Citizen-Generated Media (CGM)

Business Blog Summit

Today, I attend the Blog Business Summit, a three-day conference in Seattle.

Some of the people that I profile in The Blog Ahead, including conference speaker Robert Scoble, The Search author John Battelle, and Weblogs, Inc. CEO Jason Calacanis, are going to be there, so I’m toting copies of my book to surprise them with.  I must say, this is one business blog that doesn’t bog down like many do.  It mixes aesthetics and information well, and is deep enough to reward someone that spends more than thirty seconds perusing it.  One of the major presenters at the Summit is going to be Ben Edwards, the Director of New Media Communications at IBM.

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 Stock of Citizen Journalists Keeps Rising

CNN has launched a new website that encourages viewers to contribute their own stories and videos.  CNN Exchange will evaluate all incoming submissions and post what they feel is newsworthy and appropriate.  This is the largest formal recognition that citizen journalists have received from any of the electronic mainstream media, and promises to be imitated widely by other news outlets.  For a broader look at the growth of citizen-generated media, visit the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s Home Broadband Adoption 2006.

Blog-Tracking

The National Journal has an ongoing feature that tracks the buzz in the political blogosphere.  The Blogometer is a good place to find new blogs you had never heard of before, as is the blog directory Blogarama.  Blogarama also has a page that archives articles on how to blog and who should, and yet another page that lists the 165 books (as of today) that have been published on the blog phenomenon.

Digital Rights Management Transcends Politics

When a corporate strategy ticks off both the left and the right, perhaps that strategy needs reconsideration.  As I related in The Blog Ahead, Sony’s DRM strategy of embedding rootkits in the CDs they sell backfired, and became a public relations disaster when the left-leaning folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a class action suit against Sony.  Now, the right-leaning folks at the Cato Institute have published “Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act” by Timothy B. Lee.  Anyone interested in intellectual property issues and the shifting notion of fair use should read this article. 

Columbia University Class Visit - Lesson #1, Deciphering RSS

Old pal Jeremy Kagan, who has now advanced his teaching efforts to Columbia Grad students while managing well, let’s just say…a diversified capability base, asked me to come in and address his “Marketing and the Internet”, class regarding blogs and social media yesterday. The students are working on a class blog project, and I’ll be sporadically participating as an advisor for as long as they’ll have me.  Overall, it was quite a nice day as you can see from the picture I snapped on my Treo below.  I also am making my first formal contribution to the class by the RSS resource listing below.  Class dismissed…

CT Biz Blogs has posted a series of articles on Really Simple Syndication (RSS).  “RSS and You” is an introduction, “How To Find and Use an RSS Reader” and  “Ways to Find RSS Feeds” are follow-ups.  CT Biz Blogs also links to articles outside their domain on this topic.  “What are Webfeeds and Why Should You Care” is a twelve-part tutorial from 2003.  “RSS: The Web at Your Fingertips” is PC Magazine’s take on RSS from late 2005.  “Save Time with Syndication” is a 2004 post from Newsforge, and “Order from Chaos via RSS” is Information Week’s contribution from August, 2005.

R. I. P. Stanislaw Lem

One of the central notions of my book, The Blog Ahead, is that the blogosphere is a modern technological equivalent to Teilhard de Chardin’s more mystical notion of the noosphere.  Very few people knew what to do with de Chardin’s notions when they were first published, but one who did take the idea and run with it in his masterful science fiction was Polish writer Stanislaw Lem.  Lem believed that machines would evolve into entities indistinguishable from human beings.  His 1961 novel Solaris, which was first made into a film in 1971 by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, and more recently re-made by Steven Soderbergh (starring George Clooney), was about a space ship full of astronauts who come to a new planet, where the sentient being is an intelligent ocean that can read the psychologies and memory banks of individuals near it.  Lem was an exceedingly original science fiction writer, and would be much more well known had he not written in Polish.  He does have a website in both Polish and English.  A beginner’s biography of him can be found here, but it was written before he passed away.  That occurred recently in Warsaw at the age of 84.

Citizen-Generated Media on the March

Forrester Research recently released a new report: Social Computing: How Networks Erode Institutional Power, And What To Do About It.  While it costs $299, POMO Blogmeister Terry Heaton thinks it’s worth the price, as it provides a roadmap to a murky technological future, where power is likely to shift from traditional institutions to virtual communities.  For my thoughts on similar subjects, take a look at The Blog Ahead, previewed on this site.

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 timeline 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?