December 2004

An interesting article on blogs … an extract

When it came to the criticism emanating from Boing Boing, Scoble simply… agreed. “MSN Spaces isn’t the blogging service for me,” he wrote. Nobody at Microsoft asked Scoble to comment; he just did it on his own, adding that he would make sure that the team working on Spaces was aware of the complaints. And he kept revisiting the issue on his blog.

“It’s all about openness,” says chairman Bill Gates of Microsoft’s public blogs like Scobleizer. “People see them as a reflection of an open, communicative culture that isn’t afraid to be self-critical.”

… and musical stylings by Harry

The President on his way to some other shafting.

…. offer up some pearls now and then.

One commenter over on Washington Monthly, a progressive blog, cuts through much of what’s going on to offer some short and sweet advice on major policy revisions.

Given that the current situation has been more or less developing ever since the founding of Israel (actually before that), it’s not likely that the current US administration will implement this advice any time soon.

I believe histroy will show us, one day, that this would have been the way to go … starting yesterday.

- Get off oil

That’s NEW THINKING.

… from a non-North American whom I trust to be thoughtful … Dina Mehta. I’ve been reading her material for a couple of years now, and know that she is thoiughtful and considered.

She was comparing, and trying to understand, some comments received in response to Arundhati Roy’s very critical examination of recent Bush Administration doings in Iraq. Some of the commenters were very heated in their criticisms of Roy, and suggested Roy was a terrorist, rather than Bush. This type of logic seems similar to much of what I observe going on in the U.S., with real divisiveness continuing to grow as any criticism of Bushco’s grand adventures is typoically turned upside down … the critics are told that they “hate freedom”, or don’t appreciate Dubya’s far-seeing wisdom (I am so tired of the continued use of the phrase “history will show whether Bush is right or not” … that can be said about absolutely anything, and is NOT in any way a logical support for having invaded Iraq.

Apropos Dina’s (longer) post here, I have read much of Arundhati Roy’s recent work, and readers will know that I have no fondness whatsoever for George Bush.

I found the points of view she has uncovered, and her subsequent exploration of them, very interesting to read and think about. Thanks, Dina.

Am excerpt from her longer blog post:

Its interesting to see how there seems to be a blurring here of who the aggressor is and who the victim. And who is to blame - the perpetrators of atrocities resulting from war or the initiators of the war itself ? And finally who is a terrorist or an enablor of terrorists ? Bush as Arundhati Roy says … or Arundhati Roy as Shanthi suggests ? 

And if the people of Iraq resist this invasion are they terrorists ? Or are they victims who are resisting terrorist attacks ? And what is wrong in Arundhati Roy saying - “One wasn’t urging them to join the army, but to become the resistance, to become part of what ought to be non-violent resistance against a very violent occupation,” she said, adding that the term resistance needed to be redefined. “We can’t assume that resistance means terrorism because that would be playing right into the hands of the occupation,” she said”

Online Advertising

Jakob Nielsen talks of the The Most Hated Advertising Techniques :

“Summary : studies of how people react to online advertisements have identified several design techniques that impact the user experience very negatively. …………

Lessons for Websites :

Sites that accept advertising should think twice before accepting ads that 80 to 90% of users strongly dislike. The resulting drop in customer satisfaction will damage your long-term prospects.

How Not To Advertise Online

Advertisers themselves might be tempted to continue with these nasty design techniques as long as they can find sites that will run them. After all, they typically yield higher clickthrough rates. But clickthrough is not the only goal. Users who are deceived into clicking on a misleading ad might drive up your CTR, but they’re unlikely to convert into paying customers. And your brand suffers a distinct negative impact when you antagonize customers and use techniques that are associated with the worst scum on the net.

Corporate websites can also learn from these studies, even if they don’t run ads. Many elements that users dislike in ad design are also common in mainstream Web design, with equally bad affects. A few things to avoid:

Pop-ups

Slow load times

“Teasing” links, misleading categories, and other elements that trick users into clicking

Content that doesn’t clearly state the site’s purpose or what a particular page covers

Content that moves around the page

Sound that plays automatically

All of these techniques have caused problems in traditional usability studies of non-advertising sites, and I’ve warned against them many times before. The fact that they’re associated with the most hated ads is one more reason that respectable sites should avoid them at all costs.”

Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void gets into one of the most interesting areas of impact the Web has on the intersection between creative work and the commercialization of content.

I think that this is what Wired was looking at with its recent issue that offered a free CD of music to use.

Is the interactive future inevitable ? I think that’s the point of this recent post by Ming the Mechanic that highlights the issue that 15 lines of code in Python provides an effective P2P application … can it ever be controlled from on high ?

Increasingly it will be a world of information that is constantly flowing, fed with original and re-mixed, re-combined bits and pieces of information. Humans combining this bits and pieces will always be the final filter, as they take in the information and turn around and push info back out … publishing to a blog, or email, or to a file that will be saved in their own Personal Server. A Personal Server will be a simple and easy to use “electronic filing cabinet” that accomodates both the diligent person’s need for structure and the ad-hoc nature of many peoples’ inforaging habits.

From Gaping Void:

In a recent gapingvoid post, Microsoft employee/star blogger Robert Scoble asks the question about his employer:

But who knows. Predicting the future is a hazardous business. So is underestimating Microsoft.

Suffice it to say that two worlds are colliding here … a monopolistic outlook on personal-productivity software (Word, excel and Powerpoint) and the world where easy-to-use blogging tools and an increasingly effective infrastructural of link management are creating a new environment for creating and exchanging information.

No wonder Microsoft has come out with MSN Spaces. This intersection - Microsoft personal productivity software and the capabilities for self-expression offered by blogs - is where the world will come to life on the Web over the next decade or so.

Matthew Yglesias cites examples where swift united action, enabled by links, blogs and people, may have had some positive impact. He then calls directly for the same with respect to pushing back against the proposed changes to Social Security, and offers us the example of how the still-powerful AFL-CIO used its clout against financial services firm State Street.

What’s really interesting in this piece titled Harball is the context he creates, wherein his concerns about civil progressive society are accompanied by his recommendations about how to address issues … by forming focused virtual communities, using the Web (and no doubt, blogs as well as email).

Interesting. With the government entirely in the other side’s hands, progressives are going to increasingly need to fight and win battles in society rather than in the courts or the legislatures. Doign that effectively means building a more robust progressive civil society.

If the AFL-CIO does move forward with something like this (and I hope they do), I hope they’ll think of ways for people outside the unions to likewise sign on. The anti-Sinclair campaign this past fall was encouraging, but suffered from a lack of participation on the part of big, established institutions.

Bottom-up social media, where the content/passion starts at the edge and ripples upward/inward, creating order and power as it goes.

Very cool. I am going to have to watch these phenomena very closely.

A snippet taken from Stowe Boyd’s article Hugster, MeetUp and Activism at the Edge on his Get Real blog on Corante.

I also noticed a similar statement in a quote from Daniel Henninger (below) on Glenn Reynold’s Instapundit blog today, as well as further down his page some speculation that Time’s Person (Man) of the Year could be the Blogger logo, or a photo of an eye with the caption Citizen Journalist underneath it.

Communications technologies, most of them developed in American laboratories (often by engineers who voted for John Kerry), have finally begun to effect an historic shift in the relationship between governments and the governed. The governed are starting to win.

Is a Power Shift underway ? Looks like it. Emergence, emergent democracy, the power of distributed networks, call it what you will … I believe one of two things can happen over the next decade or so, as this set of conditions matures somewhat, and the technology just gets more integrated and easier to use. Either the transparency will grow, and there will be requisite (but probably painful) changes to structures and adaptive responses that will render hierarchy, generally, more accountable (early examples abound, but suffice to say that I consider Sarbanes-Oxley a good thing to keep an eye on), or the dark side will grow, with which there will be greater corporate and governmental control (some visible, some not) of digital rights, digital identities, and yes, even the content that will be published and exchanged on the Internet.

Which of thos two directions will you or do you support ?

It’s commonplace today to use, or hear, the phrase “The Age of Transparency”. And of course as I have been thinking about what I call “wirearchy” for a long time, I am heartened to see the ongoing changes taking place.

But, what does transparency mean for most of us ? More choices, or more confusion when we find out that our local government, or our employer, or a friend or a neighbour, is different or has behaved differently than we expected or were previously advised ? How much transparency can we handle ?

I don’t mean this to sound trite. I’m reminded that a widely-recognized guru of leadership, Warren Bennis, said not too long ago that “hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust”. I think we’re seeing the ramifications of that in many places and ways these days. Knowing more and seeing more, having and living in transparency … implies engagement, and it implies growing one’s capabilities to handle, or at least work with, more sources of information and opinion than that to which we are habituated. If you don’t trust your boss, or that Roman Catholic bishop in your region who smiles at everyone, including the altar boys, or the politicians who have lied and manipulated repeatedly, or your brokers … who do you trust, and why do you trust them ?

Think about it for a minute. Until relatively recently (ten or fifteen years ago) the only sources of information for most people were television, newspapers and radio … and in that mix, there was a much greater tendency or willingness to rely on those sources as authoritative. And when it came to life in the real-time world, at work or in interaction with institutions, the dominant force was the authority, status, and expertise of the top strata of organizations and institutions. Fifteen years ago, there were no easily-clickable sources of information, no blogs, no interlinking, no citizen journalism.

What will it be like when we have had blogs and RSS feeds for 15 years, when it’s commonplace to link to several sources in one paragraph (sources that may even be conflicting), and when the examinations and analyses stay up on a blog or web site for years, and can be linked together with other expert sources of investigation, examination and analysis ?

Will this promote greater truthfulness, and more listening to a wider range of voices in various forms of dissent, agreement, clarification and criticism ? Or will this promote a very real surround-senses atmosphere in which people clamp onto channels … of thinking, of expression, and of influence … which may result in a much narrower and probably homogenous center … actually, many many centers … with divergent and exploratory thinking remaining out at the edge ?

Watts Wacker and Ryan Mathews wrote a book about two or three years ago titled “The Deviant’s Advantage”, in which they set out a well-worn path for new ideas and innovations, both large and small in their overall impact. The path was from the Fringe, to the Edge, to the Realm of the Cool, to the Next Big Thing and finally to the Mainstream … and they used as an example the now-widespread popularity of tattooing. Blogging would also serve well as an example. Is a marginal activity like blogging, still on the Edge as far as most people are concerned, likely to become mainstream, perhaps in some derivative form ? Will it, for example, be the way people communicate and learn in the workplace in ten years ? Will it be excluded from the workplace, because organizational cultures are not able to get past criticisms and challenges, and continue to insist that everyone speak in the sotto voce ersatz non-controversial politeness that has characterized the most recent wave of new language in the coporate workplace ?

My question is … will all this bottoms-upness, the World of Ends, the mass customization of work and life, the transparency afforded by an interconnected, interlinked and linkerate critical mass of people … will this means of communications, and the actions that flow from it, become mainstream over the next decade, and if so, will there actually come to be a major change in the ways power and control are 1) viewed, 2) enabled and enacted, and 3) used ?

What do you think ?

From the Knowledge @ Work newsletter from the Wharton School of Business

What’s the Buzz About Buzz Marketing?

There’s a new marketing catchphrase that’s getting rave word-of-mouth reviews. From articles in the popular press to conversations in the classroom, huge companies to boutique marketing firms, suddenly it seems you can’t talk about new products without addressing ‘buzz marketing.’ “People are buzzing about buzzing,” says Wharton marketing professor Barbara Kahn who adds, along with others, that word-of-mouth marketing has long been recognized as a way to influence consumer behavior. What’s new about buzz marketing is the structure and hype surrounding it and the attempts to measure its effectiveness on sales.

Few mechanisms are better at creating buzz online than blogging.

I wonder when we ‘ll bet blogged to death by marketing types trying out their chops. I imagine after they start, they’ll find out that marketing and creating buzz online means being intelligent and honest as well, as about message … or maybe being intelligent and honest while blogging is how the buzz is created ?

I posted an item a few days ago from Michael Wolff that was what he calls the ki-work manifesto … in response to some words from Tom Peters about the ongoing “revolution in the work place.

One of the yahoo group members asked Michael for some clarification about what “ki” and “ki-work” mean.

Here’s his response:

The ‘ki’ in ki work comes from the Japanese word which translates very much

builds trusted relationship. In that sense, both parties support each other.

Just a question, really.

I wonder how long it will be before there’s acknowledgment of blogs, blogging and its dynamics in the workplace ?

I’m aware of a range of initiatives that have geared up to introduce blogging into business areas, and for the fenestration of the workplace.

Recent months have given us more profile for desktop search (Copernic, Google, X1, and now Miicrosoft), new blogging applications (Silkblogs, MSN Spaces, Qumana, Blogjet, Ecto for Windows), increased visibility for wikis (Forbes and various other business magazines), more knowledge-worker friendly research (High Beam). And then there are those who have been at it for a while, such as SocialText or HeadShift. All this activity has been accompanied by comprehensive industry reporting by Morgan Stanley, and the birth of a spate of blog consulting offers (InisdeBlogging, Larix Consulting, Bryght)

If blogging is essentially about conversation online (which is readily demonstrable when on a blog with an established commenting community), and it’s understood that useful and effective dynamics develop that help participants stay on topic, learn and acquire a knowlege base that’s readily accessible via posted links, then the seemingly obvious question is why hasn’t blogging been taken up more readily, more quickly ?

I’ve written before about my belief, from my years as an organizational consultant (design, development, change), that blogging is an obvious way to address many leadership development issues as well as the fundamentals of an open, flexible, healthy workplace. How can it not be ? Most of us who have been blogging know that obvious cranks and trolls are dismissed pretty readily, even if things can get stupid every once in a while. So what’s different from the real world ? Group and individual dynamics are pretty similar in real life. Things get done by having conversation with other people - customers, fellow employees, suppliers, vendors, and so on. And we’re told. repeatedly that trust and relationship are touchstones of todays transparency-age business and workplace environment. Guess what many blogs are good at - yes, building trust and relationships.

Th obvious response to this from a command-and-control mindset is distrust - about the revealing of corporate secrets, or employees dissing the company, its products or services or fellow employees or higher-ups … or of the distraction or perceived “waste of time”, the blogorrhea that many might think is the essence of blogging.

That’s another interesting area of enquiry …. just how much control, other than through ideas, vision and values, can be exercised over employees, work groups and entire organizations when virtually all the workers are involved with their work via interlinked networks. Even though integrated workplace systems like PeopleSoft and SAP are everywhere, these applications tend to be highly structured and don’t provide the kind of architecture, ease-of-use and mindspace conducive to purposeful conversations. But that structure does ensure a fair bit of control, from the design of the business processes and workers’ interaction with that system.

Any type of control other than the structure of the porcesses and information system comes from established practices and culture. And this is the nub of the issue … millions or billions are spent on leadership development and culture change, notably in the areas of communications skills and competency models so that employees will think outside of boxes, be accountable, speak truthfully, be proactive and demonstrate leadership capability at whatever level of the organization.

Blogging is about conversation, and the exchange of information and ideas … it’s not much of a stretch to imagine a project-focused blog, with the updateable and annotatable Gantt Chart as a link in the sidebar, as well as an easily-updated status report for each project team member, and RSS feeds or email notifications keeping each and every member fully in the flow of the project’s evolution. fenestration, or putting windows into the membrane, of the workplace, that’s what blogs can do.

Give all of this three or five more years, that many more pre-digital employees retired, that many more always-on newbies coming into the workforce, better tools and applications … will conversations still be needed and happening in the workplace ? Are purpose-built configurations of these tools and caopabilities more effectyive than disjointed, context-thin email and structured portals ? In my opinion, yes … clearly.

Will all of this activity and the continued take-up of blogs, wikis and related derivatives … will all this have an impact on HR and organizational design and development consulting, and new practices. I can’t see how it won’t. The funny thing today is, I think, that many of the responses are available, and have been around for a while, but the context of two-wayness, the “hyperlinks subvert hierarchy” aspect has been vigorously denied or ignored … to date. Why else is leadership development about listening, authenticity, and values ? Why else are many expensive and often ineffective decisions or approaches taken other than to protect perceived power and control ?

There are examples almost every day of the ways that interconnected interaction has led or is leading to changing business models, new consrtructs for understanding and administering intellectual property, shifts in power due to the transparency and vigor of online communities. Can organizations keep their fingers in the dike for a lot longer, or forever ? Maybe … but what’s the point ?

Why not recognize the widespread presence of this way of connecting, exchanging and yes, working … online, and begin to look at the design and development issues in a forever-more interconnected and interlinked workplace and markets ?

The lesson is that there’s a new force—spearheaded by people who work for no bosses and whose prose never sees an editor’s pencil—that provides the water-cooler fodder for the larger high-tech community. Its power extends not only to high-tech cool-hunting but also to what’s politically correct, geek style.

(Open source… gooood. Onerous copy protection… eeeevil.) And the significance of this phenomenon has some important implications for the way opinions will be formed in the decentralized world of Internet media.

The rest of the article can be read here.

How long will it be before that last sentence reads something like:

” … has some important implications for the way opinions are formed and people interact and learn in an increasingly decentralized workplace and in their daily lives ?”

… on his Informed comment blog, citing a blog essay by Martini Republic:

The phenomenon of blog trolling, and frankly of blog agents provocateurs secretly working for a particular group or goal and deliberately attempting to spread disinformation, is likely to grow in importance. It is a technique made for the well-funded Neoconservatives, for instance, and I have my suspicions about one or two sites out there already.

Will the blogging world go the same way? So far, if you look at the top hundred sites at technorati.com with regard to incoming links, what is striking is how above-board they are. Is the collective wisdom of the blogging world such as to reduce the dangers here? Is the blogging world actually less open to manipulation than corporate media? Stay tuned.

Update - Next Morning

As of 9.000 a.m. PST December 11, 2004 Technorati is watching 5,002,014 blogs

I meant to do this last week or so, but when I looked at the Technorati home page, it’s blogometer watching 5,000,000 blogs seemed to be a bit of a ways off yet.

Well, today I went there, and almost missed it … as of 11.00 p.m. PST December 10, 2004, Technorati is watching:

4,992,754 blogs

I wonder if Technorati’s blogometer will turn to 5,000,000 tomorrow, December 11 or the next day, December 12. I’ll bet late tomorrow, in the evening.

For those of you who are interested, I kept track of the blogometer rollover as technorati went from watching 3 million + blogs to over 4 million.

That rollover happened sometime in the lat evening of September 23, 2004 and the early morning of September 24, 2004.

So … from 4,000,000 to 5,000,000 …

1,000,000 blogs created and then watched by Technorati in approximately 77 days, or about 2.5 months.

That’s just about 13,000 blogs per day … which incidentally is bang-on what the rate of blog creation was a year and a half ago.

Update:

Just before going to bed, 2.5 hours after I first posted this item:

Technorati is now watching 4,996,925 blogs … so another 4,171 blogs in the last 2.5 hours.

Now I’ll bet that there will be more than 5,000,000 blogs watched by Technorati when I wake up tomorrow morning.

I got this via email as a member of a yahoo group focused on Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of the support economy.

Michael Wolff of ki-work.com has been thinking about organizations, knowledge work, customer service, distributed newtorks and offshoring.

Here’s his email:

Following Tom Peters offshoring manifesto in which he says that off-

approach to work-life balance.

… over on Gaping Void, I noticed either a blog ad or a new type of link, over to what looks like a blog, more than a site.

SlackerManager.com - Paving The Path Of Least Resistance, So You Don’t Trip And Fall

Blogging meets Dilbert in the Post-9/11 Era ?

The tag line makes sense when you read it, almost. But then, I found myself thinking … if it’s the path of least resistance, who cares if you fall … you’ll probably roll into something even less resistant, and it might be fun - warm, wet, soft, easy on the touch … whatever.

I’ll look around, and see what it has to say. I am so very jaded about workplace stuff … witty observations, more prescriptions and nostrums about high performance, and engagement, and execution, and leadership, and bottom-up managing upward, and authenticity, and hot groups, and innovation, and creativity.

I believe I have a good reason for being jaded. This domain was my career focus for 20 years, and a passion for most of those 20 years (and arguably, when thinking and writing about wirearchy, the sociology of technology, and the dynamics of intercognilinked communications … it still may be). I have boxes and boxes of books in my storage lockers on self-directed teams, role and power negotiations in the workplace, organizational design, organizational change and development, spirituality at work, leadership, the future of organizations. I’ve been a presenter about issues such as organizational effectiveness, work design, and the “workplace of the future” at national and international conferences in three or four countries.

From a cynical point of view, I could say that the more there has been an emphasis on performance and competition, the more it has been an excuse for many (most ?) organizations to become more darwinian, meaner if not leaner, more conservative and risk-averse, and more narrow, more rigid … even though one wcould argue that the demands of our current environment make it necessary, critical even, that organizations become more cooperative and collaborative, educated players-with-risk, and seeking to engrain flexibility as a way of life, a central defining factor of culture.

I am jealous, in a way, of the people in their early ’20’s through to mid-to-late 30’s, in that they at least get to be realistic, sardonic, sarcastic, intelligent, and so on “slackers” because it’s at least evident in 2004 that life is more often than not NOT the monotonic, black and white, heterosexual couple, two kids and a house fairy tale, the work-your-way-up-the-ladder for 20 years and you’ll be alright beliefs. Sure, those scenarios still unfold for many people in different ways or via different paths, but at least we don’t pretend as much about that area of life any more. We do pretend about lots of other stuff, though … you can probably pick just as many areas as me.

On the other hand, I imagine that there are many 20-something to 30-somethings out there that think I must be nuts or out of touch with their lives, given that there’s still so much of the old-school, established institutions mindset still in power … and no doubt many of them have a very harried, difficult set of circumstances to navigate and manage. For them I have a lot of empathy, and I still sometimes feel a responsibility to keep pushing for more openness in organizational/workplace areas and issues. Work and making one’s contributions are central aspects of peoples’ lives, and there’s an inherent, ongoing struggle between the demands made on organizations by the rules of the commercial/business game, and the demands made on individuals - physically, psychologically and emotionally - by organizations in order to succeed at the business game.

I can often understand why intelligent people become slackers, or why the “slacker ethic” as I understand it, exists … why encourage this system by getting empassioned about corporate performance when the system is badly out of whack, and not doing you any favours ?

… Air America, and Liberals Still Playing “Nice”

Today, Al was playing choice cuts of Rush’s idiotic, morally debauched rationalizations for torture at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. A pointless exercise, since Dittohead Mark thinks any criticism of the military is picking out the negative instead of accenting the positive. He insisted, practically demanded, that instead of emphasizing the occasional bad thing the military’s doing in Iraq–you know, like wiping out entire wedding parties–Al should come up with one positive item a day from Iraq. And not be sarcastic about it either, Mark added.

Al should have told his dittohead friend that it’s too damned late to be sprinking sugar on the mound of corpses mounting in Iraq, but instead he persisted in this exercise in futility, trying to persuade someone who’s unpersuadable, winkle a mind that’s proudly, defiantly clam-shut. It really is liberal masochism trying to find common ground with someone who believes liberals barely deserve to occupy the same earth. Dittohead Mark might concede a minor point here or there, but he’s never going to budge on the big dumb positions his hero Rush holds dear, and using his powers of reason on a sensibility so inert is a waste of Al’s breath, and a waste of the listener’s time.

… the exoneration of George Galloway, a British MP (whom the right-wing called, wrongly, “Saddam’s Little Helper”)

The Telegraph did me and the anti-war movement an injustice and the judge held it to account. But the Blair government - which used the Telegraph’s assault to force me out of a Labour party I’d served for 36 years - has committed an incomparably greater injustice. Iraq was invaded on trumped-up charges. As a result, an estimated 100,000 Iraqis have died; the lives of millions more have been wrecked. This week we learned the conditions of child health in a land occupied are now even worse than during the killing years of sanctions. Yet not a single government minister has fallen. No official has been sacked. Alastair Campbell has become a highly paid raconteur and talk show host. John Scarlett, unblushing, has been promoted to head the Secret Intelligence Service. The guilty men in Whitehall and Westminster remain unpunished.

Now the stain on my name has been removed, I intend to step up my efforts, with others both inside and outside parliament, to harry and hold to account those responsible for the crimes of the Iraq war.”

Doc Searls points to a new blog, and waxes optimistic. It sounds portentous … Gary Becker, professor at University of Chicago and a Nobel-winning economist and Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institute at Stanford, and Richard Posner, a U.S. Circuit Court Judge.

Emphasis added

Blogging is a major new social, political, and economic phenomenon. It is a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek¹s thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge.

We have decided to start a blog that will explore current issues of economics, law, and policy in a dialogic format. Initially we will be posting just once a week, on Mondays. In time we may post more frequently. The first postings will be tomorrow, December 6.

I’m going to answer “Yes” to my question, and here’s why.

A lot of the news about blogs is about two key features of blogging …. two-wayness and voice … that are the outcomes of sociology meeting technology head on.

Both attributes are the results of communication and sharing attempts at making meaning using a medium that didn’t really exist for most people only 15 years ago.

Information architecture, basic web site technology and the infrastructure of the Internet have all sufficiently advanced such that blogging is becoming able to combine all three to let individuals connect and exchange via personal publishing … of text, images, voice and video.

I’ve consistently noticed over the past three years how and what I felt when reading other peoples’ blog, when considering the ebbs, flows, insights, resolutions and other arcana of my relationship with blogging, and when engaged in dialogue with others via the Comments section of their blogs and on my blog.

When listening to other peoples’ voices … I look at sentence structures, I notice style, I read woop-ass phrases with delight, I marvel, shake my head and sigh when i go through some of the truly brilliant material I have seen (there are some real genius people out there … amazing). I make the conscious decision, from time to time, to give a full 30 minutes or hour (or two) to go through other peoples’ material … and this involves feeling whether i am ready to shift my body position, slow down and concentrate … attend.

Some people blog light and positive, some people literally hurl invective … others satirize, in different styles … you learn to look for the smirk, or the knowing wink, or the shared nod of understanding and reflection. Colours matter, and the cleanliness or delicacy or whimsy or banality of the font, the spacing … the blogger who writes deliciously and with long sentences, having fun … or the inspired, organic use of photos.

Two-wayness … this is a type of interaction that is truly different, I think, than talking with someone else on the phone, or speaking to them face to face. In both those cases, the evidence of what was communicated and exchanged evapoartes, if you will, unless recorded. The two-way exchange via a blog post and comments, or the more general two-wayness of links, has persistence (as many have noted before), and the process of creating, sending and receiving the information is also quite different. Organizing thoughts and speaking, either formally or informally, is very different from typing and posting words and images to ocnvey one’s message and meaning. And this persistent, always accessible two-wayness creates meaning in and of itself - the medium becomes part of the meaning created

Comments … some make you angry, or resigned to the stupidity and viciousness of trolls … some take your breath away, and lift you up, either through empathy and a felt senes of understanding and respect .. or equally, through a robust challenge to one or another assertion you may have made. The way a host responds to a range of comments, questions, challenges, and attacks can be very revealing, and I swear one can feel the calmness, or the brusque charm of an opinionated expert, or the anger or sadness in another person’s expression of their care and concern.

You get physically involved, sometimes … often ? … with the process of blogging, typing faster when your’re clear and excited, slowly and more deliberately or more vaguely, when you’re thinking or just scratching your ass and looking out the window.

Working with and in blogs makes you sometimes want to get together with other people who share this somewhat unusual but “you-know-it’s-so-natural-too” hobby of blogging. And so of course you notice outbreaks, sometimes, of people who live in a certain regional area getting together for drinks, or the phenomenon of Bloggercons and Foo Camps and Poptechs and Supernovas and SXSWs that have popped up in the past fiuve years - the sociality that is more and more accompanying the use of interconnected social technologies in this era. And of course there was a great deal of empassioned, high-engagement blogging work involved in the last three years of political campaigning that we’ve all ived through.

Doing this makes me feel social, and some of my readers may know that I’ve actually gone about meeting quite a few bloggers over the past three years - in the USA, the UK, France, Holland, and Germany, and across Canada. I enjoy meeting these new people who feel like friends already, because they have been writing and posting what it is that makes them who they are, and so I feel like I know them somewhat already … a basic threshold of trust has been established.

Other bloggers’ writing style and tone, syntax, degree of focus, diversity and other factors all combine to often give me a feeling of being able to feel the other persons’ presence coming through that which I see, read, observe and ponder. So I think you can feel other peoples’ blogs, yes.

Found on the Sift Experiment blog

At the World Future Society 2004 meeting, Edie Weiner, president of Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc. (a leading futurist consulting group in the United States) said we need to train intelligence instead of smartness:

So how do you get from A to D without having seen it done before? Arguably part of challenge requires seeing things as they are, instead of how we assume them to be. But that means seeing things in the present, instead of through the lens of case studies or old technologies. How do we do that?

She makes an interesting point … and then there’s the huge majority of people around the world who have neither the luxury of access to the Internet on a regular basis, or in many of the other cases not enough time to use it as a reflective, expressive and interactive experience with others.

Her context was the ongoing descriptions of the struggles between mainstream media and blogging regarding legitimacy.

Technology is the same thing to our generation as peace symbols and flowers were to the Baby Boomers. It defines who we are and how we see the world. It’s our way of changing our environment. Whereas they sat around with flowers in their hair or put flowers in guns or flashed the peace sign at one another (man), our weapon is far, far more deadly… we may be pacifists, anti-violence, anti-war, but, as they say, words have more power than atom bombs.

Then again… I’ve just written a proposal for a programme suggesting that the Internet is Heaven… so I may be guilty of being a bit of a CyberUtopian, but still, you’ve got to admit that blogging has changed your life. Am I right?

It’s easy to begin thinking things may be changing in massive ways. Heck, it’s not only me … Bruce Mau is famous, even … and he just named his most recent travelling exposition Massive Change - The Future of Global Design. Here’s what his home page boldly states:

Design has emerged as one of the world’s most powerful forces.

It has placed us at the beginning of a new, unprecedented period of human possibility…

… and in places where the exposition opens, I believe there’s often a keynote speech at the opening by Alvin Toffler, author of a number of well-know books, including Power Shift

If Mau’s statement is correct (and who am I to argue, huh ?) then surely the new types of persistent visually-aided communications we have experienced since the advent of the Web, the browser, ubiquitous email, blogs, and blawg, blawg, blawg … might also be heralded as a “new, unprecedented period of human possibility”.

In musing on how interconnected interlinkage might have impact on social structures and the dynamics within and without those structures, I have no doubt been guilty of naive utopianism. Many thinkers, writers, bloggers, pundits and punters ( added this group since I needed to belong somewhere in this) have opined on the democratizing forces of exchanging information and views (and probably evidence, too via the Web.

Some recent exchanges involving the term “wirearchy” and my definition and other mutterings, have prompted some curiosity (hey, when I google “wirearchy” the references are at about 20,000, up from 7,000 or so a month and a half ago).

I’ve been roundly dismissed and criticized … often … by many bright and aware people, who have virtually all said some form or other of “hierarchy is natural”, and gone on to offer their opinion as to how naive and overly optimistic I am or have been.

Generally, I agree with them … but only up to a point.

I do think hierarchy is endemic in our daily lives, all around the planet. It’s in our institutions, it’s in our groups, it’s often even in our friendships and it’s in our private lives. And as an organizing principle it’s been around for a long time - pretty much ever since humans began trying to explain things to themselves.

You know … the arrangement between God and the archangels, and then God’s representatives on earth (Kings, Queens, Cardinals and Bishops), and then various other social arrangements that have flowed from set-ups favouring aristocrats and owners. Some wag once suggested that in today’s context, wherein corporations have a lot of power, CEO’s and senior management are what royalty and the top layer of clergy were in the Middle Ages.

And certainly, these types of social arrangements predominate to this day. Hierarchy informs our daily lives from birth through to our ingress to the modern workplace, and most of us understand it more-or-less unconsciously. There are ways to escape from it … either by going off on a personal, iconoclstic route, or by coming up with a lot of money, so that no one else really can tell you what to do and why. There’s a reason it’s called “Fuck you money”.

For many years, my work consisted of helping corporations design and implement organization charts, with the attendant salary grades or classifications, perfromance management schemes, rules of engagement (otherwise known as competency models) and other sundry people management arrangements.

There are rules (believe me, rules with a capital “R”) for designing and implementing these processes.

The rules are manifest in a boring, dry and exceedingly widespread domain known as job evaluation. The core methodology for this domain was invented in the early 1950’s and reflected efforts on the part of some large-ish corporations at that time to bring greater structure and clarity to the work currently being carried out in those organizations.

The invention of this method was simple … it consisted of rank-ordering the jobs that were extant in a corporation at that time, and then seeking a consensus amongst the group of people examining the jobs what it was .. which factors… that differentiated amongst the jobs. This was supplemented with an “Input - Problem-Solving - Output” model which suggested that all work could be defined as the product of it’s inputs, problem-solving efforts and activities, and its outputs.

Factors were teased out, and codified into a set of language-based definitions. Three or four main methods quickly became prevalent in the marketplace for designing and structuring work - the Hay Guide-Chart method, the Aiken Plan, the Wyatt WJQ Method. Each of these methods are essentially the same … carbon-copies of each other … and have very similar factors and language. There have been various spin-offs since the early ’50’s but they still rely on the basic assumptions about the nature of work in an organization that were uncovered in that early, experimental work (with the possible exception of Elliott Jacques’ Time-Band Decision-Making methodology - but it relies even more on hierarchy, in some ways).

From the invention of these methodologies till today, job evaluation has been used at almost any organization or corporation that has more than a handful of people, and has come to define work almost universally.

What interests me … a lot … is that these methodologies, and the beliefs about work that they have embedded in its design and the dynamics of the workplace, have their roots in the time-and-motion studies of Taylorism and the fundamental view of work as a linear mass-production process, a sequential series of supervisable tasks.

This methodology has missed - completely - the impact of information technology and more importantly - the fact that work now takes place in an interconnected and interlinked environment. It’s interesting to note that any sense of computers aiding in the work, or even defining the processes of work, were completely absent in the founding assumptions of work design as it is still practiced widely today. It doesn’t consider the every-which-way linkages, and the persistence of those links, that point to useful information, other ways of think about some issue or problem (thinking out-of-the-box, anyone ?) or the relevant, useful and catalytic conversations people can and do get into with the help of software, linking and the Web.

The experts in this field today will tell you - quickly and adamantly - that the methodologies have incorporated the language describing work environments and challenges in an environments built on information systems. And I’d agree … and yet in a very important way that’s the core of the problem.

The fundamental issue of what is creative and constructive knowledge work, and how it must necessarily be human-centered and rooted in collaboration, has not been as widely agreed upon.

It has been studied endlessly, and there have been many interpretations of new and emerging organizational designs. And there have been important experiments with people-centered work design methodologies (the one that makes the most sense to me is Emery and Trist’s work on Participative Work Design). But nothing definitive in terms of how to design working in distributed networks has taken the place of the 1950’s Industrial Age ways of looking at work, production and service. Yes, people have identified trust as critical to succeess, and much work has gone into the development of effective communications skills.

Today, work IS communication. How work takes shape in a human-centered design process will be an interesting field to watch evolve as we all move deeper into an interconnected and interactive future.

About five years ago (the fall of 1999) I read an article in The Atlantic Monthly by Peter Drucker, titled “Beyond The Information Revolution”. That was the brief era when the dot.com boom was in full eruption … stock options were being used to attract smart people and talent to all sorts of blossoming startups, and all sorts of articles had begun to appear describing various views on the new, less hierarchic workplace cultures that seemed to be springing up everywhere.

Here’s one excerpt of Drucker’s thinking and writing in that article, found on the unreasonableman’s blog:

Peter Drucker draws social lessons from the impact of the Printing Press (c. 1455) and the Railways (c. 1855).

Software is the reorganization of traditional work, based on centuries of experience, through the application of knowledge and especially of systematic, logical analysis. The key is not electronics; it is cognitive science. This means that the key to maintaining leadership in the economy and the technology that are about to emerge is likely to be the social position of knowledge professionals and social acceptance of their values.

Drucker went on in this article to speculate a bit more deeply about his sense that “knowledge workers own the means of production now”, and the long-term implications this held for organizational design and dynamics.

Here’s a bit more, from the blog of Rick Klau … he’s taken Drucker’s insights and added what I think he suggests is the “missing link”. I’ve added bold font as emphasis.

In October, 1999 Peter Drucker wrote an article for The Atlantic that put the “information revolution” into historical context. His last paragraph is a prediction for where he expects the modern corporation to be within 10 years:

The technology to promote such sharing exists today (CRM, portals, etc.), yet too few firms have “leaders” who are capable of evangelizing the benefits of sharing their knowledge. Where Drucker fails to close the loop (and who knows, he may have done it since this 10/99 piece) is to point out that the modern organization must not only “attract, hold and motivate” knowledge workers - it must also provide an infrastructure for them that will enable and reward the active dissemination of that knowledge

Back to the check-in with reality.

As far as I know, almost all organizations are still using the basic methodologies I described above to design their organizations, create job descriptions, manage the people in their workplace … Competency models have rivalled job descriptions and used with team matrices are the current unit of work design. Great care has been taken to maintain the fundamental hierarchic structures, so of course the competency definitions are rolled out by organizational level. At the same time throughout this structure, employees are linking to each other, even if only by email, linking and talking with customers via electronic links, interacting with large information systems that integrate and reconstruct information, and of course being watched by these same systems.

There’s a reason for this continuance, and for the general lack of appetite many organizations have for innovation, or for structuring work so that it leads to better, more genuine and human outcomes on a consistent basis. Control and predictability are much prized attributes in the current economic structures and markets around the world. In addition, those who happen to find themselves in the top layers of hierarchies have little, if any, incentive to let go of the power, control and privilege that they find there. Why would they even consider it, other than on some basic level of values that they may hold personally ? It’s much harder to manage, and execute when authority is challenged, or open to a proces of building consensus before acting.

Mitigating against that these days is, of course, the difficult challenge posed by millions of smart, aware, adept people who can find out much about almost any given subject with the right information search tools and a couple of well-placed questions.

The challenges to established structures and ways of doing things have, indeed, seen the first successful instances of fundamentally redefining and redesigning work and organizations (the ubiquitous examples are Amazon, eBay, Dell, and the ongoing reconfiguration of the entertainment and communications industries).

Will such challenges continue as people who learned to think, write and work before personal computers appeared continue to retire at an accelerating pace ? Will the rapidly-growing presence of the Digital Generations (homo zappiens, as Wim Veen likes to call them) in the workplace add to the pressures for re-designing organizations and work ? Will traditional hierarchy persist in these conditions, as the conditions widen and mature ?

Here’s Drucker’s concluding paragraph in “Beyond The Information Revolution” (my emphasis added in bold):

Bribing the knowledge workers on whom these industries depend will therefore simply not work. The key knowledge workers in these businesses will surely continue to expect to share financially in the fruits of their labor. But the financial fruits are likely to take much longer to ripen, if they ripen at all. And then, probably within ten years, running a business with (short-term) shareholder value as its first - if not its only - goal and justification will have become counterproductive.

When this can no longer be done by satisfying knowledge workers’ greed, as we are now trying to do, it will have to be done by satisfying their values, and by giving them social recognition and power. It will have to be done by turning them from subordinates into fellow executives, and from employees, however well paid, into partners.

I wonder what Bruce Mau has to say about the impact of design principles on the structure and dynamics of social institutions in the first decade of the 21st century. No, I mean it, really … I’m curious.