Sunday, February 20, 2005

Blogs don't get people fired. I have yet to encounter an "I got fired for blogging story" that doesn't reduce to "I got fired for being stupid." You can rail all you want about how big organizations ought to "get it" or how Dilbert is too painfully true. The Prime Directive in organizations is to survive and they can be remarkably adept at doing so. The root blogging policy that ought to suffice is "don't be stupid," but we understand how likely that is. What these stories reflect is that blogs are amplifiers. If you're smart like Scoble, a blog makes that more evident, more rapidly. But it reveals "dumbth" just as quickly. That's the power of this technology--it highlights what is worth attending to and what is worth ignoring. Blogs don't get people fired. Blogs don't get people fired: In my travels today, I can't easily see what the response is to the blogging Googler getting fired, but as someone who encourages (mostly without success) employees to blog, I still must say, I would have fired the guy -- only I would not have waited so long. For stupidity. There are thousands of business bloggers out there who are displaying how one can incorporate blogging into their work...but using ones blog as a means to publicly whine about employee benefits displays the lack of a minimal level of discretion necessary to work within the borders of a publicly-traded company. With freedom comes responsibility. "Top ten percenters" (one of the blogger's bragging points) can still lack walking-around sense. Update: Robert Scoble, the authority on the discretionary arts related to corporate blogging within the borders of a giant publicly-traded entity, has some authoritative (and diplomatic) observations on the topic. Quote: It's not easy writing in public. All it takes is one paragraph to lose credibility, have people laugh at you, get you sued, create a PR firestorm, or get your boss mad at you. Think about that one for a while. Just a few hundred pixels on the screen can dramatically change what people think about you. [rexblog: Rex Hammock's Weblog] [McGee's Musings] 9:55:39 AM    comment [] Groupware. Brilliant. Read this, think about it, contemplate what makes it true. Groupware. Groupware Bad. Perfect. I lived through this too, with amazing similarities, back in my gogo Australia days.... [Emptybottle : Coasters] [McGee's Musings] 9:54:26 AM    comment [] A great size up on why I'm not going to get anywhere with Hewitt on this strategy.  They are the kind of people who will do exactly this AND then wonder why they don't have any traffic.  Not only can't you not fool all of the people all of the time.  On crap like this, you  can't fool anyone of the people any of the time. No RSS? No downloads? No interaction? Fake content? You're fired!. I am so pissed. Yesterday I ripped the head off of a coworker. He works in marketing on a major Microsoft product. I'm not going to identify it or him. He called me yesterday and said: "Hey, Scoble, we've done a fun site but no one is linking to it." My first question? "Do you have an RSS feed?" "No, this site is for non geeks." At that point I just lost it. I think I swore a bit. I am so mad 20 hours later that I can't even remember what I said. That demonstrates an utter cluelessness about how hype gets generated. If you don't have RSS, how will anyone who is a connector build a relationship with your site? "Why don't you get your non-geek friends to link to it then?" I think he had heard that lots of press was reading blogs and wanted to get Walt Mossberg or Steven Levy to talk about this marketing site and figured he'd use me to drive traffic. Sorry, if you do a marketing site and you don't have an RSS feed today you should be fired. I'll say it again. You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed. Saying that RSS is only for geeks today is like saying in 1998 that the Web was only for geeks. It got worse. This site, which probably cost $100,000 (ahh, that's where our towel money went) has great graphic design. Lots of streaming video. But it's fake. All of it is actors. No real people. No real point. Aaaaaaaggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh. Oh, but it gets even worse. "Can I download the videos?" "No, the whole point of the site is to get people to visit and stick around." So, let me get this straight. You don't have RSS feeds. That means I won't be able to build a relationship with this site. You have a fake site so even if I tell my readers to visit it they'll get there and feel dirty (and they can't interact or do anything there either). You won't let me download the videos to pass them around virally. Or remix them in fun ways. Oh, and there's no permalinks so even if I wanted to link you directly to a piece of content there I couldn't. This team is very lucky that I'm not in charge of marketing. Seeing sites like this makes me think that Mini-Microsoft is right. Maybe it's time for Donald Trump to visit the team in question. On the other hand? Some teams at Microsoft do get it. Microsoft Presspass, for instance, just added a couple of RSS feeds. [Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger] 9:53:18 AM    comment [] Blogging started in the tech community, and over the years, we've followed stories, sometimes they were picked up by mainstream media, often with little or no credit to the bloggers who did the discovery and research. Then the political bloggers did the same, and got the credit for putting the pressure on the MSM that's been going on in technology reporting for so long. Today we work with the our colleagues at eWeek and News.Com, ZDNet, and even some of the reporters for business publications and local newspapers. I have a feeling the story we're working on, with Google pushing the envelope on the story of Smart Tags, is going that way. Let's hope the larger press community tunes in, and let's keep this a class act on both sides. There are some interesting issues, and few clear answers. Let's show everyone what the political blogosphere may look like in a few years. [Scripting News] 9:38:03 AM    comment [] Couple Build Startup Into Blog Powerhouse (AP). AP - Like so many other 20-somethings hoping to mine the Internet gold rush of the late 1990s, Mena Trott was thrown for a humbling loop by the dot-com bust, yet still craved stardom. Her unassuming husband, Ben, just wanted another computer programming gig in Silicon Valley's depressed job market. The couple's odd chemistry cooked up Six Apart Ltd., a startup that has helped popularize the "blogging" craze, with millions of people worldwide maintaining online personal journals that dissect everything from politics to poultry. [Yahoo! News: Technology] 9:37:08 AM    comment [] Daily Show segment on blogging. Hey they like us. ";->" [Scripting News] Jon Stewart at at his finest on a stupid and yet timely topic… http://homepage.mac.com/onegoodmove/movies/ds021605bloggers.html So, I guess next week we will see the mainstream/legitimate media channels referring to THIS to get their news and update on the story…  A doubleback version of art following art at least one step removed from the question that is begging to be answered.  Was Jordon what’s his name tipping his hat on something that should be investigated?  Al Jezerra says yes, but, we of course wouldn’t pay any attention to them. If one Jeff Gannon exists on top of the other things that are coming out of how this administration is overtly using the media, I’m beginning to think we are just in the space we used to be in when no one would publish the story of Roosevelts polio or Kennedy’s illnesses, behavioral and otherwise.   9:34:17 AM    comment [] Older Hands Find Place in a New Course. A new initiative gives out-of-work New Yorkers a chance to take classes at an Ivy League university, then puts them to work on projects that use what they have learned. By By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE. [NYT > Education] 9:15:31 AM    comment [] Washington Post: Newspaper Industry Struggling. [Scripting News] Article in the Washington Post lamenting the fact that people are getting their news from other sources than newprint, the 18 to 35 year olds are a bunch of slugs and won’t replace the boomers in the rosy picture of eating breakfast and reading the morning paper.   Then this one guy says something that makes me think at least someone might GET IT, or, maybe has better PR people.   "If we focus on doing the business of journalism well, the newspaper and Web site should both be able to grow revenues."   To me the issue is NOT that we don’t have time to read the newspaper, it is that the idea of journalism (particularly investigatory journalism a la Bern&Wood/ and Watergate) is not deemed cost effective or even necessary.  And if they can’t get that, we probably do deserve to got out news for blogs and all the partisan, poor writing and uncontrolled post publication comments and person attacks on the writer that involves.     9:05:17 AM    comment []

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