More on Blogs and Business Dynamics

I just realised that I didn't add anything to the previous post on the "Changing Business Dynamics" front and I want to tap into the piece by Ross Gardler as well.

I'm pretty sure that Tom Foremski was in promo mode about Blogs, rather than in thinking mode when he proposed that "Blogs And Wikis Change Business Dynamics". I agree, but the change is huge and structural, what changes is the dynamic itself, in other words the set of possible interacting nodes and the power of their interactions.

In an hierarchical system, the "energy" you can bring to an interaction is directly proportional to you place in the hierarchy; when the boss says jump, there had better be at least some version of "how high?". Similarly, information is assumed (incorrectly but assumed nevertheless) to flow up and down the hierarchy. Blogs (in fact any form of self publishing to an audience - including email) don't just change the energy that any one node can deploy, they change the number of possible nodes, the change all the possible pathways for information to flow in and they shift the centres of power from the control structure of the organisation to the information structure. Look for Karen Stephenson in Gossip - The original Knowledge Economy to see what I mean. The Dynamic, the whole dynamic, all of the measurements and points of measurement and interactions, everything changes. That's why bosses will be very wary of blogging in business for a while yet. Now, in his trackback to the last posting, Ross Gardler picks up on the whole issue of content quality and control. He says:

Since we need editorial control of our content, much of the automated publishing and linking provided by blogs is useless. So we are back to needing a full blown Content Management System with full workflow control of the publishing process.

I only go half way with Ross here. The CMS is vital to good information management and for control of the content of the content. I'm working with a CMS right now that is the total pits and the sooner we can shift to a new one (I'm keen to see Ross's Burrokeet fully blown) the better. But editorial control is something else and there we part company. It is the attempt by businesses to control the "message" that is inherent in the content that makes us most suspicious and it is that very dynamic that is already being broken by the technology and its users.

The fact is that whatever you may say on your website, I can quote it, link to it, dissect it, critique it and compare and contrast it with your competitors. My network of bloggers can link to me, trackback my posting and offer their additions, contradictions and analyses of both you and me. And that can happen within hours of you posting your content on the net.

Then, when someone looks for information with which your content deals, they find not only what you have said, but what everyone else has said about it as well. As blogs grow more ubiquitous, it is more and more likely that I will hear about what you have said in the context of someone else's posting on it.

That demands a new kind of business information and publishing strategy. For a start, if there is going to be debate about what you have said, it is far better that the debate be focused on you that centred on JoHo or DailyKos or What Was That. Secondly, if you participate in the hurlyburly of the online discourse, you have a much better chance of influencing the discussion than if you avoid it. Hands up all those who know what kind of commercial secrets Nicholas Ciarelli published about Apple Computers on his blog ThinkSecret. Exactly.

But what we do know is that Apple is going all litigious and has got itself embroiled in First Amendment issues and is frankly coming off as a jerk. Apple has generally "got" the "network" part of the Internet, but it seems like there are some parts of "open" that it missed on the way.

The rule about Internet content is that you cannot control it.

More to the point, the rule about the Internet Knowledge Economy, is that links are the currency and the capital. The more inbound links you have, the richer you are, and trackbacks are in effect an open exchange of mojo. I link to your content in a way that automatically returns the link. As time goes by, the content I trade with others aggregates a community of interest, it also aggregates a community of trust.

If someone relentlessly uses their blog to slag me off, I just block their trackbacks. But otherwise, the dynamic of the Internet enables my content to be embedded in a critical, but generally positive web of connections. Like the spider's web, the bigger I make it and the denser I make it, the more food (users) I will catch and have fed into my larder.

What's more, because the network is built as positively as possible, the people who arrive down that path are much more likely to be positively inclined to me than by any random process.

Good content management tools are essential, high quality content (is it true, is it accurate, is it interesting to read?) is absolutely essential. But editorial control? Forget it.

Just to back that up. Thanks to Jonnie Moore who left a comment yesterday, I followed a couple of links to this story from Simon Jenkins, Editor of the Times who has been feeling the earthquake of bloggery. Under my keyboard the desk shakes. The bloggers are on the march. For a moment he seems to get it.

But in truth I too am a blogger, snatching at some item of passing news to argue a case and persuade. And I charge for it. The blogger does it for nothing. I am on my mettle as never before. So move over, Caxton, the mystery is no more. The whistle-blowers, e-babies, inside-outers, wonkettes, quacks and cranks have globalised Speakers’ Corner. They have rebuilt the Tower of Babel and put microphones on top of it. Amid the noise, a still small voice of reason will still be heard. But it may require the help of Microsoft, not dead trees.'

But then he says something that I'm sure is true, but doesn't mean what he thinks it means.

The problem for conventional journalism is to prove that such qualities as news gathering and reliability are worth more than a scream of opinion, enough to get people to part with money.

Yes, exactly, and the rise of the blog is evidence that it has failed. It has failed because we all know that, whenever we read or hear a story in the corporate media that touches on something that we have some expertise in, they almost invariably get either the facts wrong, or the analysis wrong, or both. The Internet has simply enabled many of those who noticed this fact individually and in isolation, to share their disagreement, and discover that they are not alone. Then they share their alternative knowledge.

Jenkins makes the slightly arrogant assumption that bloggers don't actually know what they are talking about. In many cases true, in many cases the blogger IS the expert. Juan Cole, or Volokh or Larry Lessig for example.

Its not journalism's fault. It has been forced to work for a commercial master whose only real interest is in quarterly figures. So they have cut and cut at the biggest cost of journalism, people, experience and expertise.

It is completely diagnostic that the White House Press corps did nothing, absolutely nothing, zero, for 2 years about the presence of an impostor, a Republican party hack, planted in their midst. Either they didn't have the resources to find out about this guy, or they didn't care that he was a patsy or they were too afraid of their White House press privileges, to expose him.

There, to a greater or lesser degree, is what is wrong with the corporate media. Their fact checking has always been suspect, that's why Watergate is still talked about today, because it was then rare and is now practically extinct.

There is also the issue of bias. If I read one story, or one paper I quickly forget the precise details of the story, and go on to the next day's edition. But the net lets me, or someone, compare every story by that publication on that subject over time. We can look at the trajectory of the coverage, compare its content with the subsequent revelations of reality and note where the consistency is.

We can even compare the language used. Does this person get a high proportion of positive adjectives, and this one get a high proportion of negative? What can we infer from that? And we can compare the story itself with the press release. How much of it is verbatim, how much "fact checking" has actually been done?

And the corporate media is found wanting, again and again, with bias. That's why the Internet is causing Jenkin's desk to shake. That's why business blogging has a loooong way to go yet before it learns how to work in an open information environment. The real news is that Jenkins is right again.

What is clear is that the blogosphere has taken the press temporarily by storm.

Check your history, how many castles, "taken by storm" recovered their power under their original owners? Just asking.

Update: The perfect example of all this turned up over the weekend in the NYTImes. Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged TV News 8 screens of text about the White systematically undermining the credibility and authenticity of the media by paying for positive press from the commentators and shipping out "news" stories that have been played, without comment or attribution on major media outlets. The Times article documents an egregious propaganda exercise that has been perpetrated by the US government and perpetuated by a media establishment that is either too busy to care or too implicated to care, but in either case, they have destroyed their own credibility and are doing nothing apart from whining about bloggers, to rectify that problem.

Comments

[Ross Gardler]

I agree 100%, but would like to make one clarification about my own message, which you refer to:

You say:

"But editorial control is something else and there we part company. It is the attempt by businesses to control the "message" that is inherent in the content that makes us most suspicious and it is that very dynamic that is already being broken by the technology and its users."

I say "Editorial Control" does not necessarily mean "Censorship". I do agree that it *can* mean censorship. Where it does I would be in total agreement with all your points.

However, an Intranet site (and in many cases an Internet site) are informational resources. The quality of this information is vital and the truth of the blogsphere is that the vast majority of it is not good quality. Automated and uncontrolled linking across this dross reduces the quality of my content. Look at SlashDot - it used to be a good resource, now it is full of ill-informed comment (at least in my opinion).

You say:

"Good content management tools are essential, high quality content (is it true, is it accurate, is it interesting to read?) is absolutely essential. But editorial control? Forget it."

I say ensuring that you have true, accurate and essential content is part of the "editorial control" process.

Just to reiterate though, I am in agreement that censorship should not be part of the editorial process.

It's a very fine line, but if our editors stray off the line and start censoring the power of the blogsphere will soon show up the truth. No amount of editorial control in a central publication can bring the whole network down.

Hi Ross.
I agree, that censorship is a waste of resources and a dead end. I was thinking more along the lines that Editorial control is about the message rather than the content. The editorial pages of any given publication have always been the place to exercise that control by conditioning the message. "You read the facts on page one, [ALL of the facts? Well some selected facts. Selected by whom, and why?] now let us tell you what they mean". That kind of editorial control.

In fact, I tell anyone who will listen, that the Internet is all about control, and that it leaks everywhere.

In the case of content management tools and the processes they support, I would much prefer that we replaced control with some other idea such as authentication.

By that I mean something like the true, accurate, interesting trilogy I used above. If someone on the staff is breaching those standards, then the editorial process should be fixing the problem. On second thoughts, lets swap out editor and call it quality control. As long as the content is an interesting story, effectively told, based on checkable facts, truthfully represented, then I say it clears the bar, get it out there.

[Ross Gardler]

"I was thinking more along the lines that Editorial control is about the message rather than the content."

OK, I understand, I was coming from the perspective of a website that wants a finely tuned message. This doesn't neecsarily mean "my prodct is good, yours is bad" type messages. It could mean "this is what people think we need to do to tackle poverty in the devleoping world" type message.

I'll give you an example of where content editing would be useful in such a situation. Today I followed a trackback from an article about AIDS in Africa. The trackback added no value whatsoever and instead quoted a line from a song that happened to mention AIDS. A complete waste of my time, and anyone elses who followed that trackback.

You go on to say "I would much prefer that we replaced control with some other idea such as authentication"

I guess we are in agreement then :-)

[http://www.worldbusinessforsale.com/]

We would be honored if we could be added to this blogger. We are from the World Business for sale is the leading independent businesses for sale listing service
http://www.worldbusinessforsale.com/