Kristine Lowe

Old dogs and new tricks (or what really happened to last year's editors' blog)

About this time last year I had great fun putting together a team of media bloggers who live blogged the Norwegian Editor's Association's annual conference which was headlined "Editor 2.0" (on commission from that very same organisation).

While writing this, I'm just about to fly out to Bergen where, among other things, this year's annual conference will kick off soon - but the blog we had so much fun with last year has largely been abandoned: after we started the conversation for last year's conference, the blog has not been updated and editor 2.0 is no longer a theme. I might drop by this year's spring conference as a journalist, but I thought maybe it's about time to put up something like this cartoon (via Sambrook) to explain the silence on the editors' blog, www.redaktorene.no:

How MSM and Marketers can curry favour with bloggers

Cory Doctorow has 17 excellent tips in Information Week (via Bloggers Blog) on how to get bloggers to write about you – which could be just as useful for news sites.

Now, let me first take a moment to say that I've never understood journalists and editors complaining about parasitic bloggers and how they feed off mainstream media (MSM). To my mind, the world wide web is a conversation, or more precisely a cacophony of small and big conversations, and the day people stop talking about your newspaper that's when you should start getting really worried. Besides, blog buzz = link love = traffic, and I can't see how blog-traffic is less valuable than other traffic.

But back to Doctorow. In short, his advice adds up to "link, link and link some more":

Have a link. Have a permanent link. Have a link for everything. Use real links. Use links that go to pages. Flash sites stink (no way to link direct to specific page, no way to copy), PDFs stink (or, as Greenslade once suggested PDF = Pretty Damn Futile) etc ...Anyway, go read in full, got to run now....

How many of the right readers can you offer us, dear?

"So, just how many DINKY unique visitors with a penchant for expensive jewlery do we get by employing you to blog for us?"

If this post on how "Personality pays in the pay-per-click economy of blogging" is anything to go by, this sort of sentiment may come to govern many a future job-interview in the media world.

As Philip pointed out in the comments, the post I wrote on the blogger who promised to bring in 120,000 readers for her future employer left a lot to be explored. It was just a tidbit I jotted down really, short on time and all of that. But I finally found time to make a few phone calls, which resulted in this piece. However, it doesn't answer all the questions Philip raised, so here's a bit more context:

When Swedish blogger Katrin Schulman recently made it known she was keen to move her delicately named blog, Fuck you right back, away from lifestyle site Stureplan.se, her blog was snapped up by competing site Sthlmsfinest.com, which hopes to gain a substantial traffic increase on the back of the deal.

The interesting story here, to me at least, is how both these sites hire high-profile bloggers to bring in specific audiences which are attractive to advertisers (both are funded by advertisement).

Alexander Erwik, editor-in-chief of the latter site told me they pay a mix of bloggers to write high-profile blogs about music, fashion and trends – all of which bring in their own niche audiences.

Likewise, Thomas Grabe, the managing editor at competing Stureplan.se, said: "The mix of bloggers is very important to the site. To showcase a blogger or personality you can not have more than max eight blogs. There are perhaps 15 really big bloggers who get paid for blogging in Sweden, six of them originally blogged for us."

Grabe explained that it was Alex Schulman, Karin's husband, who made Stureplan the success it is, and that at one point several of the members of the Schulman family, an old influential Swedish family, were writing high-profile blogs – the brother, the mother, the wife and Alex Schulman himself.

"It was a bit like Big Brother, but online. Katrin is very controversial and told people like it was, hence the name of the blog: fuck you right back. The F-word is indeed controversial, but not to the extent of which it is abroad," said Grabe.

Bloggig is about identity, not brand

A blog gives you a chance to build your own identity, which is miles better than brand. It allows for a mix of trivial, serious, thoughtful and sometimes stupid.. just like the human being behind it. That is the authenticity that companies would like to infuse their brands with. Alas, it's like with androids. Close but not quite. And often, not even close...

Afraid I don't have the direct link for this quote, but I'm sure it's something I copied down from Adriana ages ago (I can just hear her voice when I read it:-) ). I came to remember this quote just now, thinking about a question Paal Hivand asked yesterday about how long you can get away with pure marketing and sales on a blog or twitter acoount before readers get fed up. For my own part: my time/attention is precious, and I get fed up straight away if there's nothing in it for me... Just gave up on following BBC News on twitter because they don't provide direct links (in which case follwing them via my news reader would be far superior, but that's too much of a commitment)...

Journalist ought to love social media

Blogging could be the best thing that's ever happened to journalists, if we can only get our heads around it.

I apologise. If you're new to this blog and didn't check the first link of my last post, I might have misled you: I'm all for journalists blogging and can't start to count all its blessings.

However, I think it's useful to reflect on why so many media folks see social media, like blogs, as a threat and not an opportunity; and equally useful to reflect on how social media might change journalism.

See, a flair for writing, as was mentioned in the comments on my last post, is not enough to reap max benefits from blogging. You need a flair for conversation. Not for blagging, or opining or for great oration, but for dialogue.

You can be the world's most erudite writer, and of course you are free to use your blog as an outlet for blagging, opining, speechifying, it's just that if you're only in it for the opportunity to broadcast your views to the world, you miss out on half the gimmick, half the fun: you miss out on all those wonderfully distributed conversations (surely, this is why we classify blogs as social media?).

But you would think journalists would make great conversationalists, wouldn't you? That, is unless they approach blogging as op-ed writing (which too many do), or apply all their worst prejudices about blogging to their own blogging efforts and try to mimic the noisy, drunken, nonsensical pub banter they think blogging should sound like (unfortunately even more common).

Which brings me to why I think blogging is so useful for journalism: I think all journalists these day work at the intersection of mainstream and social media - because the latter is bound to change, and is changing, how we communicate and what we expect from the world – and the best way to understand social media, and how it is changing things, is by using it.

As Robin Hamman wrote recently: "The only way to "do social media" is to embrace it, not just as something that's tacked onto the back of a website, but as a method of actually doing whatever it is your business is."

You could say I'm biased of course; for my own part, I certainly did not understand social media until I started using it. I started reading about social media around 2000, but as I touch on in this interview with Siren FM (clip not working at the moment, but I'm hoping it will be back), I didn't really get it until I started blogging myself in 2005.

For years, I was too busy chasing deadlines, too busy to notice how much these very interesting things I had read about were changing the world around me. That is, until a friend of mine got fed up with all my excuses, just set up a blog for me and told me to get blogging. It was like a great white canvas: I had no idea how I wanted to use it, but about half a year into it I found myself blogging more and more about the changing media landscape, which perhaps can serve as a warning - I had no idea there was a media junkie lurking inside of me until I got blogging.

As it turned out, blogging has made me more optimistic about the future of media than ever, and taught me many invaluable skills. I touch upon how blogging supplements my journalism in my post on distributed conversations, and the web as a treasure throve for journalists here. No, I don't think that the web makes journalists redundant, quite the contrary, in fact I think it vastly improves a journalist's ability to tap into all kinds of wonderful conversations (be they semi- or near private or public)....

Journalists take to blogging like ducks to tarmac

Should journalists blog? I'm sure I've covered this before (well, actually I have) but a recent interview about teaching blogging to journalists spurred an interesting response from an editor who hated the idea but happened to be a pretty decent blogger himself, so here we go again.

First the backdrop: from time to time I try to write a piece or two for journalisten.no about all the media innovation happening around the world, such as this piece on Spokesman Review's "transparent newsroom", or this recent two-part interview with Adam Tinworth on how Reed Business Information (RBI) England uses blogs to supplement its journalism, and the challenges of teaching journalists how to blog (all links in this paragraph in Norwegian).

Some journalists make lousy bloggers
If you are familiar with Adam's blog, you will know that not all journalists take to blogging like ducks to water, or, to use the words of Andrew Grant-Adamson "some very good journalists make lousy bloggers," but if you're not, and Norwegian is all Greek to you, here's a few highlights:

"Most journalists have spent decades having personality beaten out of them, now they have to find their personality again.

"The biggest single mental hurdle for journalists is that they leap into the blogosphere and expect huge traffic at once due to brand name. Inevitably, they get severely disappointed as it takes time to build a blog audience. But over time they learn to love the hundreds of readers they have on their blogs much more than the hundred thousands of readers they have in print.

Journalists equate blogs with opinion pieces
"If reporters leave blog comments very long for moderation, we know they don't follow comments well. They need to be taught blogging is not only about writing. The shocking thing is that you see a lot of journalists don't care about their readers, but I don' think these journalists will survive. Readers will come to expect interaction."

Or, to use a recent line from Kevin Anderson, The Guardian's blog editor. (via Adam): "one of the things that many journalists don't do enough of when they blog: Listen". Now, as I mentioned at the start of the post, this interview provoked a phone call from a Norwegian editor, namely the managing editor of RBI Norway, who was very keen to stress that his titles were not getting into the blogging business anytime soon.

And I'm very glad this editor got in touch with us and told me what he thought about all this, because I know a lot of journalists share his views and fears. In fact, as the news site of the trade publication for Norwegian journalists this is exactly the kind of debate we want to put on the agenda (and our comment section is wide open):

Blogging is second-hand journalism
"I find it strange that journalists blog next to their reporting. Why can't you keep the readers informed through a good news service with sources? A reporter's stories should be published in proper articles, not rushed out as blog posts," this editor said.

However, he also told me that he wrote a blog in his spare time that had "nothing to do with work". And I promised I wouldn't link to his blog in my article as he felt it wouldn't interest anybody, but I will mention it here because it's more than interesting enough for me to start subscribing to it. See, it turns out this guy is Norway's only internationally accredited cross-country court builder and blogs about cross-country competitions because, it gives him "an opportunity to highlight results that rarely get mentioned in the daily press" .

A potentially star-quality blogger
Now at this point I should mention that I used to be really into equestrian sports. Perhaps I'm a bit of a ninny, but, whereas I'd trust my skills as a rider to re-school problem horses or break in young ones (or used to, now those skills are very rusty), I never found much joy in cross-country jumps myself as there are too many factors beyond my control (permanent/solid fences lead to nasty accidents).

So I couldn't agree more with Anton in his most recent post which deals with how there's been too many fatal accidents during competitions as of late, but I used to know a lot of people in the equestrian scene, so still find it very interesting. In fact, if I was editing an equestrian magazine, this is exactly the kind of blog I'd like to link up or get on board (though I'd like to know even more about the challenges of building cross-country courts).

Blurring the lines
His posts (infrequent as the sport is seasonal) are great reporting mixed with informed opinion, the opinion of a professional who knows the sport inside out, which brings me to the last argument Anton had against mixing blogging and journalism: "Blogs are more of a genre for commentary. If journalists start blogging too much, I fear the lines between news and commentary will become blurred."

I'm sure many editors and journalist share those fears, and having written this, I'm starting to wonder if I haven't come to see journalism more like a conversation, or perhaps that should be: if I haven't started blurring the lines between blogging, which I see as conversation, and journalism. If so, is that the first sign of corruption?

Blogging can be too big a hurdle for some journalists
(picture from Wikipedia)

Is this the media future?

After eight months at stureplan.se, blogger Karin Schulman made it known she was keen to take her blog, called "Fuck you right back", somewhere else. Dagens Media asked her how much they'd have to pay for her: "I only work on commission. 4 pence per unique visitor per month," was her reply. And how many unique visitors can you deliver? "120,000", she said. Adds up to a pretty decent monthly salary.

Obviously someone thought it was a fair bargain: according to Dagens Media, Schulman will be moving her blog to sthlmsfinest.com, Stureplan's worst competitor, tomorrow. Schulman on the other hand, is already branding her former employer as "ungrateful".

On The Knee-Jerk Journalistic View of Bloggers

Adam over at One Man and his Blog alerted me to this brilliant post by Howard Owens, "Journalists who learn to blog help their online sites grow beyond shovelware".

Adam is particularly taken by these lines:

Most of the bad bloggers tend to gravitate toward current affairs blogging.

Unfortunately, political blogs are also the kind of blogs most journalists tend to read. So a lot of journalists have a very low opinion of blogging.

Those of us more immersed in blogging, or who have grown beyond merely the current affairs bloggers, know that there is more to blogging than rants and raves.

For me, who don't teach journos how to blog, it was these lines that really stood out (foremostly because I had something positive to say about them):

Naive as it might be, I haven’t given up hope. I believe journalists can become good bloggers.
Learning to blog really takes turning one simple switch in your head: This isn’t print journalism.

It isn’t the journalism of your cranky old city editor or your sainted j-school prof. Neither of those old farts would approve of blogging in any form, even though blogging is now part of the legitimate media mix.

Well, never say never: my former tutor at City University, Professor Richard 'Probably-knows-every-journalist-in-the-world' Keeble as my co-presenter so aptly called him, recently invited me to give a talk on blogging at Lincoln University, and the journalist who mentored me when I was at the Daily Express' City section, whom I've never known to be cranky, recently invited me to say a few words about blogging to his staff at CityAM.

I've actually seen the attitudes towards blogging in the media industry change massively for the better in the last year or two, at least in England (not as much as I'd like in Norway yet, but certainly in neighbouring Denmark and Sweden where mainstream media have started to use blogs proactively). And, to give the last word to Howard Owens:

In case it’s not obvious: There are lots of different kinds of blogging. This post might be an example essay blogging (if I were to be that pompous about it). There’s also link blogging, and commentary blogging, and news blogging. The kind of blogging a journalist might do depends on the situation, the purpose and the goals. The purpose of this post is merely to say — get over your objections to blogging and start exploring how you can use it in your newsroom to grow readership...

Influence on the Web is all about connectivity

It's been months since I revisited the value of linking out, so it was great to stumble across this post by Publishing 2.0 (via Martin Stabe), which contained too many eloquent lines on the power of the hyperlink to include them all on del.icio.us. My favourite parts:

The reason Google’s search results often contain more blogs than traditional media content is that blogs were the first to harness the power of the link. Blogs linked to other blogs, while traditional media brands remained disconnected silos. Savvy web users — many college age or early 20s — pooled their links on Digg and developed the power to drive server-crashing volumes of traffic, forcing traditional media sites, who still lack such influence, to plaster themselves with Digg This buttons...

...Journalists and PR professionals, the influence brokers of traditional media, have lost a huge degree of influence on the web in large part because they don’t link to anything. While traditional media brands are still powerful channels on the web, they are losing influence everyday to the link-driven web network — journalists and PR professionals can no longer depend on controlling these former monopoly channels to exert influence online.

Whenever I give talks to traditional publishers who have been afraid to link to other sites because it will “send people away” instead of keeping them trapped in the publisher’s own content, my now standard response is to say that there’s a site that does nothing but link to other sites — all it does is send people away. And yet remarkably, people keep coming back. So much so, that this strategy has translated into $10 billion+ in advertising revenue. (Yes, Google of course).........

Danish news site starts linking to blogreactions

On Tuesday this week, Politiken.dk, the news site of one of Denmark's leading newspapers, started using Twingly to show blog links to the sites' articles (I covered the news here, in Norwegian. More about Politiken's reasons for doing so here, in Danish).

As it happened, this was one day before the newspaper decided to republish pictures of one of the controversial Mohammed cartoons, and I had honestly forgotten about this when I blogged about it, but as the links started coming in I got a chance to investigate the effects of linking up blogs in this way further (I blogged about Norwegian and Swedish news sites' experiences with using Twingly here). I'd expected a lot more bloggers to link to the Politiken-article with the cartoon, but so far Twingly only shows five blog links.

Effects and causes
I got quite a bit of traffic from the link though, more than what I got from links from e.g. Financial Times or Washington Post, but less than what you'd get from many bloggers with a big following linking to you – but I think that has something to do with the topic being so controversial.

Not that I'm too fussed about traffic, I'd take 10 blog readers who are genuinely interested in what I write about over 1000 random readers any old day, but I'm curious about the effects of linking up bloggers this way. The people I talked to at the Norwegian and Swedish sites (Dagbladet, Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter) who'd used Twingly for some time said it created more loyal readers rather than more traffic, and also that it provided valuable feedback for the journalists.

Bridge to the blogosphere
Or, for a more poetic description of the dynamics at work: "Dagbladet's use of Twingly helps to build bridges. It opens up a communication channel to the blogosphere. It's interesting for me as a blogger because it gives me exposure, but it ought to be interesting for the journalism as well because you get other perspectives," Eirik Newth said in a debate I covered recently.

Which reminds me, to get even more poetic, of a line from a poem, Landscape by Norwegian poet Aase-Marie Nesse (my translation): "We are all islands, in an abruptly deep, pacific ocean – but the word is a bridge".

I'm sure there is a great metaphore to be made here about how newspapers have become too insular, cut themselves off from the world or something, but I'm too tired to try to make it (suggestions welcome). A more cynical way to look at it is that linking up bloggers is an attempt to regain lost influence, seeing that power and influence on the web is all about connectivity (link via Martin Stabe), but I'm getting too flippant here, been up since before the break of dawn, so think I'd better get some sleep....

Soft blagging

Okay, I made what I guess you could call a Freudian slip when I started this post, I wrote an a rather than an o: blagging. Now that's a way to look at blogging, the former is certainly a long treasured skill for journalists.

But the point I was planning to get at was quite different: I was at home with a serious bout of something on Wednesday, felt ever so sorry for myself, and thought, to lighten up a bit, I'd just do a bit of soft blogging (I attended a debate recently where I learned that youngsters use 'facebooksofting' as a way to relax after a strenuous day, so I though why not do some soft blogging). In the end, these lines on soft blogging fell victim to the perfectionist in me, and my blogging plans this week were all put a bit on hold until (first) I felt better, and (second) I got through my deadlines and social obligations, by which time I had built up quite a need for soft blag.. eh... blogging, so be warned: a bit of that coming up now...

... actually, perhaps the perfectionist got the better of me again, or perhaps the strong cultural conditioning in this country, which I discussed with an American friend only last night, finally caught up with me. In either case I ended up just bragging...

SMS loans and bloggers = new risk area for tax authority

For the Swedish Tax authority, that is. Apparently they will enlighten us as to exactly how bloggers and SMS loans pose a new risk when they present the first year results from an e-commerce project today. They will also present their findings from 'control areas' such as pornography, poker games and new online market places such as Blocket and Tradera, suggesting that the problem they have been surveying might have something to do with control - or lack thereof (more over at Media Culpa).

Update 2/2 from Media Culpa: Tax authorities spider the web in search of fraud

Must read of the day: All this online sharing has to stop

This piece is absolutely hillarious, so I couldn't help but share it with you. Here's an excerpt, but go read the whole thing. The author first deals with the woes of the music industry:

"You think you were the first to suffer from your content getting ripped off and spread to the four corners of the earth? Get to the back of the line, bud. There's a few people ahead of you"

Then the woes of the newspaper industry:

People "copy-and-paste entire articles from online newspapers to blog sites or to their own computer and they don't pay a thing. Then they read them or 'share' them with other people who they might not even have met."

Before he gives us this little gem:

"Next, pornography. You know, there used to be tons of top-shelf magazines, all earning a comfortable living. Then you know what? The damn internet came along and at a stroke destroyed their business model, in which shifty-gazed commuters had to go into insalubrious shops to get "content". Now there are loads of internet sites (Google reliably tells me) where you can get free amateur porn - exactly the same sort of stuff that people used to pay for! It's shocking (and what's more, there are no unsightly staples in the middle of the pictures)."

Before he tails it all off with a great two lines that puts the whole article in a new perspective....

Is Peter Hain's resignation UK's first blogging scalp?

Remember the Swedish blogger who brought down a trade minister? Well it seems the story is repeating itself in the UK. Iain Dale suggests it was blogger Guido Fawkes who through is relentless campaign forced Hain's resignation as Work and Pensions secretary, and Guido certainly thinks so himself (he details his 18-month stalking of Hain here).

According to Greenslade: Mick Fealty (aka Slugger O'Toole), also thinks Guido did well. In a Daily Telegraph blog posting, he says there is more to Guido's gossip than meets the eye.
"His supreme value as a blogger is that he knows how to follow a story", writes Fealty. "Undoubtedly he kept a lot of psychological pressure on the former secretary for works and pensions directly and vicariously through his readers/fans/detractors in the lobby."

This story reminded me of Arianna Huffington's brilliant line (via Sambrook) on the difference between bloggers and journalists: "Bloggers suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, journalists suffer from Attention deficit disorder." In other words, journalists report and move on and don't always follow up. Bloggers are obsessive, get hold of an issue and won't let go....

That must make a blogging journalist such as myself bipolar (or schizophrenic).

Do live bloggers and vloggers threaten to take the business out of the events industry?

Jemima Kiss notes how US sports reporters, in what interestingly is not an isolated incident, have been issued with strict blogging rules by the NCCA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) and effectively asks if live blogging is threatening the business model of the events industry.

Admittedly, Jemima looks specifically at whether people "don't bother to pay the thousand-pound delegate fees for a conference if they know they can follow the whole thing live online," but the question applies just as much to the rest of the events industry - especially seeing it's the sports industry that seems most desperate to make sure that people continue to pay for the rights to cover big gigs. With today's technology, do live bloggers, vloggers, whether they act for professional reasons or just out of a desire to share the experience, threaten to make a substantial dent in the potential revenues of events-organisers, be they in the sports-, conference-, or music/entertainment industry?

Swedish link love: linking to bloggers breeds loyalty rather than traffic increase for MSM

What, if any, is the added value news sites can get from linking to bloggers?

If you're well versed in the dynamics of social media you might think this a silly question, but for news companies with a deeply ingrained 'silo-mentality' the answers are far from obvious. In fact, even if you run your own blog, it's not obvious that the benefits you get from linking up the conversations spurred by what you post on a very narrow niche topic will scale when you transfer the experiment to the country's biggest mass media outlets.

And since I work at the intersection of social media and mainstream media (MSM) – actually, I believe this is where all journalists work these days, whether they're conscious, or approve of it or not – I was curious about how news sites who link to bloggers felt this worked, so I asked a few newspapers in my 'neighbourhood' early this month (for this article, in Norwegian).

In Sweden, big nationals such as Dagens Nyheter (DN) and Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) have used Twingly, a blog search engine that can be used by newspapers to show blog links to articles, since early this year. In Norway, the country's second biggest tabloid, Dagbladet, has been experimenting with it since October.

In essence, they all said they had no evidence to suggest it created more traffic to their respective news sites, but it created more loyal users and was a way of connecting with the blogosphere which gave added value to their websites (Sweden), and it was valuable to hear what people thought about their journalism (Norway).

On the negative side, the biggest drawback was how many bloggers tried to 'game' the system and linked to the news sites' articles just to get traffic, though their content was completely unrelated to the articles they linked to and often nonsensical.

However, even though DN removed bloglinks concerning the caricature controversy earlier this year, controversial links represented only a minor problem for the newspapers, and Bo Hedin, head of digital media at SvD, told me it was extremely rare that they did block or remove Twingly links. He said he felt newspapers had to make a fundamental choice in this respect, and pointed me to an argument he'd made on his blog (my translation):

"As a media company we have to make a choice. We can either open up and accept that the odd link takes readers to opinions we don't share, or we can close the connection to the readers, op-ed writers and bloggers out there, and let the journalists publish their articles unbothered by the rest of the world."

Over at DN, Charlotta Friborg, the paper's managing editor online, told me that, like SvD, they had not experienced any significant traffic increase from linking to bloggers, rather it was the other way around: DN.se sent a lot of traffic to blogs.

As Media Culpa's Hans Kullin, I found it a bit puzzling to hear that MSM links send lots of traffic to bloggers. It may of course be the topic, both Kullin and I write about media stuff rather than highly controversial or political issues. Friborg did point out to me that Sweden has a lot high-profile political blogs, and those were often the blogs that spurred massive traffic.

Still, this blog has been linked up by a wide range of mainstream media, including Dagens Nyheter, Financial Times, Business Week, Washington Post, The Guardian etc. Of those, only the latter two have led to any significant traffic increase, and even then, the traffic has been miniscule compared to what happens when you get a link from A-list bloggers such as Dave Winer or Doc Searls.

The difference, I think, is community, and perhaps a different kind of readers. When I've been linked up by Washington Post and The Guardian, it has been via writers like Howard Kurtz and Roy Greenslade who both have a very strong following, or community, of readers who are passionate about the topics they write about, perhaps so passionate that they will follow the links to learn more?

But I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, and I'd also be very interested if you know of other, more formal or exhaustive, surveys on this topic (e.g. what are the experiences of really big papers like Washington Post and New York Times?)....

It's not a chore, not another bundle of deadlines: it's conversation

While catching up with my neglected RSS-feeds (that's getting to be a regular habit of mine, while too busy chasing deadlines I tend to save the 'thinking blogs' for a quieter day), I came across yet another healthy reminder of how to (not) go about blogging.

I readily admit that I often feel guilty about not blogging more - mainly because this blog, although a blank sheet when I started, has very much turned into my (public) notebook on the changing media landscape, and there's just so many interesting changes going on I'd like to record, for myself more than anybody else - but because I write so much in my professional life, it just becomes too much if I turn blogging into yet another chore. So I have to leave it aside for a while if it'not fun, if I can't use it as a welcome break inbetween all my looming deadlines and 'have-to-dos'.

I also realise that I've linked to a similar quote by Jeff Jarvis before, but I don't think it can be stressed enough, so here goes:

When I was in London, I sat with folks from the BBC in an afternoon devoted to blogging, and the woman next to me was troubled, bearing weight on her shoulders from having to fill her blog and manage her blog. To her, the blog was a thing, a beast that needed to be fed, a never-ending sheet of blank paper. I turned to her and said she should see past the blog. It’s not a show with a rundown that, without feeding, turns into dead air. Indeed, if you look at it that way, you’ll probably write crappy blog posts. I’ve said before that if I think I need to write a post just because I haven’t written one, I inevitably come out with something forced and bad. Instead, I blog when I find something interesting that I’ve seen and I think, ‘I have to tell my friends about that.’ You’re the friends. So yes, I said, it’s just a conversation. And reading — hearing what others are saying — is every bit as important as writing. It was as if scales were lifted from her eyes and weight from her back: She’s just talking with people.

Social media is too important to leave to self-proclaimed experts

Social media is something you have to engage with yourself to fully understand.

I've previously voiced my fears about how many companies seem to believe they can outsource that whole 'Web 2.0 thing', leave it to third party providers, though just where I made that point escapes me right now (Update 29/11: I made a few notes on this here and here). However, this is good stuff:

I've seen this post by Reuter's CEO, Tom Glocer, widely linked up (and deservedly) commended during the last few days, but Adriana, as always, brings some interesting thoughts to the mix. Here's my favourite part of Adriana's post (full post here):

"Tom Glocer is spot on about the nature of expertise. Recently I noticed how people in business are starting to approach learning about social media second-hand, listening to the self-proclaimed experts* rather than jumping straight in themselves:

I believe that unless one interacts with and plays with the leading technology of the age, it is impossible to dream the big dreams, and difficult to create an environment in which creative individuals will feel at home. This does not mean that the ceo needs to program a third-party app on Facebook, but I believe it is ultimately more useful in understanding business concepts like viral marketing, crowd-sourcing or federated development to use a live example rather than wait for the Harvard Business Review article to appear in three years time.

We should all feel comfortable to follow our own paths. What counts is the results, not living-up to some outdated view of what “work” looks like in the 21st century.

"Indeed. This is an area of exploration that no CEO or other executive should leave to others. If part of the job of a business leader is to see the big picture, well, there is no more distinct big picture out there than what is happening at the crossroads of the web, technology, media and human interactions within networks and outside traditional organisations and institutions.

"*For the record, rather than consider myself an expert on social media or Web 2.0 or [fill in the web buzzword du jour], I’d prefer to be an ‘expert’ at shifting people’s mindset and helping them understand what is the web and what’s possible on the web."

(Everything in quotemarks is Adriana's words, italics is Tom Glocer, emphasis (bold) is my formatting)

Buzz or substance

Replace that with traffic vs substance if you like, excellent quote from Doc Searls in this post, something to think about:

... do you go for buzz, or do you go for substance? Yes, you can go for both, but if your main purpose is popularity you sell out substance. That’s just how it goes. You may still traffic in substance, but it’s secondary. And if you go for substance you’ll sometimes get some buzz, but as a secondary effect.

The post was written on the back of this debate about the blogosphere and TechMeme, but the questions it raises applies just as much to mainstream media.

The ultimate CEO blog explains the meaning of life

It was perhaps a bit improper to blog this on a Sunday as I intended, hence I conveniently forgot to publish it until today, but I stumbled across this CEO blog, which, hang on, is not just yet another of those boring CEO blogs, but may with some justification be called the ultimate CEO blog (via Jackie Danicki).

After all, this particular CEO has 6.6 billion potential customers, and even though he is believed to be able to read our minds and know all our questions in advance, this blogger is going for 'a more transparent and accountable method'. From the mission statement: ".. every Wednesday I’ll give you the opportunity to ask me, the Lord God Almighty, questions and I’ll try to answer them as best I can. I should warn you that my ways are so mysterious that I sometimes baffle myself. But ask away!"

And, in the words of Jackie, when "God is a British CEO", this is the sort of common sense answers you get to such mind-boggling questions as that one about the ever elusive meaning of life:

The meaning of life is a performance review that I use to ensure constant improvement and growth.

Well, the word “life” is a noun and describes the opposite state to dead. You are alive and you do stuff and when your life is over it will have no meaning to you because you are then dead. Then you come to me and have a chat about things – and this is the meaning of life performance review.

In the performance reviews we sit down and carefully examine your life, what you did with it and if you generated any value for others, the kingdom of heaven or me. When you get here you are allocated a line manager and he talks you through the results of your review as we see them and gives you the chance to give your side of the story. Together we decide your future within my organisation.

In another post, the almighty blogger slags off Seth Godin for suggesting that all problems can be quickly outlined, and in the comment field we learn that Satan is working part time as a middle manager with McCanns - somehow I think many people already suspected that.

Unfortunately, this transparency experiment seems to have been shortlived: no posts since the end of August.