Posts
A blog is a blog is a blog in the same way that a TV show is a TV show is a TV show.
That is to say, there are many kinds of blogs in the same way there are many different kinds of TV shows, depending on their goals, audience, subject matter and format.
So when a government department, commercial organisations or individual tells me they are starting a blog often my first question is generally - what type of blog?
Around four years ago Rohit Bhargava defined 25 different types of blog and when to use them (see his presentation embedded below).
Wikipedia also discusses the many different types of blogs, differentiating them by genre, content, authorship, goal and approach.
In both cases there is sage advice for anyone considering setting up a blog to consider, preferably before you establish the blog.
Have you thought about the goals for the blog - to communicate, educate, evangelise, attract or sell (amongst other potential goals); have you consider who you see as your audience and their particular needs and approaches - are they experts or novices, do they prefer short snippets or in-depth analysis; have you considered your available resources - can you blog daily, weekly or sporadically, what technologies you are using and their benefits or limitations.
Finally have you considered your subject matter and the degree of interactivity you seek to include. Can - and will - people respond to your blog by commenting. Will they discuss and share your posts on Twitter or Facebook?
Whether you're proposing a blog as a communications or engagement tactic for your organisation, you're being told to establish a departmental blog or you're considering blogging personally or on topics of professional interest, it is well worth considering the appropriate style and approach to improve your changes of success.
And remember, you can blend a few styles together, create your own and evolve your blog over time in response to how your audience is engaging. Don't be limited by lists!
Monday, May 03, 2010
The many styles of blogging - selecting the right approach for your goals and audience | Tweet |
Friday, April 30, 2010
The street as a platform, what's government's role? | Tweet |
An extremely thought-provoking post about The street as platform written by Dan Hill in February 2008 has been brought to my attention by Darren Sharp.
The post explores the virtual life of a city street, all the digital data exchanging hands between systems, infrastructure, vehicles and people in the street unseen to human eyes.
While condensed into a single street, the post is based entirely on current technologies and practices. It could easily represent a real street in any major city anywhere in the world today.
The question for me is what is government's role in building the infrastructure, managing and effectively using the data collected?
Streets are generally infrastructure created and maintained by governments and the systems that 'power' a street are often installed and managed by public concerns (roads and pavements, water, sewage, electricity and telecommunications) or at least guided by government planning processes (the nature of the dwellings and commercial services provided on the street). So there's clearly a significant role for government in the virtual aspects of streets as well.
There has been some work done internationally on what precisely is the role of government (some articles and publications listed at the Victorian Government's eGovernment Resource Centre, but have we done enough here in Australia?
Given we have a national broadband network planned, and are already in the process of preparing for pilot roll outs, ensuring that this enables, rather than limits the vision of our digital streets in a managed and well-thought out manner is clearly moving its way up the priority list.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Crowdsourcing at the National Library | Tweet |
I've spoken before about the fantastic Historic Australian Newspapers archive program at the National Library to digitalise old newspapers, coupling OCR scanning with a online crowdsourcing tool that allows the public to fix mistakes in scanned text.
One of the key people behind the program, Rose Holley, recently presented at Mosman Library about the initiative. Thanks to B3rn, the presentation was filmed, and I have embedded it below.
Using social media to drive government policy - President Obama vs Goldman Sachs | Tweet |
Using the media to build public opinion pressure against an opponent is one of the oldest tactics in the political playbook.
However in the modern world politicians and organisations can go one better - marshalling their social networking followers and using social media avenues to directly build and channel public opinion.
While we've not seen much of this in Australia (though perhaps the Prime Minister's National Health and Hospitals Network Facebook Cause page is an example of early steps), the President's office in the USA is becoming quite mature and strategically effective at this type of pressure.
A short time ago President Obama used his social media platforms, including 8 million Facebook followers and millions of supporters via the MyBarackObama site (now referred to as Organising for America) to successfully lobby for the US Health Reform bill.
More recently the President has used his online muscle to launch a campaign against Goldman Sachs - a campaign that seems to have left the company off-balance and reeling.
Covered last week in the Forbes magazine article Obama Fights Goldman With Social Media, the President has used search engine marketing directed to Organising for America combined with a coordinated campaign via Facebook and Twitter (where the President has 3 million followers) to build public support for changes to the US's financial systems, specifically focused at Goldman.
The campaign has been even more effective because Goldman has a negligible social media presence and is not able to respond effectively through social networking channels - a major warning for any organisation, or government department, facing a determined and highly coordinated attempt to shift public opinion online.
As the article states,
To date, Goldman's silence in the online space has been deafening--making it all the easier for regulators, legislators and the White House to paint a bull's eye on its back.I hope no Australian government department will allow itself to be in this position.
For those who are not fully across the social media strategy used by the US President in his election campaign, a good piece to read is Viralblog's The Full Barack Obama Social Media Strategy!. I've embedded the presentation linked to that article below.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Are you a citizen of Australia, New Zealand, the US, the UK, Google or Facebook? Blurring governments and companies | Tweet |
Many people consider Google as a search engine, or maybe as a search and email system, with a few extra frills like maps.
However with over 1 billion searches a day, Google is not only aggregating the world's knowledge, it is learning about the world's citizens, what interests them, how they think and feel - even how well they are. It is now becoming possible to track the spread of diseases via Google searches with a high degree of accuracy, or model political sentiment.
These techniques are still in their infancy, however over time Google is building mental maps for billions of the world's citizens. The company is hiring the best and brightest engineers, mathematicians and psychologists in the world in order to make more sense of this data and improve their predictions - apparently to help improve the targeting of advertisements.
Google is also a more complex entity than it first appears in the clean Google search interface. The company is involved in a vast array of businesses connected to how the internet operates, is powered and the services delivered across it, such as power generation, broadband networks, connection devices and operation systems, electronic healthcare and biotechnology. In many respects the company is heading towards becoming a global operating system for the planet.
Alongside Google is Facebook - the world's leading social networking site. However rather than just being a place to chat with your friends online and share photos, Facebook has much grander ambitions.
Facebook now has almost 500 million active users - more than half accessing it daily. The service's users spend more time engaging with and through the service than they spend engaging with their national and state governments.
Facebook's advertising engine learns every time a user interacts with the service and even learns about people who do not have accounts by how they are mentioned in photos, videos and updates by users. This makes it a tool for achieving the same depth of audience understanding as Google is developing through its search and other services.
Last week Facebook and Microsoft launched a partnership which will allow Facebook users to create, edit, share and collaborate on documents via Microsoft's new web-based Office back end. The site is Docs.com. This isn't the traditional tool you find in a social network and could herald Facebook's entry into business life.
Also last week Facebook launched the Open Graph initiative that could see them embedding roots into many - if not most - websites, by enabling people to embed Facebook 'Like' buttons which connect back to their Facebook profiles. More than simply being a way to share your sentiment with friends, these buttons allow Facebook to know when you visit every site with a Like button, what you do and how long you spend there. Like a benevolent strangler vine, Facebook will suck knowledge about its users (including around 40% of Australians) out of potentially millions of websites in the most comprehensive data collection and reuse scheme in history - again apparently focused on ad sales.
In the past companies with this level of influence and control over a geographical territory amassed enormous political power. In some cases they effectively became the government in some areas of the world. The British East India Company springs to mind, which governed much of India for 100 years.
As the world becomes reliant on the internet as the global nervous system, where the territory is owned by companies rather than nations, I wonder whether we will see a similar situation with the potential for companies becoming governments - all but in name.
At some point will people consider themselves citizens of Google or Facebook rather than Australia, New Zealand or Great Britain?
Maybe some already do.
Below is an excellent video by the ABC's Hungry Beast that provides more information about what's under the hood at Google, and speculates about what the company could become.
