David Weinberger's keynote, BlogOn day 2

"What Blogging Isn't".

He starts by body-slamming the Juicy Fruit "blog". It's a train wreck.

Oh man, he is a classic. Has the audience in stitches. I love his powerpoint - it's all handwritten, looks like the work of a Tablet PC. Even the graphs are just hand-drawn with a highlighter. Nice personal style. All of his slides look like post-it notes blown up very large.

So Dave's talking about how journos are now using many bloggers as "stringers", people they get stories from.

The Long Tail - marketers are starting to wake up to it. There are tens and tens of millions of people. The area under the end of the long tail is far larger than the area under the high part. (Great point that can't be said enough.)

The importance of writing badly. Public intimacy through fallibility.

Multi-subjectivity. A new concept in media. The blogosphere provides multiple perspectives on any topic.

Dave makes the point that the criticism often made of bloggers by MSM, that it is an echo chamber, is more accurately applied to the MSM itself. He provides examples of Doc Searls blog up against the New York Times website. Doc's site links to hundreds and hundreds of other sites. It is generous and shares the attention it has with others. Doc is telling you to go read other people. The NYT site, in contrast, only links to it's own content. No diversity. No generosity.

Multi-dispute-ism. There is room for difference online and the conversation continues. Face to face, if people have an arguement, they get emotionally involved and can come to blows. Online, we can argue, debate, but online arguments die down and people move on. It makes for a healthier world.

There are no more walls. Businesses used to think of themselves as a fort. They would selectively release information to customers and to employees and investors. Today, there are no walls. You customers often know more about your business than you do. So what should businesses do?

Internal blogs. Listen to what your customers are saying. Do an audit of your employees in a non-threatening way. Find out who is already blogging and what they are reading. Don't assume that your CEO or senior executives are the best people to blog. They are the people inside your company who might struggle with human conversation the most. Be prepared to give up control of the conversation. It's about connection, and that's the most profound thing that human beings do.

DAMN - that was a great session. Worth coming just to hear Dave.

 

 

Comments

[Tony]

Is that Juicy Fruit blog the one at juicyfruit.com?

That can't even be called a blog can it? If it is it has to be the loosest term ever. I am not even sure train-wreck does it justice.

[Rob Irwin]

Interesting use of the term 'stringer' he gave you. On all the pubs I worked out in Australia, a 'stringer' was, essentially, a freelancer. For example, you'd take a call and someone would be asking you to an event in Melbourne. You'd decline (often because there wasn't a plane ticket on offer - the cheek!), and the next question would invariably be, "Do you have a stringer down there?"

[David Weinberger]

Cam, thanks for the overly-generous bloggery.

Tony, it gets worse. Take a good look at the "contest" on the right half of the page. Try clicking on the circle for a second. Unbelievable.

Rob, that's how I meant "stringer" also, but I was talking pretty fast and didn't always put things right. In fact, print media are looking at bloggers for at least three things: Story ideas, stringing (in your sense) and as a farm team from which they can "promote" bloggers into "real" journalists.

Thanks again, Cam.