Boz Weblog

Why Corporate Blogging Is Different: 1. Civility

In keeping with my earlier posts on blog attacks, I did some research and found some interesting debates on the role of civility in the blog phenomenon, some of them difficult to decipher but probably worth the effort.  But is there something different about civility in blogging from any other medium?  Seems to me a question worth investigating.  One reason corporate blogging might be different from personal blogging is the role of civility.  As with email and message boards, flame wars are a common event in blog-land.  But flaming is not the kind of thing corporate types typically do well, and it probably doesn't make good business sense.  Interesting then that this topic has not received greater play in discussions of corporate blogging.  One way to illustrate this is to do a search on blogging and civility in any of the major blog search engines.  What you get back is predominantly links to bile and spew decrying the loss of civility by the "other" side (read some examples and see for yourself), rather than a view of civility as an ethic shared among a group of communicators.  The results for delicious, technorati, and icerocket are just cases in the larger phenomenon. 

I gather we need to understand the emergent expectations regarding civility and blogging -- if any such expectations exist -- a little bit better.  Some expectation of civility is reasonable and necessary to ensure a commons in which people can discuss freely.  Civil doesn't mean boring, and that's where expert guidance and some additional social norming will probably happen.  Sure, there are ettiquette guides for corporate blogs, how-to's, manuals and the like, but I don't think we have really arrived at ettiquette for those among us who blog as part of their job.  Is there anything different about the way we should behave online, and in particular blogging, from other media?  We see some of this emerging with the assertive stance some have taken toward harassing commenters, and with the withdrawal, albeit temporary, by a few high-profile bloggers from the medium.  It will be interesting to see where this goes.  The social rules are likely to be as important than the technology in determining the uptake of blogging by mainstream corporate functions.

How Summer, 2005 Will Be Remembered: The Summer of Blog Attacks

Okay, I'm starting to relive that summer a few years ago when we could not get away from shark video, shark attacks, shark anger-management classes, only I am reliving it in an alternate medium.  One prominent blogger takes a week off after enduring more than a few pins and needles, and we have a trend.  Perhaps the most astute is not she who detects the trend, but she who invents the trend. Blog is fashion is reality.

Is it a bit tetchy out there?  Dunno.  But expectations have a way of making things happen.  Remember the summer of road rage on CA freeways, guns blazing every mile partly because people expected it to be so?  Given recent reports, as well as the wired-in status of citizen-bloggers, I suspect that any day now some poor blogger is going to get his leg chewed off while typing away in a coffee house, simply for having blogged about someone else in the same coffee house.

Next, we will have a debate about whether it is all the mainstream media's fault.

Does it Take a Billionaire to Create an A-List?

Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek online has an interesting take on the A-list blogs controversy.  Don't know what this is?  Representative sample.  In Mark Cuban: Create a different A list, Baker proposes creating a new blogging top-line to address the imbalance found in A-list blog rankings, caused by the many thousands of links built up by top blogs over the years.  All we need now is a TV commercial:  "I know - let's get Marky!  He'll fix anything!"  It helps if you have several billion to work with (plus a load of talent).

My take: If there is a market for such a service, someone will do it.  In fact, it's already been done in the seedier side of the net industry.  It might be nice to see a little more competitive oopmh in Western information markets, so maybe Cuban will take up the challenge.

I can't help noting that a huge portion of the A-list probably aren't blogs in the traditional sense - they're message boards, marketing sites, group publishing houses, and the like.  As Cuban points out, not a bad thing - just different.  The market will decide.

How does Baker's proposal differ from blogrolls, anyway?

Big Worlds: Blogging in the ElderSphere

I read Jen Huget's interesting Blogging Through The Ages in the Washington Post recently, and couldn't help wondering whether there is a "big world" aspect of the medium that has to some extent been overlooked.

So are Elders one example of a Big World -- a really, really big world?  Elders are not exactly a small demographic, and are the wealthiest (at least in Western countries), and in some respects are more-connected that other segments.  Yet works like Mark Buchanan's Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks has been taken to mean that people will be connecting in ever-more-refined groups.  Not sure if we're missing things with that model.  Oh maybe this is just a straw figure argument.

On the Ownership of Ideas

It's a natural human tendency to think of an idea we had as belonging to us.  The more self-aggrandizing among us, including me, refer to "my idea," as if we know we were the first to have it.  We show a certain hubris when we take that kind of position, and not simply because so often, someone else has already had the brilliant idea we think we had first.  Instead, it's the hubris of one who does not pay proper homage to the thinkers who came before, nor to the power of the language they created that allowed "our idea" to come into being.

The language, after all, thinks us as much as we think it.  So the only reason we think up new technology in collaboration or instant messaging is because thousands of people cooked up the network infrastructure, communication protocols, and software categories that allowed those ideas to come into being.  Not that I'm taking a position on the patentability of software implementations - too big an idea for a single blog post.  Instead, just to say, almost every new idea these days is but a twist, a dash of flavoring built upon a foundation laid by others whose ideas we believe are gathering dust.