The Grit and the Glitter of Blogging and RSS

Update on this one at the end.
There are at least two approaches to the value of Blogs and RSS feeds in the world. As usual, they seem to be dividing into Push and Pull camps. In the Push camp is one that my mate Taka at Awasu picked up on that looks at Blogs and their potential in PR. Personally, I think that blogging and PR are diametrically opposed to each other. One is very much about controlling information and the other is about letting it go.

In fact it reminds me a lot of rules 34 to 36 at Vox Politics Manifesto that say,

34. Define ‘Message’: I will tell you only what I want you to know. People will only understand me if I repeat something over and over again and again.
35. Have you any idea how silly you sound?
36. Why do we want to read your spun version when we can use the same number of clicks to access the unspun version?

On the other hand, Paolo Valdemarin has a much less flashy, much more grounded look at how information flows in organisations (look for one called Intranet Aggregators) could be handled with aggregators and RSS feeds that looks much more like pull to me and places the control in the hands of the recipient.

James Farmer has an interesting point tomake about a subject that really matters in organisations, power, and who wields it, and how anyone is going to prise it out of the managerial cadre's cold dead hands.

Update
Taka at Awasu has responded and maybe he is right about me missing the point, that may be through my personal prejudices at work. I agree with him about the uses to which RSS feeds can be put, and that the ability to carry on a public conversation provides extra value to that conversation. But I also think that we can't expect this to be a technology driven process in that it will take users, courageous users, to make apply the pressure to their competitors who will see that greater openness is not only not a threat, but is in fact beneficial in a networked world. His ppoint about loss of control is spot on. I go even further and say that the only thing people have to lose is the illusion of control over information. But that entails a total review of everything the PR people thought they were doing.

But it brings us back to the age old problem of sincerity. As they say, "once you can fake that you have it made". The Cluetrain Manifesto raises the problem; we have to speak publicly in a more authentic voice, but doesn't provide a solution. In Taka's original post, I didn't follow the link to "here's how Awasu can help" because it had "sales pitch" written all over it. That kind of language also helps to undermine the authenticity of the whole post and is, pleasantly, missing from his follow up. What we need is a way of speaking that doesn't engage that cognitive resistance factor that we instinctively feel about advertising.

That is what all blogs are trying to do, including this one. I engage in the debate, I proffer ideas and arguments, hopefully increase the value of the resources I link to by giving you something to think about as you follow the link. Somewhere down the track, someone who needs the kind of skills and background that I have will find the blog, get to know me through the content and ask me to do some work for them. In the meantime, I gain huge benefits from having to make myself as clear as possible about what I think on the kinds of topics that will matter to a future employer. That implies that I have to think these things through in the first place and that alone makes me better off immediately.

In the meantime I also get to debate some damned sharp people and that keeps the ageing neurons awake.

Comments

[James Farmer]

Thanks for the thoughts Earl... nice to find another downunder blogger :o)

I'm v. interested in the push/pull thing... always have been! I wonder if the real power of personal publishing is that it is the first technology that really binds push & pull together?

[Earl Mardle]

I have a theory, now THERE'S a suprise, that almost anything works, as long as too many people don't do it.

The Japanese are great savers, obsessive savers, that's part of the reason their economy was so strong and has now stagnated for over a decade; the US and Aussies are great spenders, we spend money we don't have, we wont ever have, that's part of the reason the US especially is the world's biggest debtor nation.

The balance comes from people adopting different strategies because each strategy creates niches for other people to fill with different strategies. A jigsaw that is made of identical but irregular pieces will never fit together, the same with any ecology. Its only when everyone wants to be the lion that the lions end up eating each other and the last one starves to death.

I think the online world is similar, there are different strategies using different tools that work more, or less, at different times. Our biggest problem is that we imagine that there is one answer and that we either have it (fanatics of all stripes) or we don't (victimhood) both are wrong - to a degree.