February 2005

Hugh Beam’s Chief Blogging Officer Chris el Rageboy reminisces about some of the hope held out by the core messages of the Cluetrain.

the scobelization of microsoft

This is going to be a followup to yesterday’s post about Firefox. But first I want to tell a little story to set up an analogy.

Really … he is going to reminisce.

It sometimes seems tough to remember that corporations are indeed full of real people, people who care … while his posts suggest that there may be some very interesting fulcra for change appear when connections, intent and ways to exchange and build ideas meet, please remember that corporations typically will listen to a range of different and critical voices only when forced to do so, whether by competitive innovation, financial constraints or societal accountability and regulation.

Underneath their personae, they share a core brand … I mean, it’s all Wealth Bondage after all, isn’t it … even if we converse, cooperate and collaborate ?

The purpose, design, structure and dynamics of corporations are still in most cases intently aimed at keeping people unconscious and buying rather than conscious and demanding of clear improvements to human systems of cooperation and collaboration.

Here’s Chris, though, breathing in-and-out on what may be possible, if we put our minds …. and voices .. to it.

A couple of points of information just connected for me whilst over on the Gaping Void blog …

Gaping Void’s Hugh and Microsoft’s Scoble back-and-forth a fair bit on Hugh’s blog. Hugh holds forth on the hughtrain, and the ways, means and attitudes for listening to the customer, creativity and innovation in this interconnected environment.

Hugh said recently, on Windows 2000 and Microsoft

Windows 2000

Known quantities belong to the past, not the future (and no, there is no present)

Scoble (The Economist’s Chief Humanising Officer for Microsoft) is building a considerable reputation for being open, listening well, and playing back to Microsoft the conversations going on amongst its customers.

He’s also been lauded (rightly, imo) for congratulating Firefox for its rapid success … I think he cited approximately 25 million downloads in about 10 weeks.

Today in his keynote address at the Northern Voices blogging conference Marc Canter (I believe) asked Robert a question about whether Microsoft would have come out with IE 7.0 had it not been for Firefox.

Robert stopped for a second, chuckled sheepishly and said (if i remember correctly) …. “Probably not” … and then demurred graciously to Marc by continuing …”if it weren’t for you and the others posting so many great suggestions to the team’s wiki”.

A nice semi-tangential reflection, but what I noticed was the “probably not” in the context of Firefox.

What are the backwards-looking odds that without such a clear and significant improvement from Firefox (not to mention some of the other great alternative browsers out there), Microsoft would have happily continued on deflecting and not really listening to its customers who, after all, have been complaining long and loud for some time about the inadequacies of IE 6.0 ?

My guess is that they would have - maybe - gotten around to it on their own time, notwithstanding their growing reputation (is it just really slick but maybe ultimately unsubstantive PR is the question that comes to mind) for listening to and working with their customers.

The Northern Voices blogging conference is underway.

Tim Bray and Robert Scoble set the stage for the day - Tim providing a touchstone perspective on blogging dynamics in the context of its use at Sun Microsystems, and Robert setrting out to describe how he reads 1000 blogs per day.

Tim’s key points were about the use of blogs as listening mechanisms (listening to markets, customers and smart people) and the openness and authenticity necessary to develop effective blogging dynamics.

Robert underscored these key points by noting that today he posted a blog entry that was very critical of a Microsoft employee’s question about linking and showcasing an initiative for non-techies … without considering the use of RSS feeds.

Tying these two concepts together …

Listening, openness and authenticity are core elements of any organization and leadership development initiative. I think that a Microsoft executive or manager (for example) can learn a lot about her or his team, customers and markets by aggregating blog posts about a given issue … using the aggregation to listen carefully about what is being said, and then use blogging (along with other tools and processes) to respond or to consider initiatives that address - openly and authentically - the issues that have been raised.

via Bitch, PhD.

Just a question … how long will it take larry Summers to resign ? It’s the only decent thing to do, and if he doesn’t Harvard will have no integrity left worth speaking of, as an institution dedicated to the values it says it serves. Period.

Open mouth, insert dick, Larry

Here is the transcript.

From Dave Pollard’s recent post The Ten Most Important Ideas of 2004: Politics and Society

9. The Label Becomes More Important than the Substance (think ‘Right to Choose’ vs ‘Right to Life’ labeling applied to every aspect of current political and social discourse, going beyond Lakoff’s frames to their manifestation in language).

… this didn’t come up during the election campaign … or maybe it wouldn’t have mattered even then, considering how the mainstream media is in GWB’s payroll and all.

Even tho’ the GuckertGannon story has been done to death, Maureen Dowd has an interesting, and sarcastic, bit in the NY Times today.

Useful to note that she, who has been covering White House and national politics since at least 1986, couldn’t get a WH pass initially, even tho’ GannonGuckert could … as she says , they need to get someone with blogging experience on the security vetting team
From here piece in the NY Times:

At first when I tried to complain about not getting my pass renewed, even though I’d been covering presidents and first ladies since 1986, no one called me back. Finally, when Mr. McClellan replaced Ari Fleischer, he said he’d renew the pass - after a new Secret Service background check that would last several months.

At last month’s press conference, Jeff Gannon asked Mr. Bush how he could work with Democrats “who seem to have divorced themselves from reality.” But Bush officials have divorced themselves from reality

Why Long Tail Content is Different

 

Charles Mann, one of my favorite writers (dating way back to our Science days), writes with a great perspective on why the nature of content changes as you go down the Tail. He quotes David Foster Wallace from his famous essay (found in “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”) on television:

 

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb.

 

Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

 

Noticed on Blog Herald …

Cincinnati City bans blogs

The City of Cincinnati has banned employee access to blogs, despite maintaining access to racist groups, organisations advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government, cult groups, and abortion and sex education sites.

Whether racist cult groups advocating abortion and overthrow of the US Government who maintain blogs are included as part of the ban was not disclosed.

CNN is back at it again,

It’s after dinner, and I just flipped over to CNN … it’s now tha Aaron Brown segment.

He’s just about to launch an element of his show focused on examining the use and spread of blogging.

Blog Swarm ! is the title of the segment.

According to CNN, the main target is mainstream media … and they start reviewing the Eason Jordan and Jeff Gannon stories.

They cite Hugh Hewitt and National Review Online as conservative bloggers who blew the stories up, “pushing the story into the mainstream press”, or “circumventing the mainstream media and going directly to computer users”.

They do mention real-time fact-checking … in the same breath as the spread of rumors enabled by the blogosphere.

Summary .. yes, useful, and faster but less reliable than the mainstream media. But they would say that, wouldn’t they ?

CNN has run pieces on blogs before.

But today … I’m watching, right now, Howard Kurtz and a female reporter are examining - onscreen, live - the blog sites like Technorati and Blogpulse, dailyKOS, Wonkette.

The Power Law will never be so apparent again, as they use some top blogs as examples. I wonder how long it will take “the long tail” to make it onto CNN’s radar ?

Howie says “boy, the blogsophere is so fast”

He’s exploring the ability of blogs to swarm an issue, and also the phenomenon of rapid reader fact-checking.

They’re also exploring the readership …. 27% of Internet users … 48% of readers under 30 … Howie says “That’s where they get their news”.

The segment has been quarter-backed by Judy Woodruff, and is called “Inside the Blogs”

This sequence is really interesting, and makes me want to start video blogging just as soon as I can.

Found on Chris Caine’s blog, via a link in a comment on Euan Semple’s delicious blog.

Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy - David Weinberger

I’m just now watching Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz on CNN - David Gergen, Bill Press and Jeff Jarvis are his panel today, and they are comparing and contrasting the work of mainstream journalism and bloggers in the rapid coming-to-rights of Eason Jordan of CNN and JD Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon.

“You don’t take money from the government and then purport to be delivering the news”, Gergen is saying right now.

Jeff Jarvis has noted that blogs give citizens, or anyone observing some activity, access to publish information easily and quickly. This information may become *news*. The links work to ensure that such *news* get spread around very quickly, and subject it to all sorts of analyses .. some spun through various point-of-view filters, and some analyses that deepen and uncover useful and sometimes embarassing facts.

Blogs are an important element of wirearchy in action, and help create a two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, credibiltiy, trust and a focus on results … the results being exposure of the issues in ways that mainstream, top-down media often has decided to *edit* or control according to an agenda.

I’d like to introduce what used to be one of my (too many) pet peeves.

I worked for many years as a management consultant in the area of HR and organizational effectiveness .. which means a signidficantrange of projects and related sub-domains, over the years. Projects involved job descriptions, job evaluation, work design, organizational design, compensation philosophy and strategy, equal-pay-for-work-of-equal-value studies, performance management, learning strategies and so on. In later years the work morphed into designing competency models, leadership development and global HR strategies for several major multinational companies.

In about 1990 I became fundamentally convinced that IT would change the nature of work in deep ways, and permanently … and at that time I didn’t even know about the Internet, really.

So .. now, let’s fast forward a decade. As part of my ongoing personal evolution I underwent training and apprenticeship as a *professional coach*, in 1997. I have grown to see the rapid growth in *coaching* as - initially - an antidotal response to the major changes in the nature of work introduced by reengineering and a clear emphasis on stripping costs out of business processes. At the same time that the results of widespread reengineering hit, the every-which-way linkiness of an interconnected Web-based world of work started to have impact.

This dynamic has been accompanied, in my opinion, with a wholesale change in attitude towards a very material relationship between people …. “what’s your brand, what’s your value proposition, what have you done for me lately, what can you do for me” ? and so on.

Individuals today often find themselves trying to navigate these arguably-new conditions with the tools acquired by tears and tears of socialization and conditioning in hirearchical models, where roles are clearly defined and expected behaviours are known. The problem is that increasingly this seems not to work very well. And so what I mean by antidotal response is that thus far, I believe coaching is mainly used, and useful, for maagers seeking to *soften*, if you will the rigidity of hierarchical structures, reporting relationships, and industrial-age compensation schemes that still focus mainly on rewarding individual cause-and-effect accountabilities.

And now, from antidotal response to commodity ?

*Coaching* usually promises to help you identify and lead the life you want (tm ;-), at work and in the other spheres of your life. And imo, the approaches are close to becoming commodified … if you hire a coach today, you’re often given an unknown person some degree of carte blanche to start asking you “purpose” and “values” questions … whether they have the accompanying wisdom to respect your answers, probe them deeply and wisely, and actually begin to help you - the coachee - come to some sort of constructive reckoning with a speeded up, multi-directional life, is another question.

I’m aware of the usefulness of a skillful good listener who uses a structured approach to help a person come face-to-face with questions and conundrums. I’m also aware that the large majority of coaches who have been *ordained* in the past five years or so are people who have switched from other careers … often after the last lay-off from a mangement role, or as a transition from a job as teacher or social worker or counsellor, or who just see coaching as a great way to cash in on a growing and almost limitless (potentially) market .. for disaffected or wandering fellow humans.

I think most people who are professional coaches are also over 35 years of age, and are only slowly becoming cognizant of the effects of an interconmnected, interlinked technology-driven world.

What I keep wondering about .. and what i see little evidence of … is the degree to which coaches take into consideration, or even maybe map out with their individual clients, the links and every-which-wayness of attention *pulls* that accompanies interacting with other people in a wired-up, interlinked world.

I think that in a growingly real sense, we individual humans are becoming “small pieces loosely joined” and experiencingthe attendant dynamics of how we relate in new social architectures, as the hierarchies and the roles in those hierarchies to which we have grown accustomed are, as David Weinberger once put it in an explanation of the hyperlinked organization, being pounded into little pieces.

he said:

Documents traditionally have a hierarchical structure (also known as an “outline”) created by an author. Readers move through the hierarchy in the way the author intended. The outline may be quite complex and intricate.

The Web changes all that. The Web pounds documents into many small pieces, loosely joined. Now the reader decides the order in which she’ll read the pages. The pages lose their context in the hierarchy. The author loses her position of central author-ity.

So .. replace documents with people, and *authors* with our institutions and organization, and you probably begin to get my drift.

It may be that the Web is also pounding us into small pieces, loosely joined .. with new arrangements, relationships and architectures coming our way increasingly frequently depending upon who we’ve recently connected with and why.

Much talk on blogs and in comments sections this past week or so on the case of Mark Jen, the former Google employee who was fired for indiscreet blogging about his work and his employer.

Broadly speaking, there seem to be two camps .. one in which free speech is free speech and dam the torpedoes, and the other in which once you sign an employment contract, the employer owns your mind and voice along with (ostensibly) 40 hours of your time per week.

Just as an aside, the situation reminds me to some degree of taking the (negative) results of an Employee Attitude Survey to the management of a company. There are almost always two predictable reactions:

1) the senior management basically don’t believe it, and

2) the work begins to deny it, cover it up, or twist the employee communications so as to more-or-less apply camouflage.

Every once in a while some organizational leader has acknowledged such results, and had the nerve to go into the belly of the beast and begin the process of trying to learning more about the issues and sources of dissatisfaction, and what can be done to begin honest improvement. Very rare .. and when it happens, there is almost always a tremendous amount of positive energy released.

I admit to being conflicted here … if I owned and operated a company, I would want anyone I employed to stand up for the *organization*, and both enjoy and be proud of what they do .. and if I or another trusted colleague ended up making what seems to be a mistake in hiring, then that’s an issue we would want and need to deal with.

I would also see it as my job as leader and steward of the organization’s values to work actively at creating an environment of openness and trust … and results. I would clearly permit blogging, and I would get RSS feeds of all the blogs maintained by anyone associated with that company. If there were negative and cynical issues appeared, I would want to understand and address those issues right away .. and yes, that might involve firing .. but then again it might not.

And if understanding and addressing those issues involving confronting myself or other people holding significant responsibility, I would address that, and might even blog about in response to the signals that alerted me to it. If upon examination it involved work design, or it involved a cultural or management style or some such issue of which I had not previously been aware, then I would be glad to have learned about it, and set about to find out who’s involved and what needed improving or changing.

If the person who carried out *negative blogging* turned out, in my judgment, to be a sour character with little impulse control, I would

1) acknowledge I had done a poor job hiring,

2) work to rectify the situation within the limits of the applicable employment legislation (my natural tendency would be to let the person know my impression that they were negative and sour, and then get into what is known as performance coaching, prior to constructive dismissal), and

3) ask what they would be willing to do to take responsibility for changing their point-of-view in the context of employment in my/our company.

On the other hand … if we all keep bowing to corporate masters because he or she who has the bucks or writes the checks is to be obeyed no matter what they think or say, and individuals are not allowed to dissent, then we’re in a sorry state, and the general levels of dissent need to get louder, imo.

I don’t agree with “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” without question, especially if the hand is heavy and swift to mete out punishment as well as extend nourishment. To me that means that there will be companies that say ‘well, we don’t like gay people, or single mothers, or coloured people, so .. we’re gonna hire just who we please, because it’s OUR money“. Unfortunately, after a couple of decades of progress in such areas, some days we can’t be faulted for thinking that… these days .. we’re heading back towards that particularly lonely type of employment wilderness.

There’s a wide range of comments at the Red Couch blog where Scoble posted the story that run the gamut from “you signed up to workfor the company, b**ch, so you now do what I tell you and that’s the way it is” to “no way will I let anyone ever tell me what I can and can’t say and that right couldn’t and shouldn’t be taken away from me, and blogging is scred free speech, so I should never be fired for anything I blog”.

I felt that this comment, below, summed up a generally pragmatic approach to the issue. But I wish at this point to remind myself, and anyone that reads this, that IMO there’s so much chicanery and general obeisance to corporatism in the developed world that really, under the surface, I think we’re all living in an outtake version of Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil … so pragmatism quite often may be corporate jingoism in drag.

Here’s the civil, pragmatic comment:

“Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as empty, meaningless or dishonest and scorn to use them. No matter how pure their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.” - Heinlein

Your blog is your own, certainly, but either don’t associate yourself with your company (a practice I personally follow as best as I can), or if you do associate yourself with your company then don’t talk about your private parts.

It’s just an assumption, but for anyone to be considered a Chief Humanising Officer at Microsoft must mean that a revamp of their reporting relationship - directly to G*d hisself - is also under discussion.

just kidding

From the Scobleizer blog:

Economist names me “Chief Humanizing Officer.”

Economist: Chief humanising officer.

In the meantime, I think I’m gonna get new business cards since I have a new title.

As of 5.00 p.m. PST, Technorati was tracking 6,968,679 blogs.

Will the 7,000,000 mark be achieved by midnight February 12, 2005 ?

Update

Sitting in the SOMa cafe in Vancouver, free wifi and hipsters two decades younger than me all around, Technorati cruises past the 7,000,000 blog mark at 2.00 p.m. PST Saturday, February 12, 2005.

Doc Searls, one of the deep-and-wide thinkers on the effects of the Net on social and economic behaviour notices my previous post and pushes at the edges of the implications, using his own blog and blog / online behaviour as inspiratioon.

I’d like to think I’m observing, not advocating.

I am decidely not an uncritical fan of advertising, in terms of its consumption nor its (in my humble opinion) over-use. That said, it can serve an extremely useful purpose when we find that we truly need or want something, and then want to find a quick and trusted route to sources. I still use the Yellow Pages often enough .. but today compared to a few years ago, I kinda wish there was a blog I could go to as well - to make an additional judgment about that Yellow Pages listing I just found.

Note that I don’t have any advertising on my blog, and I’m not sure I will opt-in, so to speak.

Nevertheless, I do think that blogs will become a widely-used medium for carrying contextual advertising (heck, I guess its safe to say that in many cases they already are). And yes, that brings out the NEO in me too.

And .. we get to choose, which is a great thing unto itself. I think we’ll find that contextual advertising will get sharper and clearer, and we’ll get to mass-customize it to our needs, both going out and in terms of the advertising to which we give our attention. I noticed yesterday, by the way, that some blogs (