June 2007

Via pointage from Doc Searls … another angle on the interplay between blogging and established journalism practices.

I’ve snipped out the explanation beneath each of the headlines below … the detail is in Mark Glaser’s MediaShift blog post titled Ten Reasons Why There’s A Bright Future For Journalism.

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10 Reasons There’s a Bright Future for Journalism

1. More access to more journalism worldwide.

2. Aggregation and personalization satisfies readers.

3. Digital delivery offers more ways to reach people.

4. There are more fact-checkers than ever in the history of journalism.

5. Collaborative investigations between pro and amateur journalists.

6. More voices are part of the news conversation.

7. Greater transparency and a more personal tone.

8. Growing advertising revenues online.

9. An online shift from print could improve our environmental impact.

10. Stories never end.

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Glenn Greenwald of Unclaimed Territory, now a central Salon.com feature, on the interplay between purposeful news blogs and mainstream journalism.

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One can debate the true influence of blogs and whether they will continue to grow in size and influence. But what seems beyond reasonable dispute is the fact that nothing can match bloggers and their readers in terms of political interest, intensity and energy. And, most importantly, the ability of blogs to be self-sustaining is growing rapidly.

Blogs are increasingly able to engage in their own in original reporting and widely and effectively to disseminate opinion and information without reliance on establishment media organs. If anything, establishment media organs are growing increasingly dependent upon blogs to sustain interest in their products. And one should not underestimate the vital role this development plays in so much of the establishment media’s hostility towards bloggers and their endless reliance on caricature to belittle and demonize blogs.

Luke O’Brein, of Wired’s superb 27B Stroke 6 blog, yesterday attended a panel discussion entitled "Can Blogs Be Trusted?", at which Jason Zengerle of the sickly New Republic warned of the grave dangers posed by bloggers. O’Brein reported:

New Republic Writer Warns of Wily Blogs

To blog a conference seminar entitled Can Blogs Be Trusted? is an exercise in ontological absurdity. To listen to The New Republic’s Jason Zengerle announce that "If you’re going to blogs for straight facts, per se, I don’t think they’re the most reliable resources," gives us the Fear. Can I trust that I heard him correctly? Can I trust him at all? After all, he blogs, too.

Zengerle described a lawless landscape of political bloggers playing loose with facts to advance an agenda, savaging above-board media outlets such as The Politico for revealing unsavory trashtalk involving Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) and Gen. Peter Pace. No better than mercenaries, these hatchet men, they should be eyeballed cautiously, Zengerle said.

[ Snip ... ]

"Bloggers," like every other group, include some irresponsible members, and can benefit from meaningful and vigorous criticisms. But the vast bulk of anti-blogger hostility — particularly the criticisms offered by establishment media figures — are motivated not by any genuine concern over journalistic ethics and responsibility (witness how steadfastly they ignore their own breaches), but instead by the fact that bloggers have shined light on the mistakes and corruption in their profession which previously festered in the dark, and by the fact that blogs are increasingly rendering what they do less important, and in some instances, even irrelevant. This amazingly whiny and substance-free attack on bloggers by Joe Klein in Time — following months of constant criticism from bloggers about Klein’s "journalism" — illustrates this self-absorbed process perfectly.

For the foreseeable future, large media organizations will be necessary to enable cetain types of critically important investigative journalism. There are some truly superb and courageous journalists whom bloggers cannot replace. Indeed, so much of the blogger critique of the media is grounded in a desire for more of that. And there are many journalists who are receptive to the work of bloggers and use it as a resource. But the overwhelming sentiment towards the work of bloggers from media figures, especially our media stars, is to scorn it except when they ignore it. Their self-interest in relegating blogs to the "unserious" fringes is obvious and overwhelming.

But blogs are on their way to becoming self-sufficient, to enable — entirely apart from media institutions — the widespread dissemination of ideas, narratives, and viewpoints that the media excludes from our rotted public discourse. That development plays no small role in the increasing hostility one witnesses towards blogs from those who thought they had an entitlement to conduct and shape — without any challenge or criticism — how our political discussions proceed.

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… and one which I have also experienced during my travels.

I have "known" Sebastien Fiedler ever since he linked to me or I linked to him, or we each linked to each other, about four years ago.

It has been interesting to watch the evolution of social software and the first and second (and more , some will argue) waves of uses and business models.

.. and not a moment too soon.   Tony Blair hands over to Gordon Brown.  The man had some strengths, but personally I will never and can never forgive for enabling an illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq.

So, in my opinion it is also fundamentally wrong that he become Mid-East Envoy.

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Blair officially steps down
Associated Press
June 27, 2007

LONDON — Tony Blair resigned Wednesday after a decade in power, heading for a new role in the Middle East while Treasury chief Gordon Brown succeeds him as prime minister.

Mr. Blair held a 25-minute meeting with the Queen to tender his resignation and was also expected to resign as a member of Parliament later in the day to take up his post as chief envoy for the so-called Quartet of Mideast peace mediators.

Mr. Brown, a 56-year-old Scot known for his often stern demeanour, beamed as he was applauded by Treasury staff before heading with his wife, Sarah, to the palace to be confirmed as prime minister.

A visibly emotional Mr. Blair used his final weekly questions session with legislators to say sorry for the perils faced by British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, but gave no apology for his decisions to back the United States in taking military action.

"I wish everyone — friend or foe — well," Blair said before departing the chamber to cheers. "And that is that. The end."

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I just noticed this comment in passing, while reading the comments on this Hullabaloo post wondering why PBS would hire

Dave Snowden has been wondering out loud, in public … and making up his mind conversation by conversation, link by link … about the process (moderation or not, for example) and the relative utility and effectiveness of various forms of online exchange, with respect to knowledge construction and knowledge management dynamics.

I think it’s clear that he’s come down on the side of the purposeful and responsible use of blogging as fundamentally effective, for all the reasons many bloggers know … free, unmoderated flow of ideas, ability to easily link to source or reference material, personal sculpting of the use of RSS aggregation, the formation and deepening and broadening of social and professional connection that blogs effectuate like nothing else, really … at least in today’s post he says he will talk about Knowledge Management and Sin at an ARK conference today in London.

In perusing the post and the comments, I found this delicious comment by Dennis Howlett:

KM = hierarchical straitjacket about which no-one cares

Social Software = freedom to choose - everyone cares

I started paying attention to knowledge management (KM) in 1990, as part of my career-long interest in the nature of work and the structure of organizations .. this combined with a growing awareness of the impact of IT and (eventually) the Web on work and organizations is what led to wirearchy in 1999, and my ready adoption of blogging in the middle of 2002.

In the fall of 2002 I had been in conversation about KM and blogging with a few people, and because of the social nature of blogging I was thinking about the development of trust and openness.  It struck me back then, as it has any number of times since, that we learn a great deal about trust and openness in our primary friendships.

I believe that there are few deep friendships which do not go through periods of testing and friction … and it’s important to note as well that friendships, especially professional ones, aren’t always about blind support, loyalty and being nice, but as often are about honesty, directness, usefulness, pertinence … but they all follow similar dynamics on the way to deep trust.  It is in the way these tests are approached and resolved (or not) that define and deepen the friendship, helping to create solid bonds that enable even deeper trust and exploration, and yield richer fruits.

So, during that period of wondering 5 years ago, I wrote the following post.  I began to believe then, and still believe today, that the sociality that blogging enables and creates is a critical component of the effective construction, exchange and use of knowledge, and I truly believe that many if not most organizations should move more quickly and more seriously to experiment on purpose with ways to use blogging (inside and outside the firewall) to enhance responsiveness, effectiveness, productivity and innovation.

I hope this November 2002 post reflect that .. please bear in mind that I, as well as any of you that are interested in KM, will have learned much about it in the past five years, so what I reserve the right to update what I wrote back then.

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Sunday, November 03, 2002

Following on Chris’s notes below on conversation and KM -

I’ve often thought about this. There’s a core issue in KM - that of the gulf separating Tacit Knowledge (TK) and Explicit Knowledge (EK), with proponents arguing that TK is only really shareable ("manageable" ??) via conversation, dialogue, communities of practice, and so on.

I tend to agree. At the same time I believe that in a wirearchical world there are emerging tools that allow for sharing, building, using, re-using and adding to knowledge - tools that don’t have to necessarily replicate the synchronous, face-to-face aspects of conversation. This emergent phenomenon called blogging is a key example … to me it represents state-of–the-art in 2002 of how KM could be handled, with perhaps links to a larger database if lots of documents need storage.

What IS problematic are the other aspects of communications that are involved - culture, structure, body language, attention.

Attention, in particular, holds my fascination these days. I’m continually amazed at how hard it often is to have a fully-fleshed-out conversation with people - we are overrun with "get to the point", "make it tangible", "what’s your value proposition" (which is OK in and of itself) without - often - the participants in a conversation taking the time and expending the mental and attentional effort to define and understand the context. Specialization is in, generalization is out.

This has utility, in an era defined by time pressures, but I think it’s dangerous not taking the time or making the effort to listen to each other long enough to share a common field of understanding and meaning. As things get more uncertain, and compelxity accelerates, people want clear and simple answers. Hmmm….

From David Weinberger

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 - The opposite of machine is voice

 - The opposite of information is trust

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I have been thinking for a while about how understanding knowledge "management" could benefit from exploring the dynamics of friendship. If we are to develop and share useful knowledge, we need to trust each other.

Do you trust "instant friends", or a transaction where someone else you don’t know says "this is what you need to know - here it is". How do they know that’s what you need to know?

On the other hand, you trust a friend. Why? Because you’ve been down several roads together, you’ve gotten to know each others’ characters and contexts, and you’ve probably had instances where boundaries have been crossed - and the friendship has survived. They’ve made mistakes - given you the wrong info, so to speak - but you’ve cut them some slack, probably found a way to communicate to each other about that, and as a result the context and trust have grown "deeper and wider". You’ve yelled at them, stopped speaking to them for a while - someone (one of you) reaches out, issues are reviewed and clarified, a negative feeling is lifted, and you go on to share more, learn more, develop more.

Passing this puck over to KM - tools exist to "share" information and knowledge, but adoption has been relatively slow. Sure, there are big integrated sysytems that are like warehouses. Sure, there’s Lotus Notes. Sure, there’s Groove. And so on….

Yet, the potential for sharing knowledge and starting to really cook has only just started to scratch the surface of possibility.

As I’m writing this, I recognize the distinction of  inside organizations versus outside organizations. Blogging is knowledge sharing, isn’t it? Why does it seem to work well? Because it’s the sharing of points of view without an ulterior motive - the receiver can decide what’s useful, interesting, outrageous, incorrect (from their POV), and so on…

So, back to the slowish adoption of tools and sharing … Inside an organization, there’s competition, territoriality, punishment for irrelevance or irreverence (at least in the formal sense). People at work are, for the most part, constrained and held hostage by structures that are often outdated, too rigid to accommodate true creative and constructive conversation. Interesting conversations happen, anyway…it’s just that they have to find some other "time and place".

There’s always been lots of "jazz" conversations that transfer and share lots of knowledge - but it’s almost always been on the QT when it’s not structured, formal and "on the agenda", as it were.

My belief is that wirearchy is clearly leading to the necessity for more open workplace cultures. What a polarity, eh - a greater drive for efficiency, more demand for results, six sigma, specialization, cost clampdowns, layoffs, longer work weeks, juxtaposed by the pressing need for greater flexibility, responsiveness, innovation, integration.

I think we’re clearly seeing the leading edge of these issues and dynamics emerging, what with all the consulting in employee engagement, emotional intelligence, participative management, coaching, real-time employee input, employee relationship management, etc. The old structures and assumptions are eroding in effectiveness, the new approach(es) aren’t yet clear.

However, it’s clear (to me) that mass customization - of work, and of learning - is on it’s way into the workplace and into our society. It has been for a while, and the marketers have understood this for some time (One-to-One), but it hasn’t really been framed in this context for the world of work. I’m pretty sure it will be, soon.

Back to KM, and the mass customization of sharing knowledge - IMO, Knowledge Management will never be fully addressed by having an integrated information system that makes whatever you need accessible when you need it - context, questioning, interpretation and fit-for-purpose will always have an essential role to play, and so what better than a Knowledge Buddy - a collaborator - with whom to have an argument, or with whom you can share a major breakthrough.

What about looking to the dynamics of effective friendships to inform this dialogue further?

Hey, and while we’re at it, there’s the whole (similar) fields of Family Systems dynamics from which to obtain additional useful insights. The OD word has been onto this for some time - and I’ve personally used Virginia Satir’s work in a number of my interventions over the years.

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If the Democrats in the US Congress need any backing or encouragement to get on with impeaching Darth Cheney, they could take some heart with the results of this current online poll …

Total responses = 78,246

Should Vice-President Cheney be impeached ?

Yes = 99.21%

No = 00.78%

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Worst. President. Ever for the Middle East, says Haaretz

With friends like these…

[Snip ...]

It is difficult to think of an American president who has caused more damage to Israeli interests than the president who is considered one of the friendliest to Israel of all time. No leader has done more than Bush - by commission as well as omission - to destroy the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.

It was Bush who imposed the wretched elections on the Palestinians, despite Hamas’ refusal to fulfill the terms of the Oslo II Accords concerning the participation of political parties in the democratic process. Bush gave his blessing to sacrificing the road map on the altar of unilateral disengagement, an act of charity toward the Palestinian "refusal front" and a death blow to the already damaged peace camp.

[Snip ...]

Officials in Olmert’s government are sighing in great relief over the lowering of the American profile. To understand the depth of these leanings, one must go to Damascus. Vice President Farouk Shara interpreted Bush’s statements using the following harsh, but accurate, words: "The American president does not want peace between Israel and Syria."

Israeli intelligence officials are already warning that the opposite of peace is imminent war between Israel and Syria. This means that Bush is refusing to help prevent another round of blood-letting. What an outcry would erupt here were he to refuse to aid us by shipping a cannon or a helicopter over, and sending us out alone with the Arabs to handle the next war.

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Glenn Greenwald on the recent shift by the CheneyBush administration shift in terminology, from insurgents (arguably freedom fighters seeking to liberate their lands from foreign occupation) to al-Qaeda.

McClatchy reports on shift in Iraq propaganda

[Snip ...]

All of this seems based upon the premise that for the last four years, we have had a strategy of simply leaving "Al Qaeda" in peace, just letting them be. But now, we have a new Commander, Gen. David G. Petraeus, who has dramatically embraced a bold, innovative, new strategy: "Let’s get Al Qaeda." That, in turn, is what accounts for the rhetorical shift.

But that explanation is just ridiculous on its face, particularly in light of how many times we have heard in the past that we have Al Qaeda on the run in Iraq, that we have disrupted its ability to operate, that we have decapitated its leadership, through all of our highly successful offensive Iraqi actions against them. And that is to say nothing of the truly laughable notion that we are able to identify dead bodies as belonging to "Al Qaeda members" ("68 Al Qaeda militants killed!").
More importantly, all of this depends upon an underhanded and deceitful conflation of (a) the Iraqi Sunnis who decided to call themselves "Al Qaeda in Iraq" as they battled against the U.S. occupation of their country, and (b) the "Al Qaeda" led by Osama bin Laden which flew planes into U.S. buildings on 9/11.

In every way that matters, those two entities are universes apart. But for obvious reasons, the political consequences of equating them are enormous. To conflate them is, as I said on Saturday, misleading and propagandistic in the extreme.

For one article after the next to bolster that conflation is so journalistically irresponsible that it is hard to put into words.

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Thanks to big-heart Jeneane for pointing to this Digital Freedom Expo introduction of Larry Lessig (below) by Peter Gabriel.

Listening to his preamble instantly reminded me of John Perry Barlow’s 1998 Wired magazine dispatches titled "Africa Rising", which were full of wonder and hope about the possibilities the Internet was offering to Africa at that time.

Here we are almost ten years later … with the same observations about courage, determination and possibility.

Even though Gabriel is referencing the hot spot of Somalia,

I think I may have blogged about Mahalo before (I’m not going to check) … I know I have sent links about it in the past to some people I know.

Today the NY Times has an article about the ongoing evolution of search in which it highlights Mahalo … basically, less algorithm, more human help "under the hood" to make search results more meaningful and more useful.

Certainly the grouping into themes should help advertisers get closer to whatever niches they choose to attack.

Last month, another company, Mahalo (Hawaiian for “thank you”), inaugurated a search service with manually edited results. It started with several advantages: venture capital backing, 30 editors, systematic focus on the most commonly requested search terms, and the added idea of supplying Google’s search results for any search not covered by its own best-of-the-best lists.

Mahalo now has pre-prepared pages for 5,000 terms related to entertainment, travel, health, technology and other subject areas. The company plans to expand its coverage to 10,000 terms by year-end, and eventually to provide results for one-third of the most common search terms.

The company is financed by Sequoia Capital, which knows something about the search business: It was an early backer of both Yahoo and Google. Sequoia, like other Silicon Valley venture capital firms, offers experienced entrepreneurs an office and salary to figure out an idea for a new start-up. It was while he was an entrepreneur in residence that Jason Calacanis had the inspiration for Mahalo. Mr. Calacanis, 36, published The Silicon Alley Reporter in the mid-1990s and went on to be a co-founder of Weblogs, a federation of blogging sites that was sold to AOL in 2005 for about $25 million. He took up residence at Sequoia in December 2006, founded Mahalo and gathered two rounds of financing, including backing from the News Corporation.

At the end of May, Mr. Calacanis unveiled Mahalo at the D: All Things Digital conference sponsored by The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Calacanis said he has enough financing to provide five years of experimentation and refinements, but he has not disclosed the amounts.

A hand-built Mahalo search-results page has one conspicuous advantage over Google’s: grouping into subthemes, which make a page of links much easier to scan and to find items of particular interest. For example, Mahalo’s page about Paris Hilton, the site’s top search subject last week, arranges the recommended links into clusters including news, photos, gossip, satire and humor. The use of subject categories also eliminates the need to provide, as Google does, two-line text excerpts from the listed sites to provide clues about the site’s contents.

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Publication is a self-invasion of privacy.

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There are a bunch of them here …

I enjoyed going through them - here are three for now:

As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of ‘do it yourself.’

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Canada is the only country in the world that knows how to live without an identity.

Tags: Marshall McLuhan

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Sometimes things move in complete circles, at other times like a vast rolling fog.

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I sent Candidia Cruckshank’s valet The Happy Tutor (here offering us a glimpse of his own glass heart) this piece in which Joe Bageant responds to a letter by a young, well-paid but unfulfilled film industry special-effects expert.

… of David Weinberger’s core premise.

From the marvelous blog / web site Bubkes.org, the personal photography and commentary journal on architecture and culture by Stephen Lewis, who also maintains the blog Hak Sak Pak - Infrastructure, Identity, Communication and Change

Stephen also writes an elegant essay titled Library Access, the Limits of the Web, and the Shelling of Sarajevo on why the Web isn’t by a long shot a total replacement for the world’s libraries, archives and other repositories of information and knowledge about our human history and evolution. I found the article  thanks to pointage by Dave Rogers of Groundhog Day passing on a link from Doc Searls.

January 29, 2007

During the icy winter of 1993-1994, I traversed the Republic of Bulgaria documenting the life and prospects of the country’s one-million-strong Muslim minority. At the time, I sorted my photographs by subject (portraiture and architecture), by region (the Rodope Mountains, the Plain of Thrace, the former forests of the Deliorman), by sects (Sunni and Alevi), and by ethnicity (Turkish, Roma, and Slavic Muslims).

Now, more than a decade later, I have the luxury of sorting them into more arbitrary aesthetic and subjective categories.

Tags: Everything Is Miscellaneous

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David Weinberger is reporting from Supernova 2007, in this case about Clay Shirky talking about why and how the Web is seeding the ground for new arrangements applicable to organization, business and why things will work and last or not.

… Clay Shirky’s Lovefest

[Snip ...]

Perl is like the temple, says Clay. It continues because the people doing it love Perl enough to stop what they’re doing and help one another. "No contracts are written, no money changes hands." "We don’t often talk about love" at these conferences. But tools for coordinating and talking — simple things like mailing lists — turn love into a renewable building material. This leads to unexpected, unanticipated consequences. the better predictor of longevity is not the business model but do the people care about one another.

There’s lots of commercial opportunity. We’re not going to all live together in a commune. But the ability to get people together outside of management and profit motive creates a huge opportunity. And traditional work will be intertwined with this way of working.

Within 24 hours of Linus posting his first message, he had a global network of people eager to collaborate. The monitoring of Nigerian election through people using SMS and Flickr, the responses to terrorist actions, the anti-immigration-law protests coordinated through MySpace…we will see much more of that.

Add collaboration tools to love and you can write an operating system.

We can now do big things with love.

[This was a classic and beautiful statement of why the Net works and why it matters...and the fact that those two things are the same is what's most hope-giving about the Net. Clay is such a phenomenal combination of insight, brilliance as a writer, and, well, love.]

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In my meandering journey with the notion of an "archy" related to being "wired" … interconnected and networked with access to and exchange of information, leading to the social construction of knowledge … I’ve often been told by people who have wanted to correct me or put me in my place that "hierarchy is natural" or that "nature is hierarchical" (I’m thinking here particularly of a friend of mine who recently completed a five-year term as dean of a prestigious business school who sort-of mocks me and keeps telling me I should go back to concentrating on what I know something about

Anyway .. this morning I ran across this comment appended to a Hullabaloo blog post about an interview of creationist and futurist George Gilder in The Jerusalem Post … One On One - Faith In Hierarchy

Gilder’s vision of reality is actually the hypostatizing of pareidolia–the misperception that when you look deeply into randomness you see a face peering out.

A particular virtue of the reasoning of Darwin over the gibbering lunacy of Gilder is the disconfirmation of the idea that nature exists in a hierarchy.