University presidents, that is. Some of them are blogging as a way to communicate and keep up with the times:
While some colleges and their presidents have seen their reputations shredded on student blogs, and others have tried to limit what students and faculty members may say online, about a dozen or so presidents, like McGuire, are vaulting the digital and generational divide, starting their own blogs.
Veterans of campus public-relations disasters warn that presidents blog at their peril; "an insane thing to do" is how Raymond Cotton, a lawyer who advises universities and their presidents in contract negotiations, describes it. But these presidents say blogs make their campuses seem cool and open a direct line, more or less, to students, alumni and the public.
"When I first started learning about blogs, I said, ‘Well, here I like to discourse on issues of the day, connect with the campus community,'" recalled McGuire, who said she wrote all her own entries. "Here's a way I can talk a couple of times a week to everybody."
Here at Iowa State Extension, Jack Payne, Vice President for Extension and Outreach, has started a weblog. It's particularly interesting to see the comments it generates and where people come from who find the blog.
According to this article:
1. A solid introduction paragraph
2. Visual elements
3. Structure
4. Using line-height and font sizes to boost readability
5. Links and Blockquotes
...via digg
Like the police blotter only...not.
The most notable thing about it so far is that it has comments, which is excellent. So far the posts have been more police blotter-like than conversational, but it's a great start and it will be interesting to see where they go with it.
They do have a category for the Chief of Police (and also an irritating setup where the URL never changes when you click on a link unless you choose to open a new window) and he's made one entry so far. It'll be interesting to see if he gets more conversational too.
From Dave Sifry at Technorati:
- Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
- The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
- It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
- On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
- 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
- Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
- Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
- Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
- Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
- Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers
BBC News reports that Yahoo is including blog entries with its news seaches:
The Yahoo search system is not about blurring the lines between professionally edited news and that from blogs.
Readers will initially be given links to the top 10 stories from mainstream news organisations, alongside links to relevant blog entries.
"We do try to demarcate what is mainstream media and what is user-generated content," said Mr Redfern.
Leading web firms are beginning to sit up and take notice of blogs. In September search engine Google unveiled its own blog search engine.
At the beginning of October, AOL agreed to buy leading web journal firm Weblogs Inc.
According to blog search and indexing site Technorati, there are more than 17 million weblogs currently available online.
...via Smart Mobs
David Sifry of Technorati talks about the state iof the Blogosphere:
- Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005
- The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months
- A new blog is created about every second, there are over 80,000 created daily
- About 55% of all blogs are active, and that has remained a consistent statistic for at least a year
- About 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly
...via BoingBoing
From Popular Science, an article on how to have wireless wherever you go.
...via BoingBoing
BBC News talks about podcasting:
However, the same can be said of television, as a surf through the channels on satellite or Freeview will reveal, and this does not mean there is not great stuff too.
The quality of some of the podcasts I have listened to is certainly as good as many supposedly professional radio stations, and as the tools for finding and filtering what is out there improve we will inevitably see new ideas, new approaches and new names emerge.
And a podcast with no listeners may take up disk space, but it is not stopping anyone else doing their own thing, so there is absolutely no argument for any form of quality control.
...via SmartMobs
The Ohio State University redesigned their web pages and blogged the process, including design graphics in process:
After nearly 422 meetings, 57 sketches, and countless bogus posts to this page by internet gambling sites (but not anymore, Jim figured out how to block those), launch for the redesigned front door and associated second level pages is set for Monday, May 16. With that in sight, we're in the final "crossing the Ts and checking the links" phase of a process which began well over a year ago. The loose plan goes like this:April 20 - sub-index pages finalized
April 25 - html versions of level two pages finalized
May 2 - Front door + level 2 audience pages up and running parallel to existing design
May 9 - Items promoting launch in various outlets, OSUToday, Buckeye Net News, Lantern, splash page, e-mail lists
May 16 - New design goes livehere are the latest tweaks to the front door, we're very close to calling this "finalized." And just for context, we'd like to remind folks that this is all in context of a larger identity system now in place at Ohio State.
...via Matt in comments. Thanks!
Jerry Thomas, Director of OSU Center at Lima, has started a weblog on Trends and issues in extension.
Check it out. There are already interesting pointers to a three day conference on Extension, the Land Grant Institutions and Education, podcasting and Extension, the Organic Trade Association, and 15 minutes of tech fame.
Yay! More Extension bloggers.
At Get Real, Arieanna Foley has some thoughts on Social Networking with Flickr and why people interact more on with photographs on Flickr than with the same photos on a blog:
One crucial difference between blogs and Flickr may be the cornerstone to this mystery. With Flickr, you have the ability to add notes, comments, and tags to photos. On Flickr, you can add a comment to any part of the photo; you can also tag a photo (yours or someone else's) to assign it to that keyword category. Since the tags are searchable, your photos are always coming up and being viewed by others - no matter when you took it. So, people are interacting with the photo in a way not otherwise possible. This creates an ongoing conversation about the photo and the fluidity of its meaning, constantly revising where it belongs in the taxonomy. And, perhaps as importantly, this interaction amongst the Flickr community gives one a sense of contributing to an overall archive of shared experiences.
At Cutting Through, Tim talks about the CTO at Sapient (Ben Gaucherin) and his general cluelessness about blogs.
Via InfoWorld, I came across this pearl of wisdom from Ben Gaucherin, CTO of Sapient:
[blogs] are a fad fueled by pop culture’s desperate search for the next big thing. [They are] the digital equivalent of the pet rock.
There are a lot of people who don't 'get' blogs. And in particular lots of folks, like the Sapient CTO who write about the need to control the message. Companies want competent, skilled, enthusiastic experts, but then worry that they might be want to talk about what they do. But the bottom line in the whole blogs vs message debate is at the end of this post:
The irony here is that I’m not likely to hear another of Mr Gaucherin’s opinions for a good long while, because the only way he’s got to communicate with his market is through press releases and PR. Whereas if he had a blog, I’d have already subscribed to his webfeed and would be reading his thoughts as often as he posted them. As would many of his current (and potential) customers. His loss, I guess.
Also via apophenia--initial impressions of Yahoo 360:
360 will be invite-only but they are not seeding through employees, rather, they are seeding through active Yahoo users. This is actually very important because frankly, 360 isn't meant for people like me (or like you). It's meant for your average not-technically inclined individual who is scared of blogging but wants to share their thoughts, photos, and recommendations with their friends. Thus, before we all get into a blogizzy, it's important to remember the target.
The feature set that i saw included integrated YIM, a blogging tool, a recommendations engine (linked to local), photos (linked to Y photos, not Flickr) and a social network. It's all very integrated and emphasizes Yahoo products (although they were talking about connecting it with other products and they are doing some RSS stuff). Throughout all of this are heavy controls for privacy/publication, although it is all strict categorization schemes where you can make things available to groups (think: LJ).
David Weinberger goes back and forth on the use of tags:
Forth: But, language changes through implicit evocations of meaning. There is no word dictator who declares "Thou shalt now replace the word 'idea' with 'meme.'" Nope, we hear the word, get a sense from context or from a bumbling, hand-waving definition from someone at a party, and we appropriate it. After a while, a dictionary notices and attempts to freeze and formalize the definition. Yet, tags are explicit. They take something as rich in meaning as a family photo and reduce it to a single word. That's a diminishment.
Back: Big freaking deal. Categorization diminishes. Everyone knows that. It's why we categorize: It reduces complexity to something manageable at least for the moment. But often categorization diminishes so that things in their richness can be found: Menus in restaurants categorize food so you can taste it in all its glory. And if people feel that the popular tags are not categorizing objects the way they want, they can build local folksonomies, using the tags accepted by their social group.
Forth: Not in the commercial world. Steve Papa at Endeca at the PCForum open discussion a few days ago pointed to eBay as an example: There are economic reasons to describe your items for sale using the most popular language. E.g., call it a "notebook," not a "laptop." Likewise, where there are economic or other reasons for people to use the popular tags, some folksonomies will dominate. This will undoubtedly drive some ambiguity out of our everyday language. For example, someone pointed out to me recently that CNN started out calling the tsunami a "tidal wave," but switched when everyone else was calling it a "tsunami." That sort of thing will happen faster and more regularly as folksonomies grow in more and more fields
...so says Tim Bray:
- You have to get noticed to get promoted.
- You have to get noticed to get hired.
- It really impresses people when you say “Oh, I’ve written about that, just google for XXX and I’m on the top page” or “Oh, just google my name.”
- No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.
The Washington Post talks about using blogs and wikis in the classroom:
Early e-mail lists, newsgroups and chat rooms were ephemeral, like a passing conversation, said Steve Jones, a communication professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Now computers and networks are fast enough that many people can share text, videos, sound and art and work on them together, he said, building a body of knowledge over time. Wikis, including interactive encyclopedia Wikipedia, have been around for several years but they're just on the cusp of becoming mainstream; as the technology improves, they're popping up in a few classrooms and offices, and people are finding all sorts of uses for them.
It's the plugged-in version of a long tradition in literature, said wiki user Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland. Hundreds of years ago people kept "commonplace books," in which they would write down poems, passages from books, and observations to share. Most people think of writing as solitary, he said -- "the lonely poet taking long walks in the woods, but there's another type of writing that's social and reactive."
...via elearningpost
David Sifry talks about posting volume:
On average, Technorati is tracking about 500,000 posts per day, which is about 5.8 posts per second.
David Sifry presents the State of the Blogosphere, 2005 starting with the growth of blogs. According to Technorati statistics:
- The blogosphere is doubling in size about every 5 months
- 35-40,000 new blogs are created every day. That's a new blog every 2.2 seconds.
He also adds, however:
There is a dark underbelly to these numbers, however: Part of the growth of new weblogs created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs - fake blogs that are created by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search engine optimization, or drive traffic through to advertising or affiliate sites. We have been battling the spam situation in a significant way for about 2 months - prior to January, spam wasn't much of an issue. All of these charts reflect Technorati's databases after spam blogs have been removed, and we feel that we've been able to capture and identify most of the spam out there, but one should note that there is definitely blog spam that we don't catch (tell us if you see spam in the index!). I'd estimate that we currently catch about 90% of spam and remove it from the index, and notify the blog hosting operators. Most of this fake blog spam comes from hosted services or from specific IP addresses. One of the results of the extremely productive Spam Squashing Summit of a few weeks ago is the increased collaboration between services in order to report and combat this spam. Right now, about 20% of the aggregate pings Technorati receives are from spam blogs, so you won't see that in these numbers - these statistics show only "cleaned" data.
SimonG has a post on blog comment spam:
So, there are lots of ways to stymie the spambots. Why, then, am I about to tell you my way? Wouldn’t it be better if I encouraged you to go off and come up with a technique of your own? Surely if everyone used a different method, it would be harder for the spammers to get round them all? That is true, but I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing. I want the spammers to get round my traps. When they do, I’ll add some more. It’s an arms race, and it’s in the interest of those of us who despise spam that the race moved forward as quickly as possible, because we’re guaranteed to win it. We have two big advantages over the spammers. 1) It’s very hard to write a program that can pass a Turing test, but very easy to make a Turing test; and 2) no matter how smart they get, it’s simply impossible to make spam comments indistinguishable from real comments because, when it comes right down to it, there is a difference. If there wasn’t, they wouldn’t be spam. It might be that when the difference becomes subtle enough, only advanced AI techniques are able to detect it, and perhaps if the arms race goes too quickly we’ll reach that point before such techniques exist, but I don’t think that will be a problem. My message to the spammers, then, is a simple one: Bring! It! On!
He then goes on to describe what he's been doing to defeat spammers, though he warns readers:
Let’s get down to the details. For those of you not of a technical bent, this would be a good time to go and put the kettle on. Alternatively, here are some pictures of kittens. In fact, unless you’re a codey type person with an unhealthy interest in HTML, I seriously advise you not to read on. Go and look at the kittens instead.
Cutting Through reports on General Motors entry into blogging:
I’ve mentioned GM and their blogs a couple of times in the last week or so - now there's another first from them. The Director of New Media from GM Communications has been interviewed for a podcast, conducted over Skype. How's that for innovative?
It's an interesting insight into how GM have gone about using blogs as part of their communications strategy, but there are a couple of exchanges in particular which are worth seeing / hearing:
Neville: Who are the commenters? customers, employees, dealers? Are you happy and pleased with the spread of commenting?
Michael: I was completely blown away by the level of comments and the thought that goes into those comments. We didn't know what to expect and in many cases you feel that people have been waiting for years and years to be able to vent their feelings to General Motors, so even the negative ones aren’t sniping, they're just giving us their sincere feelings and thoughts on what we can do to create better products. We're appreciating most of them!
The response speaks clearly to the fact that some of the folks at GM at least really do 'get it.' Organizations almost always get in trouble when they try to control the message too tightly. People want to be listened to. And they want to know that 'real' people are speaking to them. It'll be interesting to see how GM and blogging go forward.
Six Apart, the company that created Movable Type and Typepad and recently purchased LiveJournal has updated their entire web site.
On the LiveJournal page, they post
- Total Accounts: 6148154
- Active Accounts: 2606583
- Posts per hour: 20455
- Posts per minute: 341
One of the beauties of weblogs is that sooner or later someone writes what you were going to write someday--and probably does it better anyway.
Occasionally the question comes up--why a weblog and not a mailing list or a news group or a discussion board. Some of the reasons from Cutting Through:
'Seeding' forums is very difficult
Getting a forum to a point where it is self-sustaining is very difficult in practice--it needs a large and active population to keep the dialogues flowing, but the population is drawn in the first place by flowing dialogues. This 'chicken and egg' situation is a difficult one to overcome--the overwhelming majority of visitors to a site will be passive 'consumers' of content rather than contributors, meaning that sites have to attract a very large number of visitors to get a contributor community of sufficient size to maintain forums.
Blogs tend not to suffer from this problem - it only takes one person to post articles, and comments will appear active and vibrant with a very much smaller number of active participants than an equivalent forum.
Decaying forums are very off-putting for visitors
It's very obvious when a forum is inactive, because the numbers and dates of posts are prominently displayed. This is the online equivalent of tumbleweed--although there may be a huge number of visitors to the site, the perception created by the inactive forums is that there are very few.
A blog, by contrast, can look active with a much lower level of activity - meaning that it can take much less effort to ‘feed and water’.
There's an increasing trend towards syndication
Syndication is becoming an increasingly popular way of subscribing to sites-- the benefits include being able to monitor a very large number of sites from a single application, and rapid reading of new articles as they arrive.
Not all forum systems provide syndication feeds, and those that do suffer from the transition from a threaded dialogue on the forum to the linear one-after-the-other format of a news aggregator. The effect is to disconnect each post from its conversational context, making it very difficult to follow. Blogs, on the other hand, can feed comments with context intact by including the original post and prior comments.
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.
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.
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
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.