Archive for the ‘Link Love’ Category

• Terrific piece over at CIO insight on the Rise of Social Networking.
• The BBC interviews Kevin Roberts on Lovemarks
• Blogs correct journalists via Rubel
• The future of news – from the Media Center:

It’s mobile, immediate, visual, interactive, participatory and trusted. Make way for a generation of storytellers who totally get it. This briefing summarizes key findings from Media, Technology and Society, a multi-disciplinary research project on the media landscape conducted for professionals engaged in strategies, research, thinking, education, policy and philanthropy related to the future of journalism and media.

• The Boston Globe on that GM thing
• Yosi Vardi speaks…

"20 million bloggers are not journalists, what are they? They want to fulfill a human desire of self-expression. ICQ was founded by four Israeli kids who wanted an indication for when their friends would enter a chat room. Initially they bet they might have 3k users, now approaching 400 million. ICQ 297M, Jesus 277M and Bible 250M mentions on MSN."

The Microsoft thing debated internally for all to see as Scoble challenges the way the company backed off supporting some anti-discrimination legislation in Washington State. Here’s his boss’s boss response. Other employees are jumping mad.

First, this is certainly a change in corporate communications – at least for the companies willing to tolerate embrace blogging. It is incredibly transparent – I guess follows the maxim that companies with nothing to hide needn’t fear transparency. If you are a stakeholder and you really can’t get a fix on Microsoft’s position via the media, then here it is. Once we waited for C/Net to publish another ‘leaked’ Microsoft memo. Now we get them real-time via blogs.

It’s also a shift in employee communications. Here we have the management/employee ‘food-chain’ exchanging views for everyone to see. No closed-door conversations. No gossip about what was said and what wasn’t. No time-lag between information distribution and eyeballs (total aside but a major issue for many companies is the hours it takes for email to reach desktops). Everyone is informed. Everyone gets to participate.

Second, it skirts an entire media cycle. Once upon a time we would have read about this exchange in the NYTimes or in The Reg. Now it’s here for all interested parties to see – unfolding in real-time. A journalist once said to me that transparency isn’t good for journalism. Maybe this points to that being true. If nothing it kills the leaked memo scoop so skillfully used by PR pros to manipulate the media generate coverage.

Third, and if nothing else, this certainly positions Microsoft as a company
willing to engage in dialog. But it’s more than that – this is an indicator of a new kind of
company. A company engaged in conversations and transparency. You could
even ask the question – How participatory is your company?

Microsoft might not be perfect – by any stretch – but this does signal a different kind of company.

In stark contract to BW… read on…

• America lags in broadband – and based on my last trip downunder, NZ is in a far worse position. "In 2001-04, Mr Bleha notes, America fell from fourth to 13th place in global rankings of broadband internet usage" – The Economist.
• Mossberg on blogging. Consumer focused.
• The Future of Jounralism – The Economist on the Murdoch keynote. “I believe too many of us editors and reporters are out of touch with our readers,” Rupert Murdoch, the boss of News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media companies, told the American Society of Newspaper Editors last week.

Another dangerous cliché is to consider bloggers intrinsically parasitic on (and thus, ultimately, no threat to) the traditional news business. True, many thrive on debunking, contradicting or analysing stories that originate in the old media. In this sense, the blogosphere is, so far, mostly an expanded op-ed medium. But there is nothing to suggest that bloggers cannot also do original reporting. Glenn Reynolds, whose political blog, Instapundit.com, counts 250,000 readers on a good day, often includes eyewitness accounts from people in Afghanistan or Shanghai, whom he considers “correspondents” in the original sense of the word. – The Economist, April 29

A classic series of shots…