September 19, 2004

One blog post, by Dan Gillmor, and one comment, by one of his readers. It’s all there.

From Gillmor’s blog:

Frank Rich (NY Times): This Time Bill O’Reilly Got It Right. No matter how long the overlap between Mr. Carville and Mr. Begala’s TV and campaign roles, that brand and CNN itself are now as inextricably bound to the Democrats as Fox is to the Republicans.

The network has succeeded in an impossible feat — ceding Mr. O’Reilly the moral high ground. The Bush campaign doesn’t have to enlist Fox hosts for its staff since they’re willing to whore for it without even being asked.

Comments

So, the next time the Merc runs an op-ed piece from Alexander Cockburn, it magically turns into “socialist fishwrap”?

The problem with Faux News isn’t that it has openly-partisan talk show hosts. It’s that management has blurred (some would say “erased”) the line between “news” and “commentary”.

Frankly, Faux isn’t even CNN’s real competition anymore: that role belongs to Google News, which provides the same up-to-the-minute information, with an even wider range of perspectives. Anyplace you have access to a computer.

If it remains in its current form, CNN is probably doomed to becoming a sort of “Newzak” for use in airport waiting rooms and similar PC-less venues.

Doc Searls points us to Om Malik’s publishing of an essay by a colleague of Malik’s. Doc suggests this essay may be the most important piece ever written on the history, current state and eventual future of VoIP as one of the fundamental components of communication.

An excerpt:

Advances in communication from writing and paper to the printing press, telegraph, and telephone shape human progress. Some might have viewed VoIP as an interesting toy in 1995, but no one presently doubts it will dominate the communication future.

The economies of scale associated with growing customer awareness and competition will produce a Moores Law like virtuous cycle of communication innovation.

The full essay is here.

I have often wondered why blogging hasn’t been adopted more readily in organizations and corporations … as have many others, and there are a plethoras of opinions readily available on the subject.

What that means to me … when so many people write about it … is that it is obvious that it would be useful. After all, it’s online conversation and would serve to advance projects, enhance the possibilities of innovation or responsiveness, and so on … just as real-life conversation does.

But then, as David Weinberger has famously said …. coonversation is only possible between equals … and in 99% of organizations, traditional hierarchy is alive, well and thriving.

Blogs are viewed suspiciously because they enable real, raw voice. It’s not obvious how they can be controlled in the same way that employees are controlled by the fear of performance reviews, or ostracization, or dismissal. Microsoft has many bloggers, and supposedly it has a corporate policy on same … Don’t Be Stupid – which makes all the sense in the world.

I’ve stated before that I believe that developing and using an active network of blogs in an organization would accomplish most, if not all, of the stated desirable results of many many dollars spent on leadership development and developing flexible, responsive, open, more motivating corporate cultures – rather than the current appetitie for “fit-in-or-fuck-off” cultures.

Suw Charman, Corante’s Strange Attractor, has some well-thought out words on the gradual evolution of the prcesses and real possibilities of blogging in corporate environments