Old media and dumb-arse Web arrivistes with ad-agency or marketing backgrounds and certainly a rack of Dockers khakis in their closets are figuring out that blogs exist. Wait till they find out about global warming.
At base, Blogger is the doorway to a fundamental Internet truth: there are two Internets. One Internet is the brochureware of the corporate world. This is the Internet of the everyday.... It is the Internet of corporate PR departments. And, quite frankly, it sucks. The second Internet is one rarely seen. [Sez you. – NUblog] Your children know it. Students see it. The IT guy in the basement that nobody talks to at company picnics – he’s there. It is the net of storytellers, technogeeks and eccentrics.... If you spend any time at all on this side of the net, you come to find that it embodies a quality that the corporate net will never touch: enthusiasm.
We forgive the focus on turning Blogger into something corporate. (How could that possibly hurt Blogger at this point?) We offer this forgiveness because Norlin again makes sense, focusing on individual expression even within a corporation:
Blogger opens the doorway to harvesting the one great untouched asset of your company: Every employee’s ability to interact. Imagine if the fear surrounding the manipulation of your company’s message subsided for a moment. Might it not be possible to actually facilitate the type of interaction that is already occurring? And what if, through a Blogger page for each employee, you began to dissolve the corporate boundary that is actually preventing you from telling the great stories of your company? Such stories do not get told from the exalted pulpit of public relations and marketing. People tell great stories. Blogger can easily connect the people inside your company to the people outside of your company in ways that were not possible before.
A company that does this is a company suspicious online curmudgeons come to love. Of course, it’s all fantastical at this point. For now, blogging is indeed a separate Internet.
“Weblogs: a Window on the Influential”: Vaguely romantic lede: “Dan Gillmor has the week off on a skiing vacation. Ric Ford has been doing benchmark tests on a Power Mac G4/733. Dan Bricklin is losing a valuable editor and work colleague. Doc Searls is moving from the Bay Area to Santa Barbara. Dave Winer is reminiscing while he is walking around downtown Palo Alto. Tara Calishain was busy watching Martha Stewart cavort with the Cookie Monster on TV.” It speaks of a You are there! sensibility, of distributed hotspots where we can all show up, of avoiding the endless insecure search for the It Spot. We can just follow the lives of our friends. Problem with the theory? You need feedback, not merely readers.
Posted on 2001-03-31