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Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive, and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative and social technologies. His new blog is Message.

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December 30, 2005

Living In The Shadow Of Clogs

Posted by Stowe Boyd

Chris Andserson has announced an open source project to track corporate blogging in the Fortune 500, arising out of an observation of Doc Searls. Doc suggested that the disparity in blogging activities could be related to the present momentum of the company: companies on the rise might not want to mess with a good thing, while those on a downward slide might want to shake things up. Initial results:

[ from The Long Tail: Announcing the Fortune 500 Business Blog Index]

... they found only 16 members (3%) of the Fortune 500 with business blogs. And, for what it's worth with such a small sample size, the average trailing 12-month share performance of the blogging members was +5.7%, while the non-blogging members was +19%. So although the statistics aren't good enough to confirm Doc's theory, they do point in the right direction.

As long as a lot of human energy is being poured into this project, I'd hope that they'd dig out other information:

How many people are blogging at the company, both in absolute terms and relative to the size of the company?
Do the companies have blogging policies, or are they running free?
Do companies respond to competitors blogging by adopting blogging themselves?
Are the blogs run by the marketing department?
Are the bloggers trained in some way?
How many companies that aren't blogging yet actually prohibiting it?

The last question is actually my biggest concern. While I admire the inherent optimism in Doc's assumption -- that companies in distress will turn to blogging to turn around their fortunes, because of the healing, redemptive power of transparency and openness -- I am worried that the fear factor that forms a penumbra of doubt and uncertainty around blogging will lead to constraints against individual first ammendment rights.

Earlier in 2005, one of my biggest surprises was the Niall Kennedy mess (see Niall Kennedy and the Spectre of Being Dooced, and Poll on the Niall Kennedy Imbloglio), where not-so-subtle pressures on an employee of Technorati led to him self-censoring a personal blog regarding political views. The mess wasn't a surprise, but public opinion about it -- these were my readers, who I thought would be a fairly liberal bunch -- was fairly conservative (see Results of the Niall Kennedy/Technorati Imbloglio Poll: It's A Conservative World):

[from Results of the Niall Kennedy/Technorati Imbloglio Poll: It's A Conservative World ]
So, if this were just a democratic test, we'd see that the great majority -- 67%! -- believe that anyone considered a corporate spokesperson (however defined) must check personal free expression in the off hours at the door. 13% believe in some middle ground, and only 20% stand on the side of the angels in this case: believing that there is always free expression available to individuals on their own time.

This brings to mind a recent survey I saw referenced in the Washington Post this week, where 51% (I believe) of High Schools students polled believed that journalists should clear stories with the government, and that journalists have too much freedom in what they write. Help me! I also read that as many as 25% of Americans believe that the Sun circles the Earth, and more than 50% of Americans are uncertain about the veracity of the Theory of Evolution.

Just because the majority believe something it doesn't mean it's right. At one time, a majority believed in slavery and the divine right of kings.

I interpret this to mean that people are already sensing that they have to keep their heads down, and their personal opinions quiet if they want to get along in an increasingly conservative and conformist climate -- I hesitate to call it a culture; that's too positive sounding. We are increasingly left without a personal life when our employers can implicitly or explicitly threaten us for expressing unpopular opinions. We are silenced before we even try to speak.

This is, alas, what I expect to see with more and more 'clogs' (corporate blogs) are launched. A diminuition of free and open speech, and more companies asserting that their employees must drop any hope of personal opinion or risk the loss of their livelihood. I hate to appear a pessimist, but unless we, the people, stand up for our rights, the corporations will inevitably abridge them. In that regard, more corporations waking up to the power of blogs may not be all sweetness and light, but instead may cast a dark shadow across the blogosphere.

tags: chris+anderson, doc+searls, niall+kennedy, technorati, fortune+500+blogs, clogs

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COMMENTS

1. Zeddog on January 2, 2006 07:36 AM writes...

There is little chance that "clogs" (great coinage) will soon be much more than trojan horses/"dogs on the Internet" -- F500 marketing/positioning ploys, every one of them suspect, all soon vetted by marketing/corp communications -- or at least their authors certified to "clog" as corporate-reliable. They'll trade on the putative "openness" of blogs while offering none of it. An inevitable development, but to be tossed into the degenerative/highly suspect pile immediately.