Everyday, there are new front page stories about the impact blogging is having on business. This morning it was USA Today weighing on on executive bloggers on the front page of the Money section. No surprise that the ongoing characterization of blogs and bloggers is meant to discredit us and what we are up to: just like the computer companies of the early '80s characterized PC makers as hobbyists. Blogging is messy and dangerous: Steer clear!

Del Jones

[from CEOs refuse to get tangled up in messy blogs]

Blogs, short for weblogs, are personal Web sites for posting thoughts, rants and opinions in chronological order. One written by a CEO would slice through traditional media gatekeepers and bring him or her unedited to the desktop of customers, employees, Wall Street analysts and competitors. A blog by a prominent CEO would attract instant traffic, could influence public opinion, perhaps steer legislation and maybe sell a few widgets.

But despite all of the power and sway that awaits an early adopter, it's going to take a brave CEO with thick skin to enter the blogosphere. The corporate sphere likes its skeletons packed away, or at least vetted through legal and public relations departments. Companies have been trained to be inoffensive.

The blogosphere, on the other hand, wars against harmony. Its mission is to air dirty laundry. There is even an undercurrent of radical bloggers who say all companies are evil and should be brought down.

The blogosphere does not war against harmony, and its mission is not to air dirty laundry, and, while there may be people in the blogosphere that say that all companies are evil and should be brought down, that is by no means a widely held view of the supermajority of bloggers.

How do these mainstream journalists get these ideas? Are they really that clueless? Do they ever research the blogosphere before launching into these pronouncements, or do they simply cage their invective from other news stories?

The blogosphere is no more unharmonious than the world in which we live. While bloggers are likely to get involved in pulling down the pants of bloated media figures -- like Dan Rather, for example -- we are moving into the gap left as traditional media have decided not to police themselves effectively, and have taken their eye off the ball in other ways, like the tarnishing of their much lauded journalistic ethics: most people just don't trust mainstream media like they used to.

The blogosphere is today's Wild West, where people post indelicate responses and react with incivility, known as "flaming." Blog readers can be counted on to hurl insults that insulated CEOs are not accustomed to hearing. Even more civilized blog readers are impatient with executives who are uninteresting or inauthentic.

Thank god someone is getting away from the kid gloves, softball pitching nonsense that so-called "objective" journalism has fallen into, which is increasingly a subliminal support for the status quo. That's why there are so many white males telling people what they should think on TV and in the major newspapers. And the reaction of traditional media to gonzo journalism is to reject the message because it doesn't fit into the now archiac canon of journalistic rules.

My metaphor is that traditional media try too hard to be polite because they think being invited back to the next dinner party is more important than calling someone a sexist after an insensitive joke.

My prediction is that dozens of CEOs will be blogging in the near future, but don't expect it to start with the buttoned-down types, first. Look to media executives, entertainment, sports, high tech, and serial entreprenuers who have moved across many industries. And the conservative bilge of the media establishment will not slow this a whit. The ones that are likely to launch CEO blogs have already shifted to reading blogs rather than, or in addition to, the tired, tired tabloids.

[tags: Watching The Watchers]

Tom Zeller's most recent foray in to the blogosphere, A Blog Revolution? Get a Grip, graced the pages of the Sunday Times, yesterday. Nick Denton reprised the same sort of blog revolution antihype that Gabby Darbyshire (colleague of Denton) and Jason Calcanis (of Weblogsinc) provided us at Les Blog (see here and here).

Tom Zeller

At a time when media conferences like "Les Blogs" in Paris two weeks ago debate the potential of the form, and when BusinessWeek declares, as it did on its May 2 cover, that "Blogs Will Change Your Business," Mr. Denton is withering in his contempt. A blog, he says, is much better at tearing things down - people, careers, brands - than it is at building them up. As for the blog revolution, Mr. Denton put it this way: "Give me a break."

"The hype comes from unemployed or partially employed marketing professionals and people who never made it as journalists wanting to believe," he said. "They want to believe there's going to be this new revolution and their lives are going to be changed."

I guess thousands of dedicated bloggers -- who are having a profound impact on society, business, and politics -- are really not a revolution, Nick. We're just something else recycled, right? And I guess we are working at tearing things down? I thought we were working to bring people together, but we might be challenging the mainstream media, just a leetle bit, and their step-children who are adopting the forms of blogging but nothing else.

It's like Doc Searls says: Metaphors are everything. If you look at the social media revolution (yes, it is a revolution, Nick) as just an extension of the "online media as content" metaphor, then it really looks that way. It's much more comfortable for the advertisers, who really, really want it to be true. It's simpler in the management of "editorial staff" who view themselves as employees toiling by the post, word, or hour. And it may even be simpler in the interaction with the wide, wide world, who are used to being treated as "consumers" and having little or no interaction with those in charge of "content".

If you want to view blogging as just another set of pipes pushing content to couch potatoes, then that's how it will look to you. However, if you approach it as a renaissance of inquiry and commentary, with citizen journalists engaging with others to expand the range and depth of discourse of the key issues of our times, well, then everything looks very, very different. Of course that perspective challenges the industrial media models, and poses an unsettling series of challenges for many. Advertisers, traditional media companies, mainstream journalists, and the average online denizen will be forced -- sooner or later -- to rethink and then rework their role in the information ecosystem. And that might be uncomfortable, hard, and even dangerous.

Zeller also quotes me in the piece, suggesting that the antihype is just that:

But others have begun to wonder if the brand itself [of Gawker Media and other neo-industrial media companies] is a form of compromise. Stowe Boyd, president of Corante, a daily online news digest on the technology sector, suggests that there may be something lost when networks like Gawker Media and Weblogs turn blogs into commodities, churned out for a fee, owned by an overlord and underwritten by advertisers.

"They're pursuing a very clear agenda and they've done very well with that," Mr. Boyd said of Gawker. "But they're just an old media company in new media clothes, and I still maintain that they are missing part of the point."

The point, Mr. Boyd said, is that blogging is unique because of its spontaneity and individualism, and that bloggers, like dancers and sculptors, are most interesting because they are "pursuing their muse."

The editors on Gawker are talented, entertaining and informative, Mr. Boyd said, but also indistinguishable from any freelance writer, with no ownership of what they produce. "These people are hirelings," he said. "What they are cranking out are the 700 words they signed on to produce."

The neo-industrial media types would have you believe that what is happening in the blogosphere is nothing new, just a lowered cost structure and a slightly loosened editorial policy. Bull. Blogging -- despite the fact that the Neos can take the technology platform of blogs and use it in that way -- can be, and is, in general, much more than that.

And, apropos of my recent rant about mainstream journalists seeking to take the discussion about blogging into their own hands (see Watching The Watchers), Zeller has a deft touch with the use of journalistic techniques to get a message across, without ever explicitly saying what he believes. He opens with Denton's positioning this all as a tempest in a teapot, just business as usual. Then I come is as the counterpoint, suggesting that there is something more to blogging than neo-industrial journalism: namely, art and activism. And then, he closes with Denton's (and perhaps his own) final message:

SO, onward goes the nonrevolution. "If you take the amount of attention that has been devoted in the last year to Web logs as a business and something that's going to change business and compare that with the real effect and the real money, it's totally disproportionate," Mr. Denton said, "in the same way all the coverage of the Internet in the late 90's was out of whack.

"There are too many people looking at blogs as being some magic bullet for every company's marketing problem, and they're not," he added. "It's Internet media. It's just the latest iteration of Internet media."

So, just in case you were wondering, the Antihype Wars have begun in earnest. And now, with august authorities like the New York Times weighing in (at least it seems so to me) on the side of the pooh-poohers, we have a third spectral presence hovering over the debate within the blogosphere between the neo-industrialists like Denton, Darbyshire, and Calcanis, on one hand, and the social media advocates, on the other.

The Times and other traditional, mainstream media outlets will argue that they are not taking sides: they are objective, and merely reporting what others say, as in this case, where Zeller never steps into the first person about his opinion. (In fact, he is only in the first person when relating the context for the interview with Denton.)

Still, my sense of the piece is that you are meant to be left with a message: blogging is a non-revolution, business as usual, hohum, yawn. In a hundred cocktail parties across America, I can imagine people discussing blogs, and repeating that message: "Its a non-revolution... After all, that's what I read in the Times!"

[tags: Watching The Watchers, Blog Antihype, A Blog Revolution? Get a Grip]

Cory is in a triumphalist mood at Boing-Boing regarding the DC Circuit of the US Court of Appeals striking down the Broadacst Flag that the intrusive and Orwellian FCC wants real bad:

The next move here is that the studios will take this to Congress and try to get a law passed to make this happen. No chance. They got ZERO laws passed last year. This year the best they've been able to accomplish is making it slightly more illegal to videotape movies in the theatre.

The fact is, elected lawmakers are not suicidal enough to break their constituents' televisions. Watch and see: over the next year, we're all going to roast any lawmaker who so much as breathes the words "Broadcast Flag" in a favorable tone.

He's right, I hope. But who knows what odd coalition of broadcast industry and religious mind control types might cook up. We'd better keep our eyes on them.

[tags: Broadcast Flag]

Alex Steffen Jamais Cascio provides the term I need to describe Watching The Watchers:

[from Worldchanging]

This notion of individual citizens keeping a technological eye on the people in charge is referred to as "sousveillance," a recent neologism meaning "watching from below" -- in comparison to "surveillance," meaning "watching from above." Proponents of the notion see it as an equalizer, making it possible for individual citizens to keep tabs on those in charge. For the sousveillance movement, if the question is "who watches the watchmen?"; the answer is "all of us."

I am going to have to rig up some technology to help me keep tabs on all the journalists opining on blogging, and I will refer to it henceforth as sousveillance.

[update: 12:59pm 7 May 2005: Jamais Cascio wrote to wise me up to the fact that Alex didn't write the piece referenced, he did.]

[tags: Sousveillance, Watching The Watchers]

Tom Zeller interviewed me last week for a piece that ran today in the NY Times, When the Blogger Blogs, Can the Employer Intervene?, which provides a good rehash of the Niall Kennedy mess at Technorati. The conclusion: your individual freedom of expression is likely to be squashed by the conformist pressures brought to bear by employers. He mentions that the EFT recently recommended a course of action: "Two weeks ago, the group published a tutorial on "how to blog safely," which included tips on avoiding getting fired. Chief among its recommendations: Blog anonymously." Great. Wonderful.

The Head Lemur at Raving Lunacy has posted an entry called ROFLMFAO (can someone tell me what the acronym means?), where he noted that Marqui is sponsoring Corante's Feedfest. His comments:

Let see here....

Blogging for Dollars $800.00 per month

Gold Sponsorship at Corante $1000.00 per month

Seeing the Marqui Logo on Corante PRICELESS!!!

I posted on this apparent contradiction several months ago when I agreed to do the debate with Marc Canter, Jason Calcanis, and Stephen King of Marqui:

Looks like Marq and I may be having this debate in public sometime in the next month. Alex Williams, Corante's Managing Director for Events told me that Marqui wants to sponsor such an event. An interesting moral dilemma: Corante will be getting paid by Marqui to promote a debate on the pros and cons of Marquiism. Is this one of those Jesuitical compromises, where we are putting the end before the means?

My view is that I don't see how in the long run this ad campaign will help Marqui: they will have to have a long, long tail to get away from the negative tang of all this rancorous contention about their marketing strategy.

I guess, though, the implication is that Corante should have turned down Marqui's sponsorship? I have always maintained that Marquiism is self-defeating for Marqui, and that bloggers shouldn't do it because they will damage their personal credibility. That doesn't mean that Marqui shouldn't have the right to participate in traditional advertising or event sponsorship, even if we are on different sides of the Marquiism controversy. I am not so narrow-minded to bar entry to those whose opinions differ from mine. Let controversy thrive. I would be happy to have Marqui as a conventional sponsor of Get Real, for example, although I wouldn't agree to talk about Marqui.

I once owned a great t-shirt, now long in tatters -- white, with big red letters, stating "Stamp Out Dangerous Ideas" -- which I believed was obvious irony. However, every time I wore it, at least two or three people would give me the thumbs up, or say something like "Right on!" Just because I think Marqui is wrong doesn't mean I will try to suppress their attempts to make the case for Marquiism.

Once again (for the millionth time): I believe that Marqui is going down the wrong path paying bloggers to talk about Marqui. It's not illegal, but the bloggers involved are squandering their hard-earned (and quickly dissipated) social capital and authority. In the long run, Marqui is not building its brand, but just gaining a strange reputation. But I won't try to block their opportunities to make their case, or to try to sell their products.

[Update: Just noticed this comment on Raving Lunacy from Janet Johnson of Marqui:

Believe me, as the debate unfolded, the irony of our sponsorship of the feedfest event where we were bashed for paying bloggers to blog was not lost on me.

Thanks for getting it, too. Nicely put.

Janet doesn't get it. We won't bar Marqui from the world of open discourse on the issue, and we won't say "we won't take your filthy money." In fact, we hope Marqui continues to participate in more conventional forms of sponsorship.]

[Another update: Ed Simmnett clued me in to the acronym: Rolling On The Floor Laughing My F*cking Ass Off (ROFLMFAO).]

David Hornik riffs on a recent email "alert" from the Howard Rice law firm:

[from VentureBlog: Lawyers Take Hold Of Blogging]

After more than our share of public blood lettings in the blogsphere as a result of employee bloggers running afoul of their corporate parents, it is not surprising that companies are starting to issue blogging guidelines. The issue is a real one but until recently it was a small and isolated problem. But if ever there was an indication of the increasing prevalence of corporate blogging, it can be found in the email alert I just received from the Howard Rice law firm. The email alert was entitled "Corporate Blogging: Seize the Opportunity, but Control the Risks" and it laid out both the legal risks raised by corporate bloggers and some "practical guidance" for dealing with those risks. In fact, when I spoke with the Howard Rice lawyers who issued the alert, they said that they were rapidly developing an "expertise" in the law surrounding blogging and would be issuing additional blogging alerts in the future.

Blogging is indeed mainstream when legal practices emerge around it -- which is not to say that the advice Howard Rice gives isn't well taken. As a former lawyer, I couldn't help but spend a bunch of time thinking about the legal implications of blogging on my professional life before we started VentureBlog. As a result, I ended up drafting one of the first blog Terms of Service out there (who knows, maybe it was the first -- I couldn't manage to find anyone else's to plagiarize [sic] at the time I was drafting VentureBlog's). More importantly, we also spent a chunk of time talking with the whole August Capital partnership about blogging and how it might implicate the partnership either directly or indirectly. While we obviously concluded that the benefits of blogging greatly outweighed the risks, it was extremely helpful to go into it with eyes wide open and clearly set expectations within my "company."

Continue reading "First, We Kill All The Lawyers"

Rachel Metz of Wired News tips us to the future of the internet - Grafedia.

grafedia: words written anywhere, then linked to images, video or sound files online.

Grafedia extends and connects the web to the offline world. How does it work? Simply post a keyword, written in blue and underlined, anywhere offline. Anyone can then access the online media through their phones by typing word@grafedia.net. And there you have it. Links in an offline context.

I think it's an amazing idea and could be great in many applications. It's an instant way to interact with an image. No need to remember where you saw it, what it was, etc. Its applications could be for advertisements, public art, or just a means for social interaction - linking people, technology, and places. Its a way to subvert the usual interactive media in public places - i.e. expensive billboards. Grafedia is as simple as graffiti. Yet, it can be anything from chalk to tattoos to posters - it need not be vandalism.

Grafedia was created by John Geraci.

Geraci wants grafedia to make people think about the idea that the boundaries of the web are totally arbitrary. If you can put links in different places, he said, you're essentially extending the internet.

Joi Ito outs himself in a soul-searching piece on his seeming willigness to turn up or down his radicalism on various topics because his words (on in this case, video) might show up on the Internet:

[from What would Gandhi do?]

I felt a sudden pain. I realized that I was compromising and in fact evening softening my words assuming that the video of my presentation might end up on the Internet and that I would have to defend any hardline positions I took. I remember watching the movie about Gandhi (Irony alert. It was a Hollywood movie.) and thinking about the power of sticking to your principles and how this purity can move nations without violence or compromise and questioning myself and my methods.

I have always viewed my role as a sort of ambassador or bridge between groups to help provide a dialog. In talks to telephone operators or other somewhat old-school companies, I talk about their "challenges". To left-wing artists, I talk about the tyranny of the monopolies. The irony is that the recent trend of people posting audio or video files of my speeches online has made it difficult for me to maintain this split-personality / facade. I think it's a good thing that these things go online, but it reminds me a bit of politicians being criticized for what they have said at parties or "among friends"... or the Enron telephone calls. I have always encouraged this and poked fun myself. Being on the receiving end of this chilling effect is interesting. The core message I deliver doesn't change but delivery is slightly dampened.

I haven't been "outed" yet and I'm sure most people would understand what I was saying in the context in which my talks are delivered, but I sometimes say things that I'm sure I would say differently on my blog. In my mind, this is translated to words the audience understands in their frameworks in order to be constructive, but in a sense I'm being a bit dishonest. I also pull back on the "radical" throttle when I think it is going to offend my audience so much they will reject everything I say. Having said that, I've had a number of people get really upset. One publisher in Finland called my presentation about Creative Commons "disgusting".

My blog is probably the most "balanced" version of my position so just imagine that I'm slight more radical when I'm talking to the radicals and slightly more "soft" when I'm talking to conservatives. But my question is, am I compromising by adapting my words for the audience and where is the line beyond which I am not adapting words, but changing my position? What would Gandhi do? I suppose everyone does this to a certain extent but I was suddenly conscious of this gap last night.

Joi is taking an inward view here: what should he personally do about his softening or hardening his take on issues. But I think about it at the social level: the Internet -- like all media -- has a powerful normative pressure. The recent discussion re: Niall Kennedy and Technorati (see here) is just another flare-up. Employers putting pressure on employees to not draw unwanted sorts of attention because of their esoteric or unsavory outside interests is only one form of this not so subtle pressure can take.

In a global village, everyone knows your kinks, knows what you said at a public function last night, and what contrarian or unpopular beliefs you hold. And there is a natural human tendency to get in line. The nail that sticks up will be beaten down.

Last year at Supernova, I was condemned as a kook on the conference blog, because I led a panel session on the future of email and stated that 'email blows': making the case that its not very good for what we most want it to do -- communicating with people we know already -- but really good for the thing we most hate about email, namely people we don't know communicating with us, which is spam. When I suggested that the future of email was less email and more social tools, like blogs and instant messaging, I was almost tarred and feathered. One guy was actually yelling at me to get off the podium, and so angry that the spit was flying from his mouth. It was almost a riot.

Had I the sensitivity of Joi instead of the hide of a rhino I would have toned down my radicalism on this issue, held a more moderate tone, and perhaps have persuaded a few middle-of-the-roaders that these neato social tools might be worth testing out. But I believe that Gandhi was right: "You have to be the change you want in the world."

Joi's self-doubt is well-founded. In a village, if you say one thing today and the opposite tomorrow, everyone will know.

A central issue in having a true voice -- authenticity and authority -- is to draw lines, and to howl when they are crossed. That Supernova audience, of 40 and 50 year olds, who believe that email is the killer app just were unwilling to envision a world (ten years from now) when the teenagers of today are in the workdforce and today's twenty-somethings are in key executive posts, and email will seem as antique as telegrams, fax, and landline phones.

Leaving the specifics of that event behind, or the specifics of Joi's presentation on copyright, it is essential that we take principled stands on the issues of the day, whether or not they are popular. The tyranny of the majority is just as bad as any other monopoly. Just because a lot of people believe something doesn't make it true. At one time the majority of people believed in the divine right of kings, slavery, and human sacrifice to propitiate the gods.

[Pointer from Greg Yardley, who maintains that "The conversation of all with all has a moderating effect that dampens extremism in all forms, as individuals are forced to constantly monitor how their behavior will look to others - including individuals they haven’t even met yet." Although he thinks that this is a good thing, which I do not.]

Anil has crafted a nuanced piece, The Blog Cycle, that attempts to puncture various myths and memes in the world of blogging. But I'm not so sure...

[from The Blog Cycle]

1. "First, it's important to note that there is no "blogosphere". There are hundreds of blogospheres. Each sub-community of weblogs has its own social norms, its own traditions and its own thought leaders. And as each community has formed and evolved, you can see it go through a few common steps as it evolves as a medium."

Hmmm. True to an extent; however, since all of these subcultures are being shaped by the same social tools -- blogs -- which are increasingly converging toward a standard suite of features, there are core set of blogosphere norms that have emerged. Think of trackbacks, blogrolls, and so on. More importantly, even though the differences between the various blog subcultures may seem obvious and relevant to insiders, to outsiders they all blur to insignificance. And there is a lot more of the outsiders than the insiders. And they are going to become more and more alike, I believe.

Where are the women/minorities? We've been going through this one again lately in the tech blogging realm, and to a lesser degree I've seen it flare up with political blogs. Interestingly, it's mostly a problem in technology and political blogs, though the most popular members of those communities are loathe to admit it. Other huge and growing communities, like knitters, food bloggers, baby bloggers, and corporate/PR bloggers don't seem to have nearly as much of a problem being blind to identity when linking to or quoting from others.

This is really a discussion about power, not diversity, per se. As bloggers become to become mainstream and not just fringe lunatics muttering in tiny cabals, power will concentrate according to network power laws. Anil is famous for demonstrating the power in his blog's reach by getting a gazillion folks to link to a post of his, and winning a context as a result.

So Halley's recent call to action about new voices (which may be one of the influences for Anil's posting) is about intentionally inviting women and minorities into the emerging spheres of power in the blogosphere. Knitting and babies have traditionally been the province of women, and blogs about traditionally female subjects can be viewed as ghettoes in the blogosphere, no matter how fullfilling they may be for the individuals there.

[By the way, I think I have three of my ten new voices... need to scare up seven more, and at least four of those need to be non-American, to meet the letter of Halley's challenge. Pointers?]

You'll get fired! If you read my site, you probably already know my feelings on the subject, but suffice to say each new community has its own backlash on this, especially as people try to find scaremongering ideas to use as the hook for press coverage.

This is a topic where I really disagree with Anil. There is a growing tide of social conformism that is stifling individual free speech (see the pieces on Niall Kennedy, here), as well as ample evidence that dozens of folks have been sacked for blogging (or through actions manifested on blogs), like Morpheme Tales (Curt Hopkins) roster of fired bloggers.

So, to recap my disagreements: People are being fired because of blogging, there is an inherent power structure built into the nature of scale free networks (like the blogosphere) so that power concentrates, and because the various separate blogospheres that Anil alludes to actually do all exist on one Internet, not as private worlds, there is really just one blogosphere. In the end, I believe that Anil is trying to play down any controversy around blogs, so that prospective users will not be alarmed or concerned, and so they can therefore more quickly gain the benefits that blogs offer. That is all well and good, but we shouldn't suppress the debate around these issues, or dismiss their root causes as simply not existing, just to make blogs less controversial and threatening.

The poll I set up recently as an outgrowth of the furor arising from the Niall Kennedy/Technorati flap has topped out with 30 responses (a limitation of the free service I was using, I guess). The question was this:

"Private v Corporate Voice

Can you have a private voice if you are viewed as a spokesperson for your company?"

And the results are shown here (note, some vagary in the software led to the answers not being displayed correctly in the results view, so I include the poll view, also, where they displayed fine):

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.

I was trackbacked by a new voice (yes, she is going to be one of the Ten New Voices I pledged to find this week -- and she found me, which is cool), the self-styled Shasta MacNasty (in the "self-centered bitch rehab" tshirt in the picture), who weighs in on the implications of the Niall Kennedy Technorati imbloglio:

Shasta MacNasty

[from If You Don't Like It]

"The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer."

I have no idea if my employer has a blogging policy, and truth be told, I'm not going to ask. Why would I want to bring their attention to my little cyber abode? They get their nine plus hours of my attention when I'm in the office, no need for that to continue any moreso at the expense of my bandwidth. However the current buzz about people losing their jobs because of blogging, and the situation last week with Niall Kennedy and Technorati has got me a wee bit concerned. (Yeah, I'm about seven days late and a few bucks short on this topic. Let it go...)

The title of this post [bolded above] comes from the blogging policy of Feedster.com, which I think is pretty helpful, but still a little unclear in spots. A lot of the hub-bub with employers and employees blogging comes from employees who identify their employer and blog about details of the job. But what about those of us that don't blog about the details of our work...and don't name our employers? It's getting to the point where I'm afraid to even say, "I had a bad day at work" without fear of some kind of repurcussion. And I don't even mention my employers name on this blog. However I think there is a lot of confusion and fear floating around blogging, the employee's right to free speech and the employers right to keep certain aspects of their business private. However more often than not, it's usually the employer that encrouches on the employees personal life, and I find that more than a little irritating. However a good blogging policy, and Feedster's is a good start.

It's one thing when you have an employee saying, "Hi. I'm Joe Blow and I work for The Man, LLC Inc. & Company (A division of Big Azz Monopoly Corp.) and I just wanna say !@!@#% the The Man, MAN!" Ok. See. That's just a little strange. If you are going to purposefully align your name with your employer and blog about the business/industry your employer is in, then I believe it's best, for the both of you, to treat your blog as if it were a corporate blog. Sure you may include your personal thoughts, however where do you draw the line between the employers interests and your own?

There are several reasons why I don't mention my employer:

1. Privacy. I don't want everyone knowing where I work. Why? Well, it's really no ones business and it's just not safe. Like I need someone stalking me at work because they didn't like something I said. I could never understand why some people mention who they work for on their personal blogs, unless, of course, they are going after some kind of reputation/status/audience/credibility/whatever that mentioning the employer would get them. But doing so comes with a certain amount of responsibility. More importantly, saying where I work isn't NEARLY as sexy as if, oh, I could say I work for Microsoft, Google, or Oprah.

2. Control. You see this? :::dramatically waving my arm over my vast digital domain::: This is me. I run this. I pay the bills. I am the only one who decides what gets said here and what doesn't. It would seriously grate on me if I had to worry every five seconds about something I posted because my employer might not like it, or think I had explained a product incorrectly, or whatever. This is my personal life. As I mentioned above, my employer gets 105% from me every day (110% is just overkill) for 9.5 hours. That's enough. I sure don't want my employer to then control what I say, think, and do in my personal time. I'm fully aware of standard confidentiality that employers ask their employees to practice. I respect that and excecise it regularly such as not discussing deals with family/friends/in an elevator/or on my blog. Just don't care to. Again...this isn't really the place for that. Now Hello Kitty vibrators? NOW we're talking business.

Ok, I get the stalking idea, especially if you are blogging about vibrators. But I beleive that the principle of not naming your employer to retain some level of anonymity shouldn't be necessary. Why can't we say I work for Bigazz Inc., and still say things that are unpopular? If you work for Wal-Mart, can't you blog about the need for unions in the workplace? That is a right specifically upheald by the courts, for example, but which is highly unpopular with Wal-Mart senior management. Or you might be an engineer for a large software company who blogs about the benefits of open source while corporate types want to stamp it out.

Do you have to conceal elements of your identity -- and ultimately your self and your life -- in order to blog on a personal level? Is "don't ask, don't tell" going to be recast in this setting? Don't ask what the corporate policy is, and don't tell where you work?

Shasta seems to suggest that we may need to do so for self-protection -- protection from the Man, and protection from angry trolls who want to strangle us for the dirty thoughts we have put in their heads.

But I feel that this is the tightening of the noose, the turning of the screw, the bottom stair on the gallows. This is the first step to total abandonment of personal freedom of speech, where an arbitrary, totalitarian corporate policy, like "no personal blogging allowed," will force people into anonymous blogging, if that, unless they stick to "safe" topics like what they ate last night, or which TV shows they watch.

If we adopt the camoflage that bloggers in Iran and other repressive regimes put on -- concealing their identities in order to protect themselves from persecution -- then we are taking a terrible step backwards into the darkness. And freedoms, once yeilded, are very, very hard to regain.

In a thoughtful but deeply worrisome posting, Greg Yardley poses a scenario about the The conservative nature of Internet 2.0, in light of the Niall Kennedy affair:

Let’s take a look at the actions of both Niall and Dave Sifry. Once the controversy developed both behaved perfectly rationally, choosing the path of least resistance and greatest common sense. Sifry acted as he did out of concern for the company he’s painstakingly built; Kennedy acted as he did to preserve his reputation and good relationship with his employer. Since both chose the path of least resistance and greatest common sense, the outcome isn’t an abberation - this is a ‘dog bites man’ story, not the other way around. Yet the lessons Niall learned and eloquently communicated to all were undeniably conservative.

As the popularity of blogging, podcasting, video blogging, blog search, and so on grows, many more people will learn the same conservative lesson that Niall did. Some predictions for the future:

1) Blogging will provide an increasingly clear rewards for individual bloggers. Employers looking to hire will increasingly favor those with well-established blogs - all the better to learn about the proclivities and abilities of their candidates. Because of this, more and more people will publicly blog, using full names and accurate biographical information. Most individuals will happily surrender their privacy for a greater perceived benefit.

2) Since blogging will provide an increasingly clear benefit to the individual, the number of bloggers will mushroom. High school guidance counselors and college-based employment centers will begin giving blogging lessons. Career-minded young people will begin cultivating their blogs with the same diligence they currently give to the accumulation of community service and extracurricular activities.

3) Advice along the lines of Scoble’s will become commonplace. From USA Today to evening newscasts, individuals will be told about what is acceptable to blog and what is not acceptale to blog. The consequences of blogging inappropriately will become common wisdom.

4) Affairs like Niall’s or Mark Jen’s will become commonplace, and therefore boring. Because ‘proper blogging etiquette’ will have appeared from everywhere from USA Today to Oprah, the public’s sympathy will lie less and less with the individual blogger, who ‘should have known better.’

5) A new generation of individuals, starting with the high school students of today, will automatically associate successful employment with blogging, and successful blogging with considered self-censorship and image management. Outwardly professed values will become internalized. Truly controversial stances and opinions will be suppressed for fear of real or imagined economic consequences.

6) The tipping point will be reached when radical groups and individuals stop embracing the Internet as a venue for organizing and start shutting themselves off from it - either hiding in access-controlled enclaves or abandoning online life and technology altogether.

No doubt I’m exaggerating; perhaps I’m missing something fundamental. If Internet 2.0 turns out to be a conservative force, it won’t be because of the intentions of its creators. Yet who can fully predict the consequences of their actions and the uses of their creations? If I leaned left or libertarian, I’d be worried.

As a avowed leftist, however, I find this Orwellian future terrifying. Corporate messages controlling our internal self-image, making us into conformist robots spouting corporate bilge in place of personal convictions, and the apparent inevitablity of all this because of the rational self-interest involved -- it's a dystopian nightmare, not something to be accepted.

Greg is right about the people's tendency to cave when coerced. That is why we have laws to ensure various freedoms, so that those with less power (the employee) cannot be compelled to relinquish personal freedoms in order to work.

I got around to reading some of the comments made at Dave Sifry's posting about the Niall Kennedy mess, and I had to disagree with most of the folks that were at least moderately positive about the apparently transparent and swift resolution to the issue. Here's my comment, which I posted there yesterday:

David -

I agree you have very quickly come to a new consensus with Niall, but I profoundly differ with the thinking that defines it.

Individuals must be permitted a private life outside of work, where what they say as private individuals is interpreted as exactly that. We, in the blogosphere, should collectively assert that truth over and over, and resist the blurring of the line between personal and corporate expression, or else, inexorably, corporations will determine what employees can say, either through direct coercion or more subtle forms of mind control.

The fact that Niall has come to believe that there is no such distinction possible in the modern world is a perspective that should be argued against whenever it crops up, even if he fervently believes it after this flap. He is wrong, and it is wrong if he gets kudos for his new understanding of the dissolution of the private self.

Just as important, employers should support individual free expression of their employees even if the sentiments being expressed are unfashionable or objectionable to others, so long as they are not illegal. And the observation has been made at various places in the blogosphere (like my blog, www.corante.com/getreal) that the use of copyrighted icons is fair use for parody and satire under first ammendment protections, so there is little chance that Technorati would be harmed in that way, even if it had been posted ata Technorati blog, which it wasn't, anyway.

While this has not turned out to be another "doocing" (the firing of an employee for blogging) and you may never have even raised the issues of Niall losing his job over this, I think it sets a bad example. Even in the heart of the blogosphere, employers like Technorati are not standing by the principle of individual free expression and liberty.

I hope next time that some critic complains about objectional content on an employee's blog, you instead tell the critic to reread the first ammendment.

- Stowe

So here is a poll, trying to get at the tenor of the times around this issue. Is it possible to have a private voice if you are an employee of a company, who, like Niall, is veiwed as a spokesperson or public face for the company?

Scoble writes about the "lessons he's learned" from the Niall Kennedy "imbloglio" in this recent piece: The Red Couch: Dave Sifry and Niall Kennedy in lesson on corporate blogging.

But, as much as I like Robert, and generally agree with his theories about corporate blogging, as well as the specific comments he makes in this post ("don't blog angry", etc.), he is off target here.

Kennedy was blogging personally: it was not a corporate blog. Kennedy's convoluted, after-the-fact reasoning that, in essence, there is no such thing as a personal blog if you hold down a paying job anywhere is simply wrong-headed. It may be the case that Kennedy has come to believe that, but it is a perspective that we should work hard to undermine, whenever it appears. Individual liberties, such as freedom of speech, should not be abridged by corporate policies or the disapproval of bosses, no matter what the content or criticism.

As I pointed out yesterday, there are five states (including California, where Kennedy works for Technorati) that specifically protect employees from being fired for legal outside activities. Of course, there is no indication that Kennedy was threatened with termination, but the point is that such laws exists to ensure that workers can enjoy free expression outside of work without fear of retaliation. And there is still an "outside of work": just because you are working 9 to 5, or even 100 hours a week in a startup, you are still a private citizen, and your employer cannot tell you to shut up.

Following various threads related to the Niall Kennedy mess, I discovered a Committee to Protect Bloggers has been formed, protesting the incarceration of various bloggers worldwide, but particularly in Iran.

A few months ago, I wrote a piece called "Ethics of the Flu Vaccine Shortage: What Would Network Science Do?" where I conjectured that the distribution of flu vaccine was hosed, not just because of scarcity, but because we were doling it out to those at high risk as opposed to those most likely to distribute the disease: the supernodes. Shortly thereafter, I wrote "More on Flu Vaccination: Kids are the Supernodes" a few days later, where some evidence emerged in Japan that suggested that the supernodes in flu epidemics are not barristas, doctors, nurses, or bus drivers, but grade school children.

New evidence has emerged to support this theory in a report being published in today's American Journal of Epidemiology:

[from USA Today]

"By vaccinating at least of 70% of the schoolchildren, you can pretty much reduce transmission to the whole community," says Ira Longini, a biostatistics professor at Emory's Rollins School of Public Health.

So, next year, when the stupidity starts up again, remember that we really need to apply network science to the flu vaccine problem, not a bunch of outmoded ethics. We shouldn't willy-nilly vaccinate the elderly, but only the highest risk cases. While it turns out that we need to vacinate the kids, we aren't motivated by "women and children" stupidity. We need to vaccinate them because that's the only way to end the epidemic spreading. Stop the madness!

And of course, this is a story buried on page 8D of the Life section, lost in the television listings, not above the crease on page one where it could potentially make a difference.

JD Lasica pulls down the pants of a Business Software Alliance campaign using a comic book ferret, Garret, to instill all sorts of pernicious notions about copyright and "cybercrime". This is targeted at grade school kids, note.

David Weinberger's one liner is priceless: "JD Lasica pastes Garrett the Copyright Totalitarian Ferret Who The Kids Love right in his snot-filled little nose."

Sheila Lennon digs in on the side of the angels, too.

JD Lasica pulls down the pants of a Business Software Alliance campaign using a comic book ferret, Garret, to instill all sorts of pernicious notions about copyright and "cybercrime". This is targeted at grade school kids, note.

David Weinberger's one liner is priceless: "JD Lasica pastes Garrett the Copyright Totalitarian Ferret Who The Kids Love right in his snot-filled little nose."

Sheila Lennon digs in on the side of the angels, too.

The Marqui story -- "paying bloggers to blog about Marqui" -- keeps on keeping on. Marc Canter (maybe we should start spelling it "Marq"?) announces the launch of a Marqui corporate blog, but with a irritated tone:

[from Marc's Voice: Blog.Marqui.com]

This Marqui program has taught me - that even when you design something to perfectly leverage the blogosphere and push the envelope - even the simplest of notions can go mis-understaood.

In the case of this Marqui program - the company missed the notion that we were setting up a pipeline - explicitely for the purpose of getting compelling stories and usage sceanrios out into our bloggers blogs.

With a piepline established - not only the corporate message - but success stories and on-going updates could be fed to our paid bloggers - utilzing their intellect and feedback to spread the Marqui meme.

But instead the entire program - up until now - has been filled with "talking about talking" - internal retrospective kind of blabber - which is typcial blogosphere filler - but not what we were hoping for.

But you can't blame our bloggers. They haven't really had anything to write about. That pisses me off. I'm bummed that Marqui hasn't come through with more compelling stories for our bloggers to blog about.

Maybe this post will push them into finding those stories and feeding them to us. We've gotten some press from our program - but the idea was not to just get press - the idea is to close sales and recruit developers. That's when we know this program has been successful.

Marq is pissed that Marqui hasn't pushed real meat out to the bloggers to blog about, so the bloggers are stuck blogging about the campaign and how those opposing the whole idea (like me) are just not hip to what's the coolest marketing model since pyramid selling.

Looks like Marq and I may be having this debate in public sometime in the next month. Alex Williams, Corante's Managing Director for Events told me that Marqui wants to sponsor such an event. An interesting moral dilemma: Corante will be getting paid by Marqui to promote a debate on the pros and cons of Marquiism. Is this one of those Jesuitical compromises, where we are putting the end before the means?

My view is that I don't see how in the long run this ad campaign will help Marqui: they will have to have a long, long tail to get away from the negative tang of all this rancorous contention about their marketing strategy. Let me know what you think, though. I would like to get a sense of people's polarization on this topic.

Suw comments on Waterstone's firing of Joe Gordon, leading to a huge backlash and public outcry, which she files under the apt and damning category of "Blog Fuckwittery" which, alas, is destined to become a large series of posts over the next few years. Also plays into the growing sense of outrage as characterized by movements like The International Bloggers Bill of Rights.

Check out the International Bloggers' Bill of Rights, launched by Ellen Simonetti: she was fired by Delta for her "Diary of a Flight Attendant" blog.

We, the inhabitants of the Blogosphere, do hereby proclaim that bloggers everywhere are entitled to the following basic rights:

FREEDOM TO BLOG.

FREEDOM FROM PERSECUTION AND RETALIATION BECAUSE OF OUR BLOGS:

1.) If an employer wishes to discipline an employee because of his/her blog, it must first establish clear-cut blogging policies and distribute these to all of its employees.
2.) Blogging employees shall be given warning before being disciplined because of their blogs.
3.) NO ONE shall be fired because of his/her blog, unless the employer can prove that the blogger did intentional damage to said employer through the blog.

Blogophobic companies, who violate the Bloggers' Bill of Rights, will be blacklisted by millions of bloggers the world over.

I am wholeheartedly in favor of this and related activities. Corporations need to wake up, and relax when it comes to the freedom of self-expression associated with blogging. Xenophobic mind control is far too common when companies are confronted with individuals who mention that they work for XYZ Corp in their personal blogs. There is an insidious notion that we are owned by the companies that employ us.

All power to the bloggers! Right on!