I met so many interesting people in the three days I spent in Europe, but there’s always something special about meeting bloggers. Last night in Milan, about a dozen of us went to dinner, including Massimo Moruzzi, Mafe de Baggis, Luca Vanzella, Gaspar Torriero and Luca De Biase. (I pick out these because they were the “organizing committee” and thus I have emails from them, so I may possibly be spelling their names right.)

I should probably learn from experience and cease being amazed at how well bloggers get along even when we’ve just met. I can’t imagine sitting down with another dozen people, most of whom I’ve never met, and feeling so immediately comfortable. And in this case, it’s not because I’ve been reading all their blogs; my grasp of Italian is nowhere near good enough.

On the other hand, I don’t want to cease being amazed. [Tags: blogosphere italy]

Gaspar has flickred some snaphots…

Giorgio Zarrelli has also posted some photos.

1 Comment »

Well, sort of. Reflecting on what Katrina tells us about the scale of life, Ernie has decided to set up practice on his own.

Good luck, Ernie. [Tags: ernie_the_attorney]

Be the first to comment »

I’m writing this on the early morning plane to Milano, sitting next to Guillaume de Gardier, the European online communications manager for Edelman PR and a blogger; Edelman is sponsoring my three-day tour (Disclosure : I consult to Edelman). The distressingly multi-lingual M. de Gardier comes to this as an Internet believer first and a communications guy second, which is refreshing.

I spent yesterday in Hamburg. I’ve never been there before, but all I saw was the inside of the Edelman office and the inside of a lovely hotel. Hamburg, I’m told, has more bridges than Venice, although I think I managed to cross only one of them.

I gave a talk about “What Blogging Isn’t” to a group of business people most of whom are at best skeptical about blogging; there were also a a couple of dozen German bloggers in the audience, which was a treat. Over the course of the day, the general consensus was that blogging hasn’t caught on yet the way it has in the US and much of Europe. Many theories were advanced, from national personality traits to the cost of broadband. I have no theory to offer.

It was quite a fascinating day. As usual, the chief business objection to blogging seems to be that blogging is risky: An employee might say something indiscreet and customers might post nasty comments.

The first I think is not much of a worry. A blogging policy can make clear what employees already understand: Give away company secrets and you’ll be fired. Be a whiny, complaining jerk who continually slags off your boss in public and don’t count on that big Christmas bonus.

The second concern is real: Some customers are undoubtedly unhappy with you and will express themselves quite clearly in comments on your corporate blog. That can magnify the perception of disgruntledness: If you have a million customers and 1% are unhappy, and 1% of those post negative comments, that’s a hundred angry remarks, which will look like quite a lot. But there are ways to ameliorate that risk, including by being refreshingly honest. Perhaps other customers will come to your defense, which is a strong positive…and quite heartening for a company. Besides, there is a risk to not knowing about your unhappy customers. They’re out there anyway, so is it a bigger risk to engage with them or to not even know about them?

Besides, if avoiding risk is your highest goal, you’ll never get married and you’ll certainly never have children. Loving your children increases your exposure dramatically!

I continue to believe that for many companies the best path to blogging is by using them internally as a knowledge management tool. The dream of KM has been that people will write down what they know. KM regimes, however, have assumed they would have to discipline people into doing that. Blogs entice people to write down what they know and to share it widely. A project blog or a department blog not only surfaces and shares knowledge, it also makes it searchable and archives it. And once a company gets used to internal blogs, it’s only natural (if anything about a corporation can be said to be natural) to open up some blogs to trusted customers and partners, bringing them into the intellectual bloodstream of the organization. And then why not open some blogs more widely? Thus companies inch their way into the blogosphere.

Anyway, Germany was fascinating. The event drew an impressive range of people, and for me it was a day of interesting conversations and a chance to meet with people who share the unexpressed knowledge that the Internet is a new social world in which we are friends already. Now it’s on to Milano… [Tags: blogging]

11 Comments »

I’m on day one of a mini-tour of Europe — Paris, Hamburg, Milan — talking about blogging with various business audiences. My main aim is to put blogging into a context bigger than business and to counter some misapprehensions. Overall, I will stress: 1. The social, connective nature of blogging: We’re not just 27 million individual op-ed writers behind walls of print; 2. If a company wants to blog, it has to give up an uncomfortable level of control; 3. Blogging is ours — for us, about what we care about, creating new “we’s” — not merely a tool for business. Of course, I expect to have my expectations subverted since I’m an American talking in three countries. (I also hope not to sound like the pompous a-hole I sound like in this post. But that may be aiming too high.)

The tour is sponsored by Edelman PR to whom I consult.*

4 Comments »

If I read Dave “Technorati” Sifry’s latest State of the Blogosphere post correctly — and when it comes to numbers, the chances of my going right is nil — rather than being shaped like a hockey stick, the blogosphere is shaped like an alert python that’s just eaten some big bloggers.

There used to be a head of the tail that consisted of bloggers with lots of links going into them and a tail as long all get-out consisting of bloggers with a few links. Now, there’s still a head, but there are fewer bloggers and more mainstream media in it. The bloggers who used to be in the head (plus others, for more bloggers now have lots of links) have been pushed past the line’s elbow and form a bump. And the long tail has gotten longer…27M blogs long.

Here’s what I think is happening, if my understanding of the stats is correct (which it probably isn’t): As more people blog, the sites that we all read in common remain the MSM. Links to the MSM thus increase in almost a straight line as the overall size of the blogosphere increases. But as blogging spreads, interests get more diverse, so there are fewer blogs that we all read; those sites get forced into the python’s lump.

Does this mean the mainstream media are “winning”? Nah, it just means that they remain the main stream. We don’t yet know if they are a habit we’re going to overcome, an institution waiting to be Wikipedia-ed, or if they will transform themselves enough to continue being our common ground.

(Disclosure: I’m on Technorati’s board of advisors. And I’m a friend of Dave Sifry’s.)

Technorati has introduced a welcome new feature in beta: A slider that lets you adjust how important blogging “authority” is to you in a particular search. As Dave says, turning up the “authority” volume is useful when doing a search in a heavily-spammed area such as “mortgage.” [Tags: technorati blogosphere]

8 Comments »

Coming up with a “code of ethics” for bloggers makes about as much sense as coming up with a code of ethics for people who say things. The diversity of blogs makes a code of ethics not even a pipe dream but a pipe nightmare.

But…

We in fact do have some ethical expectations for people who say things. We expect you not to lie (without good cause), to let us know if you know you’re unreasonably biased (e.g., “Of course, that company does pay my salary” or “But, I was married to her for six years, so maybe that’s biased me”), and be capable of responding to a well-intentioned question without socking us in the nose. We don’t need a Code of Good Talking to formalize that. Rather, those are the conditions that enable us to converse in the first place.

There are some facts about blogs that pertain pretty generally, and those facts — features of the landscape, if you prefer — give rise to what I think are some reasonable ethical expectations. For example:

Nothing too surprising in this list of rules of thumb, of course. It’s the tie back to facts that interests me. Is doesn’t imply Ought, but Is whips Ought into condition.

[Tags: blogging ethics]

8 Comments »

Mark Liberman doesn’t like the word “blawg.” Denise Howell, who coined it, responds charmingly, and even manages to work in her phrase “doorknob spam.”

Meanwhile, in the Arrested Development we watched last night, there was a reference to Bob Loblaw’s law blog. (Bob Loblaw is just such a good name, but only if you say it aloud.) [Tags: blawg deniseHowell arrestedDevelopment bobLoblaw markLiberman law blogs language doorknob spam]

4 Comments »

Rebecca has posted an email interview with me. The topic is blogging. [Tags: rebeccaBlood blogging]

3 Comments »

Planned Parenthood is blogging the Alito hearings, although it’s almost 3 pm, the hearings started at noon, and so far they haven’t posted anything. I want my instant blogratification! Plus they’re moderating comments.

Loosen up Planned Parenthood! [Tags: alito blogs plannedParenthood]

1 Comment »

Conferenza has been a subscription-based newsletter that tells you what you missed at the conferences you wanted to go to but couldn’t. It’s been well-written and fiercely frank.

Now it’s become a free blog, supporting itself by ads. For readers, this is good news because now everyone can read it. And I hope it works out wonderfully for Conferenza. [Tags: conferenza blogs]

1 Comment »