connecting*the*dots

Marc’s Voice
Welcome IBM to the corporate world of social networking

[…]

Synchronizing corporate and business data between networks can take on a whole new level of possibilities once IBM gets the corporate world to bite off on this.

I can’t wait to see what the initial implementations of IBM’s Lotus Connections brings. This is the best news Broadband Mechanics has ever had!

‘Cause they’re doing my advertising for me.

Welcome IBM to the world of white labeling social media. Add in widgets or a mobile gateway, mix in some product databases and static propoganda - and you might even have stumbled upon “digital lifestyle aggregation�.

We’ve been betting that this day would come. That corporate social networking (which included blogging) would make it to the big time. Now I get to compete with IBM on price, service, features and brand.

Let’s rock.

I can see Marc salivating from here (hm, maybe that’s drool).

This flavor of passion regarding corporate change reminds me of Cluetrain, 8 years ago.

Please open your bible to Chapter 5, The Hyperlinked Organization:

The Web, in short, has led every wired person in your organization to expect direct connections not only to information but also to the truth spoken in human voices. And they expect to be able to find what they need and do what they need without any further help from people who dress better than they do. This has happened not because of a management theory or a bestselling business book but because the Web reaches everyone with a computer and a telephone line on her desk.

So, the gulf opens between those who are connected and those who think an office with a door is a sign of success. The gulf is one of expectations, and expectations always guide perception. As a result, the company thinks it’s doing one thing while accomplishing the direct opposite with its connected employees. For example:

• The company communicates with me through a newsletter and company meetings meant to lift up my morale. In fact, I know from my e-mail pen pals that it’s telling me happy-talk lies, and I find that quite depressing.
• The company org chart shows me who does what so I know how to get things done. In fact, the org chart is an expression of a power structure. It is red tape. It is a map of whom to avoid.
• The company manages my work to make sure that all tasks are coordinated and the company is operating efficiently. In fact, the inflexible goals imposed from on high keep me from following what my craft expertise tells me I really ought to be doing.
• The company provides me with a career path so I’ll see a productive future in the business. In fact, I’ve figured out that because the org chart narrows at the top, most career paths necessarily have to be dead ends.
• The company provides me with all the information I need to make good decisions. In fact, this information is selected to support a decision (or worldview) in which I have no investment. Statistics and industry surveys are lobbed like anti-aircraft fire to disguise the fact that while we have lots of data, we have no understanding.
• The company is goal-oriented so that the path from here to there is broken into small, well-marked steps that can be tracked and managed. In fact, if I keep my head down and accomplish my goals, I won’t add the type of value I’m capable of. I need to browse. I even need to play. Without play, only Shit Happens. With play, Serendipity Happens.
• The company gives me deadlines so that we ship product on time, maintaining our integrity. In fact, working to arbitrary deadlines makes me ship poor-quality content. My management doesn’t have to use a club to get me to do my job. Where’s the trust, baby?
• The company looks at customers as adversaries who must be won over. In fact, the ones I’ve been exchanging e-mail with are very cool and enthusiastic about exactly the same thing that got me into this company. You know, I’d rather talk with them than with my manager.
• The company works in an office building in order to bring together all of the things I need to get my job done and to avoid distracting me. In fact, more and more of what I need is outside the corporate walls. And when I really want to get something done, I go home.
• The company rewards me for being a professional who acts and behaves in a, well, professional manner, following certain unwritten rules about the coefficient of permitted variation in dress, politics, shoe style, expression of religion, and the relating of humorous stories. In fact, I learn who to trust — whom I can work with creatively and productively — only by getting past the professional act.

Something’s gone wrong. Or maybe something now is starting to go right.

[…]

Bottom-Up

The Web is undoubtedly a part of your business plans. You’ve got it safely contained, under control, managed. Why, your organization has probably already installed a corporate intranet so it can publish the human resource policies that no one read on paper to people who now won’t read ’em on screen. Excellent!

Yes, your centralized corporate intranet has eliminated some paper and is making management feel vaguely cool. But that’s not the web that’s going to shake the foundations of your fort.

While you’ve been hiring consultants to create a slick corporate intranet, establishing policies about who gets to post what, and creating a chain of command to ensure that only appropriate and approved materials show up on your internal corporate home page, your engineers, scientists, researchers — hell even the marketing folks — have been creating little Web sites for their own use.

No one is controlling what’s posted on them except the people doing the posting. No one is making sure that the corporate logo is in the right place. No one is making sure that the writing is official, officious, and as dull as the pencil drawer of a recently downsized middle manager.

The real party got under way while you were still setting up the banners at the corporate prom. (This year’s prom theme: “Responsibility in a Web Age!”)

For example, by the time Sun Microsystems got around to counting, they had eight hundred intranets. And when Texas Instruments put in their corporate intranet, they invited everyone who had one already in place to register with the top-down one. Within a few months, two hundred and fifty internal sites had registered, and no one knows how many unregistered ones there were. Even a top-down intranet can take on a bottom-up feel, as happened at Lucent Technologies, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. After Lucent brought together a product-development team of five hundred engineers across three continents and thirteen time zones, it watched dozens of them insert their own pages into the project intranet. Some of these pages related directly to the project; others were strictly personal, like, “Hey, look at this picture of me and my dog!” Either way, the project took on a human cast that never would have been present otherwise. In the end the team leader attributed the success of the project in no small part to “the ultimate Democracy of the Web.”

Granted, these are technology companies, but you don’t have to be a technical genius to create an intranet. If someone wants to share some information, they can turn their computer into a Web server. It’s free, and it’s getting easier every day.

The intranet revolution is bottom-up. There’s no going back. If a company doesn’t recognize this, the top-down intranet it puts in can breed the type of cynicism that results in ugly bathroom graffiti and mysterious golfing cart accidents.

The intranets under the radar screen — and the rest of the Net panoply, including e-mail, mailing lists, and discussion groups — ignore the corporate blather and ass-covering pronouncements. Instead, these new Web conversations are actually being used to get some work done.

And the work continues…

  or    

Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and lifelong technology visionary or Mike McCurry, a life-long communication, PR and government professional?

Follow the image links and think for yourself.

(inspired by Matt Stoller)

World 2.0 seems to have raised it’s periscope within our culture almost 5 years ago, in the immediate post-9/11 world. Who would’ve thunk it possible?

Brad Neuberg on October 21, 2001:

The world seems to be hungry for an ideological alternative to capitalism. I don’t know if this is a rational or simply emotional need for something to challenge what is now the dominant ideology of the age, but I predict that as soon as a semi-credible ideological alternative to capitalism arises that it will spread like wildfire and produce another Cold War type situation. Communism used to be it, but is now defunct and dead, while fundamentalist Islam semi-fills this need in parts of the world. I’ve noticed this need to challenge capitalism while traveling; I can even see it in myself.

I’ve never met Brad — as a matter of fact, I was only introduced to his blog tonight via Messina’s post — yet I dropped a similar perspective on the state of capitalism on the other side of the planet just two weeks later in the fall of 2001.

Coincidence or…?

The collective unconscious has always been a powerful concept, but before blogging, it wasn’t a tangible construct. It took the invention of the permalink and intra-day personal publishing to even begin to generate enough trails of human expression to expose Jung’s concept of unspoken, shared realities and archetypes.

While The Cluetrain gang introduced the concept of a global conversation to netizens back in 1999, what I find so interesting about the blogosphere since that time, is that the very notion of a conversation has the potential to become explicitly amplified and extracted to become findable across new dimensions of length and density.

The web is now chock full of meshed thoughts and dreams, connected explicitly by hyperlinks, loosely by tags and conceptually by discovery. With a shift in search result interface paradigms, the possibilities for more complete, immediate research queries are endless.

Topical themes — or memes — shift intra-day and can last as conversations either as sporadic and finite bunches (Jill Carroll’s abduction and release over a three month period) or prolonged variants (George Bush’s presidency). Imagine what types of conversational connections will become possible when interfaces, such as a Technorati search result, leaves the conservative constraints of separated permalink results based on latest entries or authority, and instead focuses on the clustering of such conversations through visual metaphors across other dimensions.

And no, I’m not talking about a folder paradigm.

I’m talking about dynamic, visual representations of conversations, with the ability to shift in real-time, using attributes such as tags and language co-occurance to drive groupings within oppositional variants such as the length and density of the conversation.

The day our thoughts and dreams stop getting lost in the cracks of time and authority, we’ll be one step closer to the knowledge revolution, leaving information in the dust with data. Then the decolonization of cyberspace can begin with earnest.

How rude of me… What’s up, Brad?

This panel is very conversational (you think?), so bear with me.

Doc Searls

On marketing consulting: “There’s money to be made in prolonging the problem.”

On the title: “The cluetrain stopped there (Silicon Valley) four times a day, but never made a delivery.”

How the book came after the site received a buzz: “The book deal got worked out based on how much consulting money wey’d have to give up.”

Companies that get it:

• Dresdner Kleiner Wasserstein; the CIO completely bought into Cluetrain through Rageboy.
• Microsoft is a huge blogging community.
• Sun microsystems is trying to retain people, so they encourage blogging as well.

On the future of 2.0 and women in the mix: “There’s going to be a huge explosion of indie film and video production… the larger trend is independence… and women are best served to manage these communities”

Heather Armstrong

Heather stumbled into the marketing department of Nikon. She posts images and labels them with, “Shot by a Nikon XXX” and her audience is now buying the camera by the thousands. The problem? She’s having issues with the camera and Nikon isn’t paying her. So there’s guilt and then there’s justifiable bitterness.

When will companies get it?: “Cluetrain will be realized when BestBuy goes out of business.”

Brian Clark

“Less than entranced of the web as human-computer interaction (as oppossed to cd-rom).”

“Cluetrain predicts the idea that we can work smarter than that.”

“Ad agencies are starting to build around groups of freelancers, thereby reducing traditional organization, and increasing collaboration.”

Q&A
Before getting into the question of how do we empower individuals, I told Heather that I’ve been dooced twice; once when blogs were just web sites, and once within the thriving blogosphere. She asked me, “didn’t you listen to me?” and I laughed it off with a no, but the truth is strange. I didn’t get dooced twice for shitting on my boss or coworkers, I got dooced for openly talking about how smart we were being within our company(s) at the time. Yeah, I got dooced for having pride in our work and sharing it. Nothing secretive or clandestine, just for daring to speak to people and not go through “proper” channels. That’s a big difference. But like Heather, I refuse to name the two companies.

As for empowering bloggers to a point of sustainability, I understand Doc’s response. Blogs will provide monetary returns via the relationships and opportunities they create — through the development of respected, personal perspectives and grass roots authenticity (sorry for paraphrasing, but this is a post-lunch wrap-up). That’s all good, but my question (which I didn’t quite get out) was more about how do we empower the voices around the US and the world who might be online, but are scraping to get by in the real and don’t (or can’t) see the benefit of sharing their voice.

I feel reaching a critical mass of participation is important; not because I necessarily want to experience *everyone’s* POV, but because the chance that you or I might discover these voices is an extremely powerful, politically empowering concept, as down the road, a yet to be designed interface will make discovering such varient perpsectives within a huge ecosystem of information rather simple. So to get a critical mass, a potential monetary incentive might become the tipping point for participation.

So my original question remains; how can we develop implicit hooks between bloggers and businesses? Maybe it’s not about that direct hook either; maybe it’s about creating an algorithm service which can sense when a blog reaches:

• a readership tipping point
• a query match tipping point (enough people land on x site because they were looking for y)
• a tagging tipping point (enough posts fill the context of a particular topic that matches a business’s controlled vocabulary of value keywords [matching services, inventory, etc.])
• a local readership tipping point (based on a radius from the “home” of the blogger)

This way, community based small businesses can be alerted to potential local blog advertising possibilities and participate with smaller, more targeted payouts to audiences directly engaged within the context of their business model. Instead of creating hooks directly between domains, instead, we’d be creating hooks between people.

Or something like that…

We who blog, incessantly rave about the progressive attributes of transparency. It’s not a beckon call that we own; political activists have been screaming for transparency in government since, well, forever. Transparency provides credibility. The truth shall set you free. You pick the cliche, they’re all spot on.

Well, in this Web 2.0 world that we live in (whether we realize we’re living in it or not), transparency is beginning to take root in interesting ways. Take the age old process of writing non-fiction; I’m starting to see authors not only openly talking about their books in gestation, but reaching out to Joe Q. Public for participation in the writing process itself.

Since April of last year, Chris Anderson has been publicly blogging his thoughts about The Long Tail, the term he coined proper in 2004. His blog tagline describes his transparent approach as, “A public diary on the way to a book.” One of his recent posts, Death of the Blockbuster, is a perfect example of the transparent methodology I’m talking about:

I’ve been collecting data on just how bad it’s getting in the music industry, and this useful list of the 100 all-time bestselling albums offered another lens on the meltdown. I looked up the release dates of each and grouped them in half-decade bins. The data speaks for itself:

If you want to do your own analysis, the underlying data is in this spreadsheet.

Anderson engages with his audience, invites them to participate in his thesis and provides the underlying data behind his perspective. The above post has generated a link from USA Today, numerous comments and two follow-up posts that further this particular aspect of Anderson’s thesis. Aside from his trademarked phrase, “The Long Tail,” the entire blog is registered under a Creative Commons license, a copyright permission which allows anyone to replicate his content (as I did above), as well as to use his research finding for their own use (as long as they give proper attribution to Chris wherever they publish).

Share and share alike and build a better world.

No, I’m not a hippie, that’s just how open, collaborative, iterative development works. Chris is writing a book, one which he’ll profit from, but his open-thinking and shared research and knowledge will undoubtedly influence others to progressively impact industry in various degrees.

David Weinberger, who is knee-deep in the process of writing his latest book, “Everything is Miscellaneous,” employs a similar approach to writing.

Joho the Blog isn’t a 100% topical slave to the complexities of data, information and knowledge (I rather enjoy his political and cultural posts), but when David does dive in, you can sense where his head is in the writing process. With some posts, he’ll directly reach out for assistance and perspective, while other posts are less direct with explicit ties, but steeped in organizational memes. David blogged before he took on his latest book, so he understands the value of releasing ideas out into the ether. Hell, he co-wrote the book on it.

Ideas out, ideas in. Links out, links in.

Now, this approach is far from widespread, as the majority of books still hit “the shelf” with guarded marketing plans as the only touchpoint into the potential reader community. Authorship equates with authority in many circles — circles which seem to care more about ownership of a thesis, rather than the conversation surrounding the subject matter and the avenues newfound knowledge takes once digested. But since the shelves themselves are changing and mainstream journalists and authors are beginning to blog themselves, this just might catch on and become SOP.

What would be the ramifications of such transparent collaboration beyond the target of binding particular pages?

David hosted an interesting thread about hyperlinks subverting hierarchies a few weeks back where the conversation shifted between the lines of power, organization and connections between people. Following that premise within the context of this post, imagine if authors who write life and death non-fiction (say, covering the war in Iraq) opened up to allow for community participation… Could the impact be greater than the explosion of citizen media alone?

Methinks so.

(originally uploaded by monkeyc.net)

Either they want to get a piece of the blogosphere action or they want to shut it down. It’s the only way suits think: M&A with synergistic bottom line results or a hostile takeover to sell off business units.

One way or the other, it’s all about market disruption, marginalizing competition and turning a profit… within the current structure of corporate power and operations, of course.

Think I’m being a bit dramatic? Read this Forbes article titled, Attack Of The Blogs. Once you get the taste of corporate bile in your mouth, read the Fighting Back article. It’s enough to make you question our common humanity.

After absorbing the tone of Daniel Lyons article, you can see what this kind of advice does for the C-Levels who maintain the status quo profit structure. With all of the progressive business thinking going on in today’s world, it’s actually a pretty sad and sick relationship if you ask me.

A few weeks ago I posted about Technorati getting into bed with Edelman PR. Dave Sifry, the CEO of Technorati, commented within an hour of it going live. Now, I perceive that to be an example of a smart CEO tracking his brand in the blogosphere, joining conversations to provide transparency. But now, after reading the Fighting Back article, I’m actually wondering whether he came back at me with the first play from that playbook:

MONITOR THE BLOGOSPHERE. Put your own people on this or hire a watchdog (Cymfony, Intelliseek or Biz360, among others). Spot blog smears early, before they can spread, and stamp them out by publishing the truth.

On a personal level, I don’t know Dave Sifry from Adam, but the guy gave me his cell phone number at the end of his comment (since removed), so I’d like to believe that he’s on the right side of the revolution.

I guess this Forbes article is giving me corporate employment flashbacks, as it completely represents the old business model philosophy of mainstream, conservative, corporate America: stiff, pragmatic, rooted, closed and “we’ll take out your kneecaps if you fuck with our way of life.”

Joe Trippi, the Cluetrain Gang and Stuart Butterfield are all spot on. It’s beginning to look like Forbes and company all went through the No Child Left Behind program — they can’t understand the potential of extrapolating the philosophies of sharing.

UPDATE: Frederico is upset about this as well. And I found another one of these “corporate boys are scared as hell” articles. Check out The Mercury News article, An Internet fed mostly by amateurs is frightening.

(articles via Boing Boing and Crossroads Dispatches)