David Pogue's blog entry, "Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0?" starts out talking about why companies aren't using Web 2.0, but specifically he is discussing business blogging and the advantages of transparency and open communication with your customers.

We all know, intellectually, that no matter what image a corporation tries to project, it's made up of ordinary people with personalities, insecurities and lives. But because the marketing and P.R. teams work so hard to scrub, control and package a company's image, the public ordinarily sees none of that human side.

When a company embraces the possibilities of Web 2.0, though, it makes contact with its public in a more casual, less sanitized way that, as a result, is accepted with much less cynicism. Web 2.0 offers a direct, more trusted line of communications than anything that came before it.

This is Cluetrain Manifesto stuff. Read that if you want to be convinced of the bigger picture of transparent businesses.

Yahoo! Small Business offers two new ways for companies to start blogging with a hosted Movable Type or WordPress solution. Very good news for small businesses that don't want to maintain their own system on their machines or a webhost. You pay a reasonable monthly fee and Yahoo! handles the software administration and upgrades.

I gave a talk on enterprise weblogging for the New Jersey Chapter of the American Society of Information Science & Technology yesterday. The presentation is a distilled version of all of my past talks on the topic. I'm finding that I need to prune the actual power point file down more and more to use fewer slides, with more graphics and less text. What this is doing for me is allowing me more space to engage in conversation with the audience rather than to talk at them. This is the point of weblogs, and as I get more comfortable with public speaking this is becoming easier. This entire talk with punctuated with questions and sidebar discussions, which really helped add context to the presentation.

Here are a few of the interesting broader questions that were raised.

What makes weblogs a better choice over email discussion groups or team workspaces? Can weblogs be integrated with existing environments, like Lotus Notes, etc. (various forms of this question were asked)

I've thought about how to answer this question in the past presentations because it comes up. The answer I give is usually starts with the obvious one: ease of use, price, and syndication. They're easier to use for publishing than the tools we currently have (portal systems, content and document management systems), they're easy to install, and they're cheaper (inexpensive or free). I think that's the answer that drove the individual push to blog in the business world initially. But it's not the whole answer. The answer can also be found in how weblogs relate individuals to the company and relate the company to productivity, profitability by using these tools for knowledge sharing. Lee LeFever's "Weblog Pitch" provides the best summary of how weblogs do this. He says "It's about seeing yourself in the context of the company." It's about creating this context and understanding to make better decisions. As you may know from reading or attending my presentation, my long view for all of this is to extract and derive meaning in the relationships that are carved out of weblog use. Weblogs make this sort of extraction very simple because of what has evolved as a pattern for weblog format (blog entry, comment attached to email address or home page, trackbacks, XML feeds with subject fields) can be used for observation of relationships. These relationships can turn into other connections, expert finding, and that sort of thing.

The point people seem to be concerned about is a practical one. We do all of this sharing already in email discussion groups. We use Sharepoint. Why is this any better? My answer is yes, you can archive email discussion. Yes you can do some categorization in team areas. What weblogs offer (besides the cheap, fast and easy experience) is a different experience.

The weblog experience is often about me. I the publishing process. And by control I mean that usually an individual controls what she publishes, whereas an email discussion group is loose. It's based on we rather than me unless you're working with a multi-user weblog. But the experience also adds simple categorization, simple commenting mechanisms (including trackback) and a simple method for sharing and syndicating your output. This is the experience that's unique. The Wiki experience is similar, but with a we/community focus.

Both weblogs and wikis are enablers for grassroots efforts. And there is where the experience takes on meaning to the ecology. As we've seen in the past with Dan Rather at CBS, Jordan Eason at CNN, and George P. Nanos at LANL, weblogs have truly given a great deal of messaging power to individuals for better or for worse. This disruption to the power structures that makes them very interesting with regard to the media or to corporations. Viewed properly, it should be taken as an opportunity to harness the messaging power of the individual.

What should you do to motivate people to weblog?

I reiterated my belief that a healthy ecology depends on the freedom for individuals to express their needs. That is to say, I think that the urge to blog should be self-motivated and that when someone publishes because they feel the need to, they are more likely to sustain that publishing as long as the need exists. Self-motivation is ownership of the process. Requiring people to blog doesn't make sense. I can't believe that the process will be honest, conversational and open if the need doesn't arise organically.

At KM sessions I've been to, I've heard vendors suggest that motivation is the factor that will drive KM software success. To that point, the vendor suggested incentivising contribution by matching with monetary rewards. I think this is entirely wrong. One of the reasons we see weblogs having some success at being used for information and knowledge management today is because it represents the opposite view -- one that suggests that motivation to publish and share knowledge should be an individual matter and should be owned and controlled by the individual rather than mandated from above. Weblogs and wikis are a grassroots revolution, not a idea cooked up by management.

I gave a talk at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on the use of weblogs for communication and information management. The talk incorporated components of several of the past presentations I've given on this topic. I covered these points:

1) why weblogs are emerging as a viable replacement for Knowledge Management software and as a supplement to an enterprise intranet portal

2) why weblogs are a good idea right now

3) what weblogs are being used for and how

4) strategy for dealing with weblog growth

5) ideas for sustaining use and measuring success.

A large part of my talk is focussed on case studies at Lucent, describing how we've used weblogs for communications, information sharing and knowledge management.

The LANL information ecology is similar in some ways to the Bell Labs ecology of years past. The CIO works at a high level on planning and funding and a decentralized system of IT organizations exists at LANL. It was great to see that the CIO works harmoniously with the diverse web-based systems that are developed and maintained by the individual organizations around LANL. This is exactly the environment that is perfectly suited to the emergence of weblogs. In my talk, I discuss at length the benefits of diverse "information ecologies" -- a concept taken from Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day's literature on the topic -- and how weblogs created out of bottom-up publishing efforts fit into this picture and provide a sensible, low-cost, high-value alternative to web publishing processes mandated from the top down. The concept of diversity as a key component to ecological health is validated in what has evolved at LANL.

A few people I spoke with at LANL stated that they are already considering using weblogs and wikis for some internal information management. Everyone in attendence of the conference was already aware of what weblogs are. The controversial public blog, "LANL: The Real Story" was more than likely the site that introduced many LANL staff to blogging.

While my talk emphasized the importance of weblogs as a publishing format, I also touched on some of the issues of giving messaging power to the masses because of its relevance to LANL. I pointed to the recent resignations of Jordan Eason at CNN and the demotion of Dan Rather at CBS following some mob-blogging related to statements made by each of these well-known public figures. The "LANL: The Real Story" blog was created to provide a public, uncensored forum for LANL staff to air their concerns and express their views about how the Labs were being run under director George P. Nanos. Nanos closed the Labs because of security concerns when classified tapes went missing. The report of missing tapes turned out to be a clerical error, but the shut downs cost the country an estimated $850 million. Last week, on May 6th, Director Nanos resigned. The story is covered in the New York Times.

These stories about the movement of messaging power away from centralized control to the masses is fascinating, controversial, and a bit unsettling. At some level, it is phenomenal that a technology can be disruptive enough to create a major shift in the control of power within a social system. Essentially, in the cases of Rather, Eason and Nanos, what we're viewing is the democratization of social systems and organizations, although some people would probably call the open criticism that's been appearing on blogs mob-rule. Blogging is surfacing controversial issues to stakeholders that probably would have been hidden in the past -- swept under the rug. In today's weblogging world, the statements and actions of important public figures can be challenged rather than accepted. In the cases mentioned above, when the statements or actions could not be successfully defended, the public image of the organization was affected to the extent that the organizations feared reprisal in the form of pulled financial backing.

I should mention that while I don't believe this power-shift to be a bad thing, there is, of course, potential for mobs to utilize blogs in malicious ways. The first step in dealing with controversial blogs should therefore be more communication, not less. In the case of Jordan Eason, whom I believe should not have resigned, CNN should have reacted immediately, blogging the issue on their own and allowing conversation to happen between CNN and the public. The lesson in all this is that we live in a world where people believe in democratic rule and in ideas around open communication (like those espoused in John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty"). The right reaction to these types of disruption is to react to it in kind with open debate and conversation. What these individuals and organizations could have done is used weblogging for their counter-message and as a platform for defending statements and actions rather than simply evading the issue. Has the lesson been learned by the media? We'll see the next time this happens.

But to return to the topic of my talk, which is not nearly as provocative as the talk of the Nanos resignation, there is clearly a lot of awareness of the power or blogs, not only as vehicles for unovering hidden issues, but also as a tool for information and project management. There are reports of blogs being used at LANL already, and many of the web developers in the audience had specific questions about how to select from the various technologies offered in the blog publishing space right now. Some individuals were interested in how we at Lucent are approaching the need to publish blogs. I communicated that my organization's role has mainly been to react to the needs expressed around blogging by providing consulting and developing strategies for dealing with weblog growth. I empasized that I believed in the decentralized approach to weblog implementation because such an approach allows content owners to retain control and decision making power related to their needs and the technologies they choose to fill them. That said, I also believe that a centralized solution may also be successful if well-conceived and flexible enough to allow content owners to control their data and the use of the blog.

I provided some ideas for dealing with weblog growth in the near and long term including the RSSification of enterprise databases and the creation of weblog RSS aggregation and archiving services. I also touched on the idea of integrating some of this output with other enterprise information systems and using applications that allow social behaviors. These ideas were outlined in the presentation I gave at Computers in Libraries, 2004.

The conference provided a good opportunity for me to connect with web developers in a community similar to ours at Bell Labs in the hopes of continuing to discuss how we use weblogs to meet key business needs in our respective organizations. As LANL staff move forward with their projects, we hope to share our experiences. Hopefully the outcome of our dialogue will result in best practices over time.

WhatCounts, the email delivery application service provider, has announced BlogUnit, a network appliance for enterprise weblogging. The product is a rack-mountable appliance that plugs into a company network and runs the vendor's weblog publishing software.

It's hard to believe that a new type of product would emerge in this market where there are already quite a few vendors with established weblog products, services and client bases. The BlogUnit offering is actually quite different, however, and makes good sense for a number of reasons. Like the Google Search Appliance, the BlogUnit appliance is targetted at the corporate market, where the idea of quickly plugging in and setting up a pre-installed enterprise service might be attractive. The BlogUnit product also looks interesting for this market because of the features they're providing to help companies control publishing workflow and distribution. One of the examples given, is that the product allows the set up of controls to automatically alert certain individuals to approve posts as they're entered into the system. This is particularly necessary for companies that are concerned about what the company communicates to the outside world. Those companies can include corporate communications and legal counsel as gateways in the publishing workflow. It seems like a very small thing -- something that's built into most major content management systems. But this type of workflow management is probably a very important feature for many companies.

I can hear all the blog evangelists starting to get uneasy about all of this. The more steps to filter communication, the less blog-like these sites become. But while companies may be feeling the need to react to competitors who are using weblogs as a medium for communication, they may also need to address legal and corporate communications concerns. For those companies, workflow gateways are probably necessary. With every additional filter in the process, however, complexity is added and the simplicty of weblogging starts to get lost.

Imagine starting a weblog initiative with even 2 or 3 individual bloggers. Now imagine that every entry they post has to be reviewed and approved before it goes live. Not only does that sort of editing and review make it difficult for the bloggers to feel like they are trusted and in control, but it also demands a pretty big committment of the PR and legal people whose job it will be to review every entry.

I think the corporate concerns about weblogs are very real. But these concerns and how they may potentially impact the process of weblogging make it more and more difficult for a weblog to succeed. By its very nature, weblogging is personal and organic. Adding unncessary filters to address corporate concerns will make blogging feel much more organizational and synthetic and I would argue, may potentially make weblogs not very different from any other messages published by PR and marketing.

A the end of the day, the nature of the company and its culture and politics will determine how well a company will take to public blogging. Public weblogs won't be as successful in large corporations unless bloggers feel trusted and empowered to represent their company. For bloggers to feel this way, executives need to trust them and demonstrate that trust. They need to trust that their employees will follow the policies they set. If this dynamic exists between management and employees, all that is needed is to set the policies about what can be discussed on blogs and establish an ongoing dialog between the policy setters and potential bloggers about legal and communications concerns.

I'm really not as interested in customer-facing corporate blogs as much as I am in blogging on the intranet. But this product and some recent conversations I've had about corporate blogging with journalists and with customers inside my company have made me more aware of some of the very different issues that face companies when they blog to the outside world. Fortunately, intranet blogging for knowledge and project management doesn't hold as many obstacles.

The upcoming C2: Connect & Collaborate conference at the New York Hilton (Sept. 27-28) looks interesting. They have a call for speakers deadline of March 15, if you're interested in this topic and want to propose a presentation. I'd love to see/hear what others are doing, so if you're working on enterprise blogs and your proposal gets accepted to C2, do let me know.

I don't think I'll be submitting a proposal. After I do one last upcoming talk this spring, I think I will stop speaking on this topic for a while. We're at the point now where we're watching to see how some of our current projects do and monitoring what the interest and growth possibilities are for weblogs in the intranet. We're really still at an early phase in our roadmap, so there's a lot of internal evangelism and waiting at this point.

There have been quite a few articles in the media reporting on people who have gotten fired from their jobs for blogging. Recently we've also been seeing articles about how off the record comments can get people fired, as may have been the case with CNN's Eason Jordan. I've been wondering how all of this negative press about weblogs is being received.

First off, I don't find it particularly bad form to round up the wagons around a cause as bloggers often do with public figures such as politicians. But the recent use of weblogs to rally around isolated comments made by individuals and the effect it has on their careers is a little surprising to me, but not entirely so. Bloggers are feeling the power of their voice and are passionately exercising that power. Ryan Underwood, in Fast Company, likened the Jordan blogging to a witch hunt and advises bloggers, however, to heed the maxim that what comes around goes around. Good advice. Rebecca Blood's reaction to all of this provides some cogent observations about responsibility, ethics and using common sense with regard to using weblogs. I'm also in agreement with what Anil Dash has been saying. The negativity surrounding blogs cannot be too good for our medium.

Rony Abovitz, the author of the blog entry that publicized the comments made by Eason Jordan which eventually led to his resignation from CNN, made this comment in the New York Times.

He hoped bloggers could develop loftier goals than destroying people's careers. "If you're going to do this open-source journalism, it should have a higher purpose," he said. "At times it did seem like an angry mob, and an angry mob using high technology, that's not good."

This quote makes it seem as though the conservative mob organized to expose and remove Jordan. I admit that I haven't gone out and read the threads following Abovitz's entry, but I can't imagine how any open discussion like this leads so quickly to an employee being asked to resign (if that's what happened). It doesn't make sense that he should have resigned. Why can't the world take a breath and remove itself from the busy throng of discussion and put this all in context before we go writing resignation letters? Jay Rosen says CNN's answer to this miscommunication should have been more communication, not running away from or hiding the issue. Dialog is what weblogging is about and the very medium that flamed the fire could have been used to put it out.

Sigh. I suppose such is the case with someone like Jordan who, in a position of influence and in the wake of Dan Rather's re-assignment was victim to this craziness. For those people, it seems, every word has to be considered before being uttered. Or to put it more succinctly, talk openly only to those you know you can trust.

It really is surprising what happens when a medium becomes disruptive in so many ways, good and bad, as blogging has become. We are seeing with blogs that perhaps more than with any other medium, people are openly and actively trying to deal with and understand issues in our world by communicating on the web. Individuals are trying to be involved in the news they read. That in itself is not a bad thing. But the use of this medium has to be tempered with some responsiblity and some understanding of the ramifications of taking part. And while I say that and believe it, at the same time I think we shouldn't feel like we need to limit what we can speak about. That's liberty and it's what the country I live in is supposedly based upon (idealogically anyway).

I empathize with anyone who has lost their job due to blogging. I find it a bit sad, however, that people need to worry about what they can say and publish on the web, unrelated to the company they work for. But that is the reality for us bloggers. I don't feel, however, like this threat to the image of blogging should change the way I currently write on the Internet in weblogs, forums, email discussion. I'm not a particularly influential person, so my blogging is perhaps trivial in the eyes of the company I work for. But, to some extent I do try to protect myself as much as possible and do more self-editing now than ever before when I put my fingers on the keyboard. I know my employer and colleagues can easily identify me here on my blog and in the other Internet conversations I participate in. In this new world where anything one says can be spread around the world so quickly, it's becoming more and more important I suppose to watch what you say on and off the record and to know who's listening.

This flurry of blog-related news has also made me a bit curious about how potential users/creators of business blogs will react. What I worry about as someone who evangelizes the value of enterprise blogging is the effect that the negative buzz may create with business decision makers. People who don't normally follow weblogs are now reading more and more about blogging in mainstream media (newspapers and magazines) and what they're seeing most these days is negative news related to weblogging. Will this create some negative reaction to blogs as a potential medium for communication?

It must be difficult for busy management staff to follow trends in the web technology industry and fully grasp an individual technology or medium. It is likely the case that many managers only get exposure to a trend once it gets printed in mainstream media. They may tend to latch on to a buzzword that appears in Fortune or a trend that shows up in Business 2.0. The fear, as Anil states is that people will start to call blogging "that things that gets you fired."

I haven't seen too many articles in the mainstream business media calling blogging bad for business, and hope that media writers continue to objectively report newsworthy incidents without attaching negative value to blogging as a medium. It's unfortunate that article titles like the one in CNN/Money (Have a blog, lose your job? Workers with Web logs are everywhere, and they're starting to make corporate America very nervous) are so sensational and give business managers and bloggers alike some pause. The article will lead you to believe that companies are organizing campaigns against their blogging employees. This really isn't the case in my opinion. At best, these companies are protecting proprietary information that is compromised by their blogging employees. At worst, they are dismissing employees for making bad decisions about how to blog on company time or on company premises.

I just hope that the isolated incidents with Rather and Jordan won't tarnish the image of blogs. But again, to quote Anil, no one ever gets fired for blogging. They sometimes get fired for having poor judgement. Blaming blogging seems to me like killing the messenger.