31 January 2003

My New Paper on Weblogs and Organisations For the last month I've been writing a paper on blogs. Although the paper is not yet finished, I decided that the paper should first apper at my blog before it makes it to an online publication where it will appear sometime in March or April. I'm always enthusaistic to receive some feedback.  So, starting from today and for every day from now on, I'll be posting a section of the paper here. However, I have not yet incorporated the interviews and the sections are not edited, so there must be quite a few mispellings and grammatical errors, etc., but that's not a formal ccorporate website - it's my blog and that's how I'll do it. Needless to say, that when the paper reaches its final stage, I'll post it the whole of it to the blog. For the time being though, I do not include the first 8 sections of the paper which are concerned with organisations, marketing and corporate communications.   So here goes the first section: Enter the Weblog   It’s quite hard to accurately describe what a weblog really is. Or what people mean when they say they are bloggging. One could easily conclude that a weblog is a technology, or a social process culminating in an online phenomenon or even an online kind of a diary, if not to say a new form of journalism. The term is as broadly defined as peer-to-peer, to say the least. In fact, a weblog can be all of the above and none of it. Some people blog for fun, some for business and others for god knows why. Just like any other technology, if we could say that it is a technology, a weblog rests upon the people who adopt it to find a purposeful application for it. Which means that technology shapes people but people also shape technology. Which also means that what matters is not the technology per se but the use the technology will be put into when in the hands of the people who adopt it and choose to co-evolve with it. The same goes for any social process. Democracy differs enormously from place to place, say from ancient Athens to contemporary Athens. If you think that the above does not make any sense, you’ll be further puzzled down the road. READ MORE     9:40:30 PMSay it loud  []