Compare and contrast :)
Guardian Unlimited: Why blogs could be bad for business by Neil McIntosh
While blogging’s earliest advocates operate on the “information wants to be free” principle, many businesses would shudder at the very thought.
“Information is power” is a more likely mantra in many organisations. Whenever you hear those three words, you’re hearing the signal of the kind of closed information culture where there’s also a heads-down, bunker mentality utterly unsuited to the openness required for a convincing weblog, be it an external PR effort, or knowledge-sharing internal one.
There are plenty of areas of business where people are judged on their knowledge, and the competitive edge – and thus the safety of everyone’s jobs – is the thickness of a single good idea. Share it all on a weblog, with competitors or (worse) an office rival? You must be kidding.
Robert Scoble, very passonately, about “why do you weblog instead of doing something to get rich?”
So, why do this if not for money? Well, I started doing this mostly for myself. I am a news junkie. A community junkie. A computer junkie. I wanted a way to keep track of the sites I visited that I found interesting. I wanted a way to keep track of people I find interesting. I wanted a way for me to talk to the world about my point of view. I wanted a way to change the way corporations talk with their customers.
[..."weblogs and Miscrosoft vision" and more...]
But, no, there’s lots of people out there who think there just is no value in having a conversation with customers. Don’t worry. There were people in the 1970s who thought the idea of a personal computer was wacky. I know that people asked Steve Wozniak “why don’t you do something with your time that has a chance of making you rich?”
I think we all know the answer. I’d rather change the world, thank you very much.
I agree with Neil McIntosh that weblog use in companies depends on their culture or, I would put it more specific, on having a critical mass of individuals that can change it. He is right that bloggers tend to be “knowledge-sharing is power” people (e.g. personal characteristics that support blogging). But the question is: if people believing in the cluetrain manifesto are anomaly or early signs of changing balance between businesses and their customers?
And it also comes to more fundamental question: do you believe you can change the world?
Tags: bloggers, blogs in business, motivationArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2003/10/05.html#a782; comments are here.
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