sponsored by

The session is a reprise of the panel session I held in the middle of an INBOX workshop on Real Time Collaboration last November. I asked the various participants to return:

Speakers

Over the past few months, I have written a number of times about the True Voice projects (here, here, and here, for example).

We have had a really strong response to the 20 Questions project that forms a key element of True Voice. We have had around 200 responses to the questions from people like Robert Scoble, Ed Brill, Doc Searls, and dozens of others, and we will be assimilating the comments, and synthesizing it over the next two weeks.

Our intention with True Voice has been to get out on the road, meet with people who are struggling with these sorts of questions around the business of blogging, and to use the planned seminars as a means to interact with aspiring bloggers, either as individuals, or representatives of organizations or companies.

Last week, after wrestling with a number of opportunities for collaborating with other organizations, I decided to revamp the structure of the True Voice tour. Rather than running our own seminars in various cities, we are working with other organizations to embed the True Voice tour into other blog conferences. I am happy to say that we will be collaborating with Avondale, the folks organizing the Blog Business Summit, 24-25 Jan 2005 in Seattle.

• We will be holding a True Voice webcast there, most likely at 12pm PT 24 Jan 2005. I will be inviting a few of the prominent bloggers speaking at the conference to address the theme of the conference: the business of blogging. Information on how to register for the webcast will be posted here at at Corante Events later this week.
  
• A second True Voice event has been threaded into the conference: a session called "True Voice: The Art and Science of Blog Writing" scheduled for 4:30 pm PT 24 Jan 2005.
  
• Corante readers will be getting a serious discount on attending the conference: $395 instead of the full $795. Please email me at stowe@corante.com if you are interested in that discount.

I am in discussions with several other conference organizers regarding subsequent True Voice events in February, March, and beyond. It is my hope to visit cities all over North America, Europe, and perhaps later 2005 even Asia. The format will be a combination of webcast and workshop, exploring and refining the themes of the 20 Questions project.

We are committed to the virtual workshop approach that I outlined a few weeks ago, here:

One of the key elements of True Voice is an on-going six week virtual workshop, after each seminar, where the True Voice team will work with seminar attendees on their blogging plans and content. We will be providing a free blog account for those without (courtesy of Silkroad) for three months following the seminar. But perhaps most interesting: we will review the results of all seminar attendees' workshop participation -- whether corporate, group, or individual -- and at the end of six weeks we are planning to select one of the attendees for some higher level of support:

1. If we select a worthy corporate attendee, we will provide a no-charge day of advisory services to help them create an action plan for rolling forward with what has thus far been prototyped in the six weeks of virtual workshop.
   
2. If we select a non-commercial group or organization, we will work with them as the producer of their blog: we will host it, perhaps help them find sponsors, and promote it through the Corante blog network.
   
3. Lastly, if we select an individual blogger, we will offer the opportunity to become a Corante Contributor, either in a wholly new blog (such as our new city blog series), or as a contributor to an existing Corante blog.

So you have more options to get involved with True Voice and the 20 Questions project. We will be touring major cities, collaborating with the convenors of conferences like Blog Business Summit, running web casts, interviews, and embedded workshop sessions. Please stay tuned for more options and announcements.

As I mentioned in a posting here last week, the True Voice team (Greg Narain, Suw Charman, and I) are trying to boil down the core issues surrounding blogging into 20 questions. We will be asking our colleagues at Corante and elsewhere for their answers to those questions over the next few weeks, and we will distill the wisdom of the crowd (to borrow Suroweicki's phrase) as a key element of the True Voices seminars, the first of which is scheduled for 26 January in NYC.

I list the questions that we have come up with, as a first cut, below. If you are interested in answering the questions or in providing feedback on them, please go over to the 20 Questions blog I set up for that purpose. We will be filtering through the comments people make, and collating what we thing are helpful comments into the content for the True Voice seminars. We will cite all contributors whose material we use in the output of this project, which I think is likely to be bound into some "blog book" format. We will of course provide all contributors whose materials we use with a copy of the collated results. And we also plan to entice some of the contributors to record their contributions in video format for inclusion in the seminar, itself.

The first questions that everyone asks are these two:

• What's a blog (or, what's blogging), and why should I care?
• Who is writing them, and who is reading them, and why?

Here's a few of the questions that I am intensely interested in: the macro-economic and social impacts of blogging:

• How is blogging distinct from journalism, and how will it change traditional journalistic media?
• Blogging has been characterized as a 'social medium': what makes blogging social?
• Blogs are being adopted by social activists, in political and policy domains: will the rise of social media lead to a fundamental change in society, and if so, what sort of changes will they be?

I am also deeply interested in the business of blogging, especially the business of social media:

• Is it possible to make real money from blog-based advertising, and if so, what form will blog advertising take, since there seems to be such ambivalence and controversy in the blogosphere about advertising?
• Are their common characteristics of successful bloggers that can be adopted by others, and if so, what are they?
• What will successful social media companies look like, and in what ways will they be different from traditional media companies?

Suw offers these questions related to the micro-economic business level, where companies are working to leverage social media to better coordinate, collaborate, and communicate internally and with their partners and clients:

• How can business and employees who blog unofficially learn to peacefully co-exist?
• How do you get employees and managers to engage with and derive value from blogging projects?
• How do we successfully prevent public-facing blogs from being neutered, or turned into a broadcast, by the marketeers and lawyers?
• In what ways do we need to support staff bloggers in order to ensure that they can blog effectively?
• How can we use blogs to create a net freeing of time, instead of them turning into time-sinks?
• How do we communicate new, blog-related concepts and technologies in a way which is both comprehensible and comfortable for non-technical users without using new (and therefore potentially opaque) terminology?
• What are the most useful and beneficial applications for blogs in business?

Greg came up with some questions related to his interests on blog technologies, measurement, and analysis:

• What are the basic technical concepts necessary to understand about how blogs work?
• How do you decide what’s worth writing about, how you should write it, and when you should write it?
• What if you're not the world's best writer but you still want to blog: what are your options?
• Once your blog is up and running, how do you measure progress: like how many people are reading it?
• How can you find good blogs and how then to get them to link to your blog?

I'm happy to pull the wraps off Corante's upcoming True Voice: The Business of Blogging seminar series (see our press release for more details). True Voice is lined up for at least five cities already, starting with New York on 26 January 2005. Later on, we will be in San Francisco, Boston, London, and Los Angeles.

I will be working with Greg Narain and Suw Charman on the seminar content, and our friends at Business Development Institute have partnered with us on logisitics and sponsorship. We will have registration information up in the next week; email me (stowe AT corante.com) if you would like to be pinged. Also contact me if you would like to learn more about sponsorship opportunities.

I am also excited to announce that SilkRoad technology will be our premier sponsor, and we will be launching a True Voice blog later this month using SilkRoad blog technology. Stay tuned!

I wanted to post a more detailed sketch for the upcoming (Nov 19) Corante Real-Time Collaboration workshop, and start getting some feedback from all and sundry.

The specifics that I am most excited about:

• The "late night" TV format -- short bits of 'schtick', lots of video clips, short demos, dialog.
  
• Web cam interviews with visionaries and market leaders yeilding sound bites for the various sessions
  
• Screen cam demo clips showcasing features of innovative products
  
• Face-to-face interviews and group dialog with representatives of major RTC players, like Adam Gartenberg (Offering Manager, Real-time and Team Collaboration, IBM/Lotus) who recently agreed to participate. We are hoping to get Microsoft and others to join us too.
  
• Release of a joint Corante/Collaborative Strategies report: A Roadmap for Real-Time
  

Host: Stowe Boyd, Corante
Co-Host: David Coleman, Collaboratives Strategies [an old friend and colleague]

Session 1 [45 mins including break]

Setting Context: The Wheel of Real-Time Collaboration - Stowe Boyd

Stowe will be leading the workshop using his 'late show' format, involving short and focused presentations, strong reliance on interview and dialog, and demos of breakthrough technologies. In this first session, he lays out a conceptual framework for real-time technology and its impact on today's world.

Market Trends in Real-Time Collaboration - David Coleman

David will present various trends in the real-time marketplace and their relevance to the enterprise and individual.

Session II [45 mins including break]

The World That Instant Messaging Is Making: New Directions in IM

Host and co-host will discuss innovative instant messaging technologies - likely to include technologies like Convoq ASAPlinks (blog/website/portal integration), Gush (RSS integration), Xfire (massively parallel game support), Trillian (Plugins), Jabber (RT App framework), Userplane (MySpace), Pegasus (accounting integration) -- using pre-recorded screencams, while talking about these technologies and their promise.

Session III [45 mins including break]

Convergence and Collision: From Apps to Stacks

Host and co-host will lead session devoted to the convergence of technologies like IM, web conferencing, voice, video, content, and other real-time collaboration apps into complex enterprise architecture stacks. Will include 'policy/vision' statements through either live or recorded interviews with representatives from Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Macromedia, and Oracle.

Session IV [45 mins including break]

Real-Time Social Tools

Host and co-host will lead a session devoted to the convergence of real-time collaboration into social media and social tools. Will demonstrate wide variety of real-time social software, including "pay for intimacy" (SuicideGirls), blogging (Mo'time), social networking (MySpace), wikis (Socialtext), SubEthaEdit, Microsoft OneNote.

Session V [45 mins]

Summary: A Roadmap for Real-Time

The co-host willl lead a session devoted to detailing a roadmap for the enterprise adoption of real-time collaboration technologies, and then a final wrap-up by the host, Stowe Boyd. Note: attendees will receive an executive report of the same name, co-authored by the Host and Co-host.