What drives a blogger

I’m surrounded by colleagues with excellent blogs: Accidental Light, The Park Paradigm, Phil Dawes’s Stuff, Telcotech, the list goes on.

Malc picked up on a post I’d made earlier, and what he has to say is well worth a read. You can find it here. [And yes Malc, I should have used CoComment, but I haven’t installed it yet…]
One excerpt, an amalgam of Malc and Hugh, intrigues me:

It is, or should be, a truism that there is always someone faster and smarter than you are (c) Hugh. If you post on a blog is is likely or possible that this person or persons will read your post and respond. (The italics are Malc)

My assertion is that one of the main reasons to blog is to find that person or persons. And engage in conversation with said person(s). And learn as a result. And that blogging reduces the search and discovery costs for finding such people, as the net grows.

The role of moderation in blogging

Help please.

I’m just looking for pointers here. Most of the time, I use my power (?) of moderation to get rid of splog and spam, and to ensure that material that could be considered generally offensive is kept off. Occasionally, I’ve had to remove comments that were essentially off-topic, driving the conversation somewhere way beyond “a blog about information”. These comments (and there have been a handful) tended to move very quickly from information to freedom of speech to human rights, and focus more on the human rights aspect than on information. And my gut feel was that, while these were valid topics for discussion, they were not what Confused of Calcutta was about. I went with my gut.

Somewhere deep inside my head, I guess I felt that comments needed to be related directly to the post rather than meander away into the wild blue yonder. Yet serendipitous connections are an essential aspect of blogging.
Did I do right? Who else has faced this, and what can I learn from this?

Blogs and organisational structures and Conway�s Law

Myrto Lazopoulou, who heads up the User Centred Design team where I work, pointed me at a recent post by Donald Norman reviewing Google’s usability. Who in turn led me to Mel Conway’s 1968 paper, which you can find here.

I found it fascinating. In Conway’s own words, his thesis can be summarised as follows:

Any organization which designs a system (defined more broadly here than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure

The implications are interesting. An organisation that uses blogs and wikis and IM on a level-free non-hierarchical basis, where collaboration takes place over time and distance and silo and culture, will in time produce designs for “Conway systems” that replicate the communications structure. Is an organisation chart a Conway system? Is collaboration really that subversive?

In isolation, perhaps. But the adoption of social software and collaborative tools is counterbalanced by opposing factors such as Sarbanes-Oxley and its ilk, which reinforce hierarchies. The complexity of corporate law and tax structures also forces regional entity obeisance, again underpinning hierarchy. What Seely Brown and Hagel witnessed in China, was it despite the operating structures rather than because of them? I wonder.
Which leads me down a Chandleresque path, in terms of his suggested interplay between strategy and structure. Something to think about, how modern communications cultures will influence the organisational structures of tomorrow, despite post-facto regulation.

Blogging, value and vulnerability: a postscript

Aqualung Ric makes the point that blogging is all about relationships, and that relationships are all about vulnerability.

Doc Searls was talking to me about a conversation he had with George Lakoff; somewhere out of that conversation, they defined blogging as rolling snowballs downhill in comparison with prior forms of multiperson live conversation which sometimes felt like rolling boulders uphill. Doc commented about the way the snowball has no “ownership” by the time it gets downhill.

This too is an important aspect of blogging, the co-creation of value. But the value that is co-created is not ownable in the traditional sense. There is a delayed gratification aspect to blogging, a Goleman-like emotional intelligence; you have to do what you feel is right rather than work out how you will “monetise” what you say. Ideas are free, it’s what you do with them that may be monetised over time.

Talking about Lakoff, I found his work on anchoring and framing very interesting; the subject was introduced to me some years ago by a colleague, James Montier, and also touched upon by Barry Schwartz. Lakoff’s point that framing is about ideas and values sits bang in the middle of this conversation.

Blogging, value and vulnerability

Anyone who blogs must be prepared to be:

  • flamed or otherwise criticised
  • splogged or similarly left with some form of comment spam
  • ridiculed for actions or omissions

It goes with the territory, and I should not be surprised to face all three within a fortnight of going public. The flames have so far been incidental, largely on other sites that link to me. But they are flames nevertheless. The splogs have also been irrelevant so far, all I have needed to do is to moderate them away. And I am sure the ridicule will come.

This brings me to a point which I feel is material to bloggers in general, and I’d love to hear opinions from people “out there”. Can a blogger create value without making herself or himself vulnerable? Isn’t being vulnerable actually part of the process of creating value?

My guess is yes. In this respect I am reminded of the work of Professor Michael Power at the LSE. Some time ago he wrote a pamphlet called The Risk Management of Everything which you can find here. He’s a very interesting guy, I arranged to have lunch with him shortly after reading the document.

While he made many good points, the one that stood out for me (in the context of information) was his assertion that second-order risk management, itself often caused by post-facto regulation in an increasingly litigious society, was creating an environment that was driving out “valuable, yet vulnerable, professional opinion”. These are my quotes, and my apologies for not guaranteeing their accuracy, it has been a while since I read it.

Vulnerability is an essential part of any professional or personal opinion. It comes from not having certainty about the opinion expressed. Opinions presented with certainty must be one of two things: not opinion but fact; or, bigotry and propaganda.

I’m also reminded of another piece of apocrypha, one I really liked. Apparently Justin Hawkins of The Darkness was being interviewed somewhere, sometime and the DJ commented on how the band was perceived as enjoying themselves despite their meteoric rise to fame. And Justin is meant to have said “We take our music very seriously, we just don’t take ourselves seriously”.

There’s something in that for all us bloggers.