerance of ambiguity on the client side, whilst applying computing power on the server side to make users' lives a little easier....
...via Designing for a Civil Society
There may still be a gender gap in the adoption of technology, but it may not be what you think:
In a couple of cases, women are embracing new technologies faster than men.
"The good news is that women are closing the gap," said Genevive Bell, a cultural anthropologist who works for chipmaker Intel. Overall, women are using technology nearly as often as men, Bell said, but they are using it differently.
In a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by Intel, women were more enthusiastic about Wi-Fi than men, and they said they planned to use it in different ways. More women said they considered Wi-Fi to be a key feature in a new laptop.
"It's one of the first times, if not the first, that women have been the early adopters of a technology," Bell said.
Women and men want wireless access in airports, but more women than men said they want wireless Internet access in their doctors' offices and at salons.
...via The Shifted Librarian
David Pollard lays out what he thinks are the ten most important ideas on blogs and the internet in 2004:
1. The Blog is a Journal, and Online Journalism is Our Game:
2. We Are Our Own Content Providers, and
3. Content Has Value Only in Use:
...
10. The Ultimate Utility of Blogging:
Last, but certainly not least, is this remarkable statement from blogger Rob Paterson on the utility of blogging: "The utility of blogging to me is that it is recreating the lost world of a humanity that is connected to itself and hence to everything."
Werner Vogels talks about the scalability of feeds and aggregators, which runs into two problems, more interesting feeds than one person can handle and more subscribers than the feed provider can handle:
The increase in the number of feeds will leave many users frustrated, as there is a limit to the number feeds one can scan and read. Current numbers suggest that readers can handle 150-200 feeds without too much stress. But users will want to read more and more as new interesting feeds become available and they run into the limitations of the metaphor of current aggregator applications. The current central abstract of aggregators is that of a feed, and there is a limit to how many individual feeds one can actually handle. Aggregators will need to find ways in which the users can be subscribed to a select set of feeds because they want to read everything that comes from these feeds, but also subscribe to a much larger set of publishers for which the feed abstraction may not be the right metaphor. Aggregation, fusion and selection at the information item level instead of at the feed level seems to be a first abstractions to investigation. Advances in how users can specify what information they would like to see, will be enablers for scalability at the human level.
...via The Shifted Librarian
Louis Rosenfeld on the limitations of folksonomies for businesses:
...As sites like Flickr and del.icio.us successfully utilize informal tags developed by communities of users, it's easy to say that the social networkers have figured out what the librarians haven't: a way to make metadata work in widely distributed and heretofore disconnected content collections.Easy, but wrong: folksonomies are clearly compelling, supporting a serendipitous form of browsing that can be quite useful. But they don't support searching and other types of browsing nearly as well as tags from controlled vocabularies applied by professionals. Folksonomies aren't likely to organically arrive at preferred terms for concepts, or even evolve synonymous clusters. They're highly unlikely to develop beyond flat lists and accrue the broader and narrower term relationships that we see in thesauri.
...via elearningpost
Things to talk about when talking about things by Steve Whittaker:
...reviews the existing research literature concerning support for talking about objects in mediated communication, drawing three conclusions (a) speech alone is often sufficient for effective conversations; (b) visual information about work objects is generally more valuable than visual information about work participants' (c) disjoing visual perspectives can undermine communication processes.
I read this paper awhile ago and have had a paper copy sitting on my desk for, like, a year because I want to refer back to it occasionally and paper has been serving the social function of placeholding for me. In an effort to take advantage of the 'outboard brain' aspect of this weblog, I've created a new category called 'Things I've read' (which I'd like to be able to find again) and I'm going to stick longer papers and reports that I have either already blogged or will be blogging as I go that I'd like to refer back to later. We'll see how it goes...
Hossein Derakhshan reports on his blog that officials in Iran have cut access to blogging and social networking tools:
Friends in Iran, journalists and technicians, are saying that judiciary officials have ordered all major ISP to filter all blogging services including PersianBlog, BlogSpot, Blogger, BlogSky, and even BlogRolling.
So says Ernie The Attorney:
My view is that blogs matter because they represent a new way of communicating that is in its infancy, but one which is clearly growing at a rapid pace. Whether network TV weaves blogs into their plot lines is not significant, and the same is true for having the word 'blog' chosen as Word of the Year. Blogs matter for a lot of reasons; that's a simple fact.
GM Vice Chairman, Bob Lutz, is blogging, too:
What would you do if you had a brand whose customer service reputation was that high for that long despite having a narrow, aging product lineup? I, for one, would first get down on my knees and thank the Maker for the finest retail network in the industry. Then, I would set to work replenishing the product portfolio.
That’s exactly what we’re doing with Saturn. And that’s precisely why my hopes for the brand are so high. We won’t let the brand fall victim to the tyranny of the “or.” It’s not a case of having a great retail and customer care program or having great products. It’s possible to have both, and we plan to do so. Finally.
Cutting Through has more lists of ten things:
Ten Cool things you can do with web feeds, including:
And, a pointer to ten things your website should be doing:
Cutting Through provides ten ways to use blogs to manageprojects:
Communicating with project stakeholders
Keeping your stakeholders up-to-date with the progress of the project is vital - but if they’re busy people with other things to worry about, how do you keep them informed between major milestone reports with bombarding them with email?
One way is to post regular intra-milestone updates to a blog. It can be updated weekly, daily or even hourly without drowning your stakeholders with emails - and if they use RSS webfeeds to keep updated, they only need to scan the webfeed summaries to know if it’s something they’ll need to respond to.
Also, four ways to use wikis for project management.
Six Apart, the company behind Movable Type has acquired LiveJournal, the weblogging/journal community:
Six Apart, makers of the highly acclaimed Movable Type publishing platform and TypePad personal weblogging service, today announced that it has acquired Danga Interactive, Inc., the operators of the popular service LiveJournal, for an undisclosed amount of stock and cash. With the acquisition, Six Apart solidifies its position as the industry's recognized leader in weblogging software across all markets, and LiveJournal can continue its rapid growth trajectory under Six Apart's umbrella. As of today, the combined user base of both companies exceeds 6.5 million users, with thousands more added daily.
For many LiveJournal users, it's a community more than a tool so it will be interesting to see how all this plays out. There's been some discussion on the community aspect around the internet. I'll try to link to some of it later on today
Ed Felten of Freedom to Tinker gives his predictions for 2005, including:
(2) Vonage and other leading VoIP vendors will start to act like incumbents, welcoming regulation of their industry sector.
(3) Internet Explorer will face increasing competitive pressure from Mozilla Firefox. Microsoft's response will be hamstrung by its desire to maintain the fiction that IE is an integral part of the operating system.
(4) As blogs continue to grow in prominence, we'll see consolidation in the blog world, with major bloggers either teaming up with each other or affiliating with major news outlets or web sites.
(5) A TV show or movie that is distributed only on the net will become a cult hit.
A list of publications on thesaurus construction and use.
...via elearningpost
An interesting article about a project to bring affordable broadband to a province in India:
According to Ajay Sahni, joint secretary, IT department, the Aksh consortium will also utilise the existing optic fibre lines of companies like Tata Teleservices before establishing its own optic fibre network across the state. Among other customers, the proposed broadband network will provide broadband services to 40,000 government offices across the state. This will enable the government departments to deliver various citizen services through eSeva centres, Rajiv Internet Village Kiosks and web-based online services. The network will also enable the rural folk to access video-conferencing, internet surfing among other facilities.
...via BoingBoing