Citizen-Generated Media (CGM)

Net Neutrality and DRM Manifestos

Edward Felten is a Princeton engineering professor who has been very active in evaluating digital rights management schemes.  He has published a ten-page thought paper on the complexities surrounding net neutrality, available for all, of course. It’s called “Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality.”  Also recently made available by Microsoft is a speech that Cory Doctorow gave a couple of years ago to its senior management, entitled “DRM and MSFT: A Product No Customer Wants.”  This is available as a transcript and as a video link. 

The Best and Worst of Days

America has had some exceedingly good days, and some horrific ones.  Media Orchard has tasked itself to come up with the ten best and worst days since our country’s inception, and they make for fascinating historical reminders.  It is interesting as we near this one year anniversary that Katrina did not make the cut.  Very debatable...

Heavier Than Air - Friday Tidbit

The list of famous people who perished in airplane crashes is always growing, and this handy website allows you to track the grisly record decade by decade over the last century.

The Business of Blogging

Is blogging a hobby or a business?  Think Steve Wozniak’s garage.  A tinkerer’s pastime became a trillion dollar global business that has transformed the planet’s landscape in ways we do not yet fully comprehend, all in two short decades.

The acquisition of information used to follow predictable patterns.  The era of the personal computer changed all this.  It transferred the means of production from the realm of specialists to the realm of consumers.  Globalization and outsourcing got a quantum boost when the Internet made talking with India as easy as talking with Indiana.

Just think about how fast the trickle of early adoption became a streaming torrent of exponential growth.  The term weblog was coined and first used less than a decade ago, yet now there are more blog sites than there ever were newspapers.  The entrenched media were slow to realize what was occurring until they were hit upside the head with citizen participatory journalism had snuck up on them.  The Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Dan Rather/CBS News investigation of President Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service, and even more recently the emotionally charged Meet The Press interview of Jefferson Parish, New Orleans, LA Aaron Broussard’s tearful proclamation post Hurricane Katrina were all were first examined and/or analyzed by bloggers, and were later adopted as full-blown stories by the mainstream media only when they realized that their previously-impermeable hierarchies of command and control have been, well – dis-intermediated.

Blogging is to words as Napster was to music, a transforming technology whose influence and implications will only grow more wide-ranging with time.

Imagine that you are a large corporation engaged in the manufacture and sales of widgets.  Your organizational chart is fairly predictable.  The vast majority of workers make the widgets or supervise those that work on the widget assembly line.  A smaller group of employees work in the field, selling the widgets, and an even smaller group of executives devise the strategies and monitor all the systems that must operate to ensure the efficient production and distribution of the product in a competitive marketplace.  This basic structure is the same whether you manufacture a material product or process something more ephemeral, like information.   In traditional business structures, the information flows primarily in one direction, from the powerful spots on the top of the hierarchy downward.  Enlightened managers may have placed an anonymous suggestion box on the workplace floor, but even that was a recognition that fine-tuning any production process was best accomplished by those that actually participated in it.  By anonymizing the process, the manager was able to cherry-pick the best ideas without disrupting the hierarchy.  The same thing applied to company newsletters and magazines.  They emanated from on high and served such useful purposes as informing the workforce of changes or adaptations, or elevating morale.

Along comes the blog.  Anyone can create one, practically for free.  The early adopters were frequently voices in the wilderness, people with a point of view but no means to broadcast it.  Just as Hollywood first saw television as a threat, and missed its greater significance as an allied technology that could enhance the marketing and distribution of feature films, so too did businesses perceive blogs as annoying usurpations of their “system”.  Employees were fired for serious offenses such as disclosing company secrets or undercutting company campaigns, but just as often got the axe for posting photos of themselves in company uniforms, or for gently criticizing a misguided management policy.

 

As blogs have become more commonplace, resistance to them gradually softened.  To some, they’ve become be a useful tool, not only an expression of muted hostility.  Giant firms like General Motors, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have all embraced the blog, and required that senior management operate them for such critical functions as dispute resolution, product liability information, even labor/management negotiations.  Blogs can facilitate internal communications, or act as an avenue for customer feedback.   Their threaded, chronological nature creates a legal record and provides a well of history into which any interested reader can delve.

Traditional businesses are hierarchical and don’t usually encourage mid-level initiative.  The web is a lateral series of volitional associations, one almost impossible to monitor or control.  The architecture of the blog has enabled a dialogue, the most appropriate dialogue, to take place, outside the reins of hierarchy and in the spirit of egalitarian information transfer.  The company that refuses to recognize the utility of this because it violated protocol faces the fate of the horse-and-buggy and the typewriter.

Blogging is a digital medium, one more way to tell stories and assess their relevance.  It’s another channel, and for some, a disruptive one.  Blogs allow conversations where none could occur before.  They are currently, and will greatly change the way that business is conducted at virtually every level.

Where You’ve Been, Where You Are Going

Did you ever think about how much of the world (or of the USA) you’ve actually visited?  Now come two handy websites that build you a map, based on input you provide.  To map out every state visited, go here, and top map out all the countries visited, a much more daunting task, go here. 

50 Mainstream Best

Time Magazine has selected the fifty best websites from their mainstream point of view. It’s a pretty eclectic mix.  And the Jackson Pollock amusement is a real time waster!

CEO Blogs

In The Blog Ahead, I report on the blogging efforts of the CEOs of General Motors and Whole Foods Market.  It appears that this trend is expanding rapidly, and there is now a website that lists the blogs of over 250 corporate leaders who are actively blogging, with hyperlinks.  It would be interesting to know how many of these CEO-credited blogs are actually written by the CEOs themselves.

New Research Reveals How Blogs Revolutionize The Way Human Beings Connect

I decided to go ahead and post my boring press release...

New Book demonstrates the influence and power of Citizen-Generated Media.

New York, NY (PRWEB) August 17, 2006 -- With tens of thousands of blogs being created every day, the communications landscape is changing faster than ever before. In response to the emerging significance of blogging, R. Scott Hall, author of The Blog Ahead: How Citizen-Generated Media Is Radically Tilting The Communications Balance, sheds light on the art of blogging. Hall’s book teaches people how to use blogging as a tool to make their businesses, no matter the size, into a more consumer-friendly, customer-satisfying corporate outreach. The book demonstrates how progressive business owners can use blogs to emotionally connect with their clients resulting in a deeper relationship.

“Bloggers are at the forefront of the greatest change in communication since the Gutenberg press,” states Scott Hall. “Individuals with no establishment connections can connect with millions worldwide, relying solely on the power of their ideas and their prose to connect with and influence an audience that print journalists and authors could only dream of.”

“The blogging phenomenon has remarkable adaptability to everything from corporate communications to kids’ interactive diaries on MySpace.com.” says Hall. Hall shows not only why Blogging transcends more traditional communication forms but also how it works in a variety of settings. Hall’s book features a wealth of humorous and inspiring specific examples of what blogging makes possible that traditional media can’t.

For instance, readers will learn about various web conferencing sites such as Squidoo, a site created by Marketing Expert Seth Godin. Squidoo allows users to create a lens that will focus attention back to their particular blog or web page. Hall’s book goes on to list various strategies that enable individuals and companies to utilize blogs effectively.

Hall’s inspiration to share his knowledge of blogging began as he realized the huge impact that the Internet would have on communications. While working at CompuServe as a sales person, Hall witnessed how a company with 4 million subscribers could be beat at their own game by a rival company, AOL, with class act marketing.

After listening to a talk given by Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.org, a famous free classified advertising and social networking web destination, Hall realized that new media was going to revolutionize communications, allowing everyone to have their opinion heard. In his talk, Newmark of Craigslist.org proclaimed that, “The internet was everyone’s printing press.”

As Hall began to shape his book he realized that one of the great benefits of blogging is allowing people of diverse backgrounds and interests to find and connect with like-minded colleagues despite geographical barriers. Hall’s book will teach you specifically how to use blogging as a tool to connect with like-minded thinkers and even those with divergent ideas on any given subject. Blogging is literally shrinking our world and Hall’s book shares the ways you can influence people on any issue anywhere in the world.

Information workers of all kind are calling The Blog Ahead a must read as it outlines a global meta-view of the very complex transmogrification that the media is undergoing and the implications that come because of an ever shrinking globe.

The Blog Ahead Launches...Finally!

Here is a little book descriptor I stumbled upon that I had written this spring and I thought it worthy of posting as opposed to a boring old Press Release...

The Blog Ahead is written to discuss the advancement of higher level discovery and communication taking place due to the global blogging phenomenon.  A discussion of both historical communication and theories on communication, both recent and distant, are brought together to give context to the existing tipping point occurring on the web.

I keynote excerpts and analysis of conversations (blogs) primarily in the political, legal, media and business realms.  Interjecting keen, well-supported and sometimes humorous content, one of the key themes - the idea of an entirely new prototype for global communication virtually being responsible for a new tangibility of the human mind – is explored.

The Permanence of Blogging

Writing became the pipeline that allowed precise messages to be passed on to subsequent generations.  From inscriptions carved on hardened stone to mass-produced copies of books, the words of ancestors long gone remained to haunt or instruct, in a manner that made our species quite unique.  No longer did distortions caused by word of mouth dilution threaten to wipe out the meaning of the original message.

The last decade has seen a democratization of the ongoing human dialogue, driven by new technologies and the realization that cooperation among tribes makes more survival sense in a world of plenty than a state of permanent warfare.  But there is a growing feeling that words in the ether lack the gravitas that words printed on paper possess. Blogging has an immediacy about it and has become a preferred path for rumor and instantaneous comment.  But will the blogposts of today be around tomorrow like all the great books are?

In the past, libraries were funded because leaders saw the value of safeguarding the ebb and flow of creativity, but the blogosphere and its cyber-father, the Internet, have bloomed into great cultural institutions without the parallel sense that their content is precious and should be saved and archived in a Cyber-Library of Congress. 

It's probably safe to predict that the behemoths of the blogosphere like Slashdot and Boing Boing will exist in some archival form for years to come, but what about the millions of less important blogs created by teenagers and others for their own edification?  These may be as important for future generations as the Drudge Report and Huffington Post seem to be for ours, but for reasons yet to be articulated. 

It is not difficult to imagine a future historian mining thousands of these typical online diaries to track the evolution of language or to define the evolution of social trends, much as present-day historians pour over sales records and crop diaries of the Civil War period to paint a more complete portrait of slavery or of technological development. 

There are already attempts being made to archive all the early, and now defunct, history of the Internet, but the sheer mass of blogging verbiage and its mostly ephemeral nature suggest that blogs might not be treated with the same degree of curator love as the iconic early web.  It would take a government or a corporation with extraordinary foresight and the guts to stick to a long-range vision to implement a kind of Cyber Repository open to all.  Are there any takers out there?