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October 27, 2006
Pito Salas explains how BlogBridge’s topic guides work, and how you can use their Feed Library software product to create your own. BlogBridge is a well-intentioned, free, open source blog aggregator that works across platforms. I’m a user and an advocate. (I’m also an uncompensated advisor: disclosure) [Tags: blogbridge aggregators open_source pito_salas rss]
October 21, 2006
I haven’t blogged anything about the recent discovery that “Wal-Marting across America,” a blog recounting the travels of a couple from Wal-Mart to Wal-Mart, was in fact funded by Wal-Mart through Edelman PR. In its wake (1 2), Edelman disclosed that Working Families for Wal-Mart and its subsidiary site, Paid Critics, are also Edelman sites. It seems to me unambiguously wrong for Edelman to fund sites for clients without making that clear on the sites themselves. I haven’t blogged that (until now) in part because it’s so obvious and in part because, as a consultant to Edelman, I’m in a conflict.
By contract and body language, Edelman has not attempted to control or influence what I blog. Never. There are, however, three important inhibiting factors. First, no matter how genuine and warm the relationship, taking money from an organization taints what one thinks about that organization; that’s why I have repeatedly disclosed my relationship. Second, as a consultant, I’ve been in a position to observe how the company interacts, what sorts of ideas it contemplates and rejects, and what it embraces enthusiastically or reluctantly. It would betray their trust — and get me fired as a consultant, and keep other companies from hiring me — if I were to blab about that stuff. But that makes it hard for me to write about an affair such as the Wal-Mart one, even though I didn’t know about it beforehand. Third, As a result of consulting to the company for the past year and a half or so, I’ve developed personal relationships with people there, including with Richard Edelman, whom I’m proud to count as a friend. I’m not objective.
So, with that in mind:
Edelman’s non-transparency about its Wal-Mart programs erode the trust that makes the Blogosphere valuable. It also forces the question of whether professional PR has any place in the Blogosphere.
I think it does, but it’s not going to be an easy transition. Full transparency is the minimum requirement. But, that’s not enough. Being transparent about funding blogs is hardly what it means to do enlightened PR on the Web.
I personally think there are two fundamental roles for PR in the new world: Transparent advocacy and facilitating open, genuine engagement among customers and companies. Transparent advocacy means that the agency argues for its client, providing useful information to people who want to receive it. Genuine engagement means the agency helps its client participate in the Web conversation honestly and frankly, whether that’s through employee blogging, customer forums, or ways yet to be invented. Just as the agency can be a transparent advocate for the client on the Web, it should be an advocate for Web values to the client, counseling the client to be frank, honest, and open to criticism. (An agency may also create publicity stunts, but there’s nothing particularly webby about that.)
I also want to add — keeping in mind the three factors that mitigate against my credibility on this topic — that I believe that Edelman PR overall is genuinely committed to behaving well on the Web. That it has gone so wrong in the Wal-Mart instances is an indication of just how different the Web is, and how difficult it is for an agency that has bet its future on getting the Web right to break free of its long-learned instincts. PR has a long road ahead of it.
[Tags: blogging pr edelman wal-mart]
October 18, 2006
October 3, 2006
Mark Frydenberg of Bentley College was teaching Intro to Tech last spring for freshman who have some background in tech. He started podcasting his lectures using a pocket pc. He asks who in the room has used wikis in a classroom. Lots of hands go up. People have used them to develop a class taxonomy, to sign up for groups, and to work together. Mark also used it for people to make up questions for an exam; Mark then chose from among the questions. He also had them create a video podcast about one of the topics of the class because he wanted to know what might be useful educationally about podcasting. (It wasn’t graded. It was an extra credit project.) [As always, I’m paraphrasing. And because Mark ran this primarily as a discussion, it will come across choppier than the session was.]
This semester he’s having the students use Blogger, Feedburner and PodZinger to create the podcasts. PodZinger makes podcasts it searchable.
He found that his students would listen to a podcast of the course for 6-10 minutes. (The course podcasts were an hour and 15 minutes.) So, he asked them to make podcasts of that length about the course topics. The first were talking heads. Then they tried recording screen shots by pointing the camera at the screen, which doesn’t work very well. They found Camtasia, which works better for live screen capture. (CamStudio is an open source product that does something similar, Mark says.) As more students did their videocasts, they’d start to one-up each other, figuring out how to do picture-in-picture, etc.
“You don’t know something until you have to teach it,” he says. [Very true.] How might podcasts be used in a class, he asks us.
Phil Malone says he uses it to have law students simulate oral presentations to clients and colleagues. Rebecca MacKinnon says that it surfaces knowledge in the class beyond what the teacher knows. Mark says that because he didn’t give any guidelines about content, it helps surfaces when people don’t know some things.
He found that students weren’t tempted to skip the class and just listen to the podcast because it was clear that more was going on in the class than lecturing. He sometimes found himself repeating questions for the mic. The big thing he saw was that having students create podcasts “let the students be themselves” — the sense of humor, humility, comforting other students, etc. He notes that it added a liberal arts element to a tech course. And it aids critical thinking by requiring students to plan how they’re communicate in 7 minutes on a pocket PC screen.
Colin Rhinesmith asks if the experience changed students’ understanding of mainstream media. Mark says that they understand better what it takes, plus they had a sense of empowerment that they could put their media up in public.
Rebecca asks if this ought to be done younger as an educational tool. Mark replies that all college freshmen ought to be taught how to create podcasts and videocasts so it can be assumed that they have those skills for use in other courses.
The podcasts are available on the Web but Mark didn’t publicize them.
He shows a graph of downloads of the podcasts. They spike around exam times—he put up a review podcast instead of a review sheet. Downloads by hour: 2am was surprisingly popular. Also, right after the class was held.
Phil asked what Mark learned that he will apply next time. Mark says he’ll continue to use Feedburner and PodZinger. He wants to have people comment on one another’s podcasts. Video was the right way to go.
He also has his students blog.
I ask about using a wiki to have the class create a group paper, or a site that’s a student guide to the topic of the class. How would you grade it? Mark thinks and says you could give groups of four a particular topic and grade them that way.
Q: Are you making former content availble to the next class?
A: I don’t want to make them available because I want students to go through the same moments of discovery as the students did last year. I’d rather make them available afterwards. [Tags: berkman podcasts media education]
September 27, 2006
I just got back from 1.5 days of meetings with members of the CIA’s intelligence analysis community who are interested in what social software can do for them. There were six of us “experts” and about 50 CIA folks. These are the people who put together analyses and “estimates” about what’s going on in the world so that our leaders can ignore them and do what will get them re-elected (or, in some particularly Oedipal cases, do what will make Mommy love them more than Mommy loves Daddy). In short, these folks are among the few representatives of the Reality Principle in our government. I would like them to be able to do their job ever better.
We weren’t given any confidential information (well, except that Mrs. Wanda Appleton of 123 Elm St. better stop what she’s been doing…you know what I’m talking about, Wanda), but we agreed to blog only generalities so that discussion could be frank. Here are my generalities:
This was a totally fascinating set of sessions. The CIA folks there included visionaries (e.g., Calvin Andrus), internal bloggers, the people behind Intellipedia (an in-house wikipedia), folks from the daily in-house newspaper, and some managers not yet sold on the idea of blogs and wikis and tags.
It sounds like there’s a fairly vibrant blogging community already, including some senior people. But, there’s cultural tension over, for example, whether a blog that contains any personal information means that a government employee has been misusing tax payers’ computers. It is a culture in transition, as you can imagine.
It began with an informal presentation by one of the analysts (first-name only, no email address) who took us through a typical day. He gets evaluated on the basis of the written reports he produces. There is some collegiality — more than I encountered as an academic — but the back-and-forth of commentary isn’t captured. It all comes down to the finished written document. (No document is ever finished, the panel said.)
The panel overall stressed that the issues were social, not technical. Also, we pushed for building memory by capturing more of the work-in-process and by linking linking linking. I personally would like to see the Agency get past the cult of expertise, moving instead to a view of knowledge as social. That means showing work in progress and capturing the discussion during and after publication. But that also means changing how analysts are evaluated and promoted. One of the participants said that already one’s “corridor reputation” affects one’s career. There should also be — and will also be — an e-corridor reputation that helps advance you because you’re a great commenter, a frequent contributor to the wiki, or have a blog that’s getting read.
The people we met with are serious about understanding the opportunities, experimenting, piloting, and evangelizing. I liked them. I would like them to get better and better not only at understanding what’s happening in the world but also at not being “spun.” [Tags: cia blogs ]
Keep in mind that we met with the report-writing analyst side of the Agency. As for that other side where they engage in “operations” — unrepresented at this meeting — I sure would like them to stop torturing people. But, hey, I’m just a crazed Boston liberal.
Here’s some interesting CEO-blogging. Richard Edelman of Edelman PR (which is a client of mine (disclosure)) writes about his mother’s bipolarism from a very personal point of view. [Tags: richard_edelman blogs bipolar>]
September 22, 2006
For years, Richard Sambrook, the BBC’s Director of Global News and World Service, has been one of the most popular bloggers inside the BBC. Now he’s started SacredFacts, a public blog. As Euan Semple points out, how Richard balances his private views with his journalistic position will be fascinating to watch. This is especially true because, despite the fact that he inhabits a position that is the exemplar of what people mean by The Establishment, Richard is open-minded, clear-headed about what’s happening to journalism, a born little-d democrat, aware of the power of the media to make the world better, ready to experiment, and in love with the Web. I’ve gotten to know him personally a little, so I’m willing to go out on a limb and add that there’s no one better to have a beer with. [Tags: media journalism richard_sambrook bbc blogs]
September 20, 2006
After my presentation at the Scottish Learning Festival, I wandered into a bloggy-wikiful session—TeachMeet—in a very warm room, but with wine. I walked in on a demo of JumpCut, an online video editing program that lets people share clips. It looked very cool.
Next an English teacher talks about transposing “process writing”—students commenting on students—into blogs with coments. (It might be a good use of the document commenting system at www.quicktopic.com.)
Another 7-minute presentation is on using Flickr’s annotation tool in a classroom. Why in the classroom reenactment of a Viking raid does one child not havea shield? Because he has a two-handed axe. He points to BubbleShare.com as a fun site for kids.
A couple talks about Kids Connect, an island in secondLife for kids. There they taught basic Second Life skills, including script pet rocks with sounds.
(Damn. The bloggers and Net geeks are going out to dinner but I’m committed to a speakers’ dinner. Oh well. That’ll be fun, too.)
[Tags: education scottish_learning_festival blogging]
September 18, 2006
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve done little except revise my book. All day, every day. Well, I’ve had a couple of events I’d committed to, including a keynote at the Scottish Learning Festival that I leave for tonight—I was supposed to be done with my revising by now—but basically I’ve been head-down in my book.
Which means I haven’t had time to read other people’s blogs.
The blogosphere and its local eddies are often thought of as bubbles, little hermetic worlds unaware that there’s a bigger world with bigger ideas beyond them. But not reading blogs now feels to me like being in a bubble. I’m cut off. I don’t know what’s going on, what people are talking about, who’s on a high, who’s on a roll, who’s just keeping on.
The truth is that we humans always live in bubbles. While our ideas and ideals may strive for the universal, we are embodied locally. So, living in a bubble isn’t an objection; it is our condition. The question is whether we seek to expand our ideas and—more important—our sympathy or we think our local bubble is the one that’s figured it all out (as per Mel Brooks’ immortal caveman anthem: “Let ’em all go to Hell, except Cave Seven”). Even the best intentioned of us still live locally—damn bodies!—so we’re talking here about trying, about a dialectic, about a failed awareness. But, that failure keeps our bubbles honest.
I look forward to breaking out of my bubble of self-involvement pretty soon now. I hear it’s been a mild September. [Tags: bubble blogosphere mel_brooks]
September 10, 2006
The Boston Globe today endorsed Deval Patrick for governor of Massachusetts so strongly that it ignored the customary writings-off of the other candidates, as in: “Chris Gabrieli has shown himself to be a straightforward leader with some new ideas, and we remain impressed by the precision and resilience of Thomas Reilly’s comb-over.” I’m glad. I’m a Deval Patrick supporter, too, and have the lawn sign to prove it.
But I don’t understand why newspapers take editorial positions. Doesn’t that contradict everything newspapers believe about the value of a neutral point of view? Alternatively, if expressing a point of view gives the reader valuable insight into the inevitable bias of the paper—as I think is the case—wouldn’t it be at least as helpful to allow reporters to state their own stands, in blogs if not in the stories themselves? [Tags: journalism deval_patrick]
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