Udell - Blogs as diaries of our professional lives

Jon Udell muses about blogs as diaries of our professional lives.  He notices that blogs can serve as resumes, as autobiographies of our career growth, as records of our paths though our professional lives.  Jon notes:


Jon asks for reasons that this isn't happening.  One possibility is that people haven't thought of it yet.  Another is that it's a bad idea - which leads to Jon's question - what are the obstacles, or consequences, that might make these kinds of blogs difficult.  Here are my own answers to that question:

• Keeping a blog that complements one's work life but lives separate from it is complicated.  I blog here about all aspects of my work, including personal opinions about technology and products.  I promote my expertise and my experience.  But it does feel odd sometimes to be keeping a blog that mentions a lot about my work at Harvard Business School, but not having that hosted at or affiliated with HBS.  Is my primary responsibility here to myself or to my employer? Is there a difference?  Hosting at HBS would presumably change the nature of the commentary somewhat, as well as not be "portable" to any future jobs I might have.  Finally, I do this on my own time -- time taken away from either my home life or my HBS work. Neither one can afford the distraction!  So....there are issues about the doing of it.
  
  
• Do we really want every thought we ever had, every mistake we've ever made, to live on in a public forum?  As a programmer, have you ever looked back at some code you wrote a while ago and said "man...I can' t believe I wrote this piece of crap!"  And then you're quietly happy that you had this chance to clean it up  it before someone else looks at it.  We've all screwed up, and we learn from the mistakes and we become better for it.  But, that doesn't necessarily mean that I'd choose to have every error in judgment or early-on-the-learning-curve mistake gloriously chronicled in my own weblog.  Truthfully, I haven't found that much in my blog so far that, a year later, makes me cringe.  But I bet it'll happen.

So why do I still do this?  I think that some folks operate in a public sphere where maintaining a high profile, and promoting themselves is key to success. Aside from my HBS work,  I write for various publications and websites, write vendor-sponsored white papers and tutorials, and speak and consult to businesses and institutions worldwide. I enjoy helping people solve problems, and it turns out I can make a pretty good living at it, too. 

Blogging is an important component of my ongoing "low-intensity" marketing campaign, and furthermore, it lets me keep track of what topics people are reading about. However, I think that If I were not cultivating this work in the public sphere, my motivation to blog would be mostly gone. So to Jon's question - I think there is a cost/benefit ratio to professional blogging. People will figure out for themselves if it's worth it...I suspect that a great many people will decide that it's not.

Enterprise Blogs as Content Management

This week's Gilbane Conference on Content  Management will feature a number of sessions related to Blogs, Wikis and RSS as tools for collaboration, knowledge management, and publishing applications in corporate environments.  

Coincidentally, this week's HBS Working Knowledge from Harvard Business School includes a terrific article: Does Your Company Belong in the Blogosphere?  According to HBS, corporate blogging is catching on, providing a low cost way to:
HBS makes a few good points about how to keep a corporate weblog effective. From the article: 
Finally, HBS WK closes with a great final word:


These points will be a great complement to the discussions happening in Boston this week at Gilbane.

Multimedia Training for reporters and storytellers

As noted in my last blog entry about "writing with video",  for personal video publishing to go anywhere, people have to not suck at it.   Whether it's journalism, commentary, or human interest stories, good storytelling is essential to make something anyone wants to watch. 

Starting with Five Steps to Multimedia Reporting, and going on to inlcude basic tutorials on cameras, recording audio, editing with iMovie or FCP, Photoshop and more,  the The Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and the USC Annenberg School for Communication has created a comprehensive site dedicated to helping people learn the skills necessary to author and create multimedia stories.  It's written for journalists, but it's a great resource for anyone who wants to be a better video storyteller.

Writing with video

While perusing video weblogs, I came upon Vogner, which seeks to define exaclty what a Vog (vog?!?) should be.  In a mention of video blogs in the Mercury News Jon Fortt noted some skepticism:


To which Vogner responds:


This entry, a 50 second wordless commentary, shows what he means. 

"Secure Computing" vs. Whistleblowers

In an interesting counter-trend to my observations about the future being in full view, Jim Rapoza at eWeek comments on the unintended (or intended) affects of "secure computing" technologies on the act of "whistleblowing". 


Many of these secure computing initiatives are well-intentioned.  We all have the right to secure communications - much as been written about preserving our right to PGP-signed email and other personal encryption technologies.  Much has also been written about the misuse of such technologies for exerting unprecendented control over how and when people use information and software. 

In this case, we're talking about good, legal initiatives fueling a side-effect that may be hard to live with.  There's no question ... whistle-blowing is often the courageous act of a lone soul that initiates the unravelling of corruption and other illegal and harmful activity.  It seems to me that the tools of personal publishing, including cell-phone cameras and Weblogs, provide the counter-balance that levels the playing field.  It may be that there will be increasing efforts by corporate and government entities, each persuing their own honorable and less-than-honorable goals, to lock down information, criminalize the sharing and publishing of information, and eliminate open and public access to the tools of personal publishing.  But, in the words of William Gibson, 

The future will be in full view

Here's some breaking news...personal media creation and publishing can be controversial.  In one short week we've seen this story ["Camera-Equipped Phones Spread Mischief"] that people are using cameras built into cell phones in unexpected ways...from the benign (capturing snapshots of public events) to the nefarious (sneaky snapshots inside locker rooms) and lots of places in the gray area between (snapping photos of magazine pages to send to a friend).  Then we hear (by way of Dan Gillmor) that Samsung has banned video phones in some of its facilities in an effort to prevent industrial espionage.  People are worried about their privacy being lost.  Companies are worried about their secrets being leaked.  Publishers and media producers are worried about their markets being undermined by actions that fall somewhere between fair use and copyright infringment.

What's odd about seeing these developments this week is that it comes right on the heels of William Gibson's excellent commentary that appeared in the New York Times last week.  In The Road to Oceania, Gibson takes on the notion that the power of surveillance and data mining has created an Orwellian world of hopeless disempowerment for the ordinary citizen.  Instead, he notes that the technology of information creation, information sharing, and information finding are available to all of us.  He says "It is becoming unprecedentedly difficult for anyone, anyone at all, to keep a secret."  In short, like it or not, you have no privacy.  None.  But neither do "they". 

William Grosso, over at O'Reilly, notes that these instruments of sharing information are becoming woven firmly into the fabric of society:


Putting the means of personal publishing in the hands of all of us might be "democratizing". Even more so, it might be invasive.  For sure, it changes all the mechanisms of society that relate to information scarcity (including publishing) and secrecy (including government, business, and expectations of personal privacy).  We can fight it, but there's no fighting it...the rules are changing as much as they did when the printing press became available.  That particular innovation was used for everything from copying other people's work to spreading misinformation and propaganda to enabling a society that was informed enough to establish democracy and fuel the industrial revolution.  Anyone who's tried to outlaw or regulate printing presses may have bought some time, but they've lost out in the end.

So, in the face of technology like cellphone cameras, P2P networking, and Google, companies and governments try to contain information, limit distribution and control access to their copyrights and secrets. Individuals everywhere try to preserve their privacy. I wonder what society will look like when they fail.  

Personal video publishing experiments - Lisa Rein

An example of true personal video publishing of the type Eric Schmidt predicted - Lisa Rein's Weblog is rich with homegrown media and original content.  I'm impressed with the quantity of material that's available here.  If this is the future of personal publishing - and the future of video publishing - then the thing that'll have to be added is the ability to "google-search" it the way we can with text.  

The Web is about filtering and finding information.  How do we make personal video weblogs such as this one more accessible?  Virage used to have a product called "My Logger", which was a personal version of their flagship video metadata extraction product that extracts keyframes and associates other metadata with the content of a RealVideo file.  I'm thinking that that's the missing element that will make personal video publishing fly.  It brings HTML-like processing to video content - not unlike what accessibility expert Matt May suggests:


Are there other examples of sites that make as extensive use of video as Lisa's?  Send 'em along!

Video blogging - ready for prime time? Depends what 'ready' means...

After my notes about Google CEO Eric Schmidt's betting that video and multimedia blogging will become Big,  I began looking for examples.  This DailyWireless piece covers the growing number of options for personal publishing of audio and video.  Something clearly is happening here, although I agree with Matt May that it's subject to the golden rule: professional video production requires video professionals.  Part of his summary:

• People can scan textual content meaningfully. In fact, scanning is the dominant information-gathering mechanism in Web browsing. They couldn't scan in audio or video players if they tried.
• Text blog reading is done actively, as users scan and read the information that interests them. Audio and video content is inherently passive; therefore, the only value you can provide is active and engaging personality and good quality imagery and sound.
• ...which you won't provide, because you're not as gregarious or photogenic as you think you are, your lighting sucks, and your bare walls look just like mine. The ability to buy a camera and some software does not help you in this department.

Both Matt and Eric are right...personal video publishing will continue to grow, but as with any creative or expressive endeavor, having good skills will continue to be important to reaching and keeping an audience.  

Matt goes on to point out that the key ingredients required for personal video publishing to take off (in the blogging sense) will be a robust ability for cross-linking and the ability to browse and scan video information  the way you can with text.  The technical underpinnings for this are SMIL, SVG, SlideML, and other open, text-based standards.  The right creative approach to content....I haven't seen that yet.

The future of media publishing - personal or commerical

At Harvard Business School's recent colloquium -
"The Bandwidth Explosion - Living and Working in a Broadband World", Eric Schmidt of Google and Rob Glaser of RealNetworks debated the future of media publishing in a world of more and cheaper broadband.

Broadband will drive the self-publishing of video and audio, expects Schmidt. That view explains their recent purchase of Pyra Labs (maker of Blogger), which was met with skepticism by many commentators. (Some others see it as a good fit. ) Traditional Big Media and Big Software will try very hard to kill standard, open formats for video and audio. According to Schmidt, unless they succeed, self-published "multimedia blogs" will one day rule.

Glaser's RealNetworks, with the hard evidence of over 1M subscribers paying a monthly fee to access CNN, ABCNewsLive, Major League Baseball, and other traditional content, sees more and more traditional media showing up on the Web. Metadata and searching is the power of the new paradigm. Is the ability to search rich metadata and random access to well-targeted content enough?

Or is TiVo on track to be the new RealONE Superpass (on-demand, random access to all the traditional media you want) while personal publishing rules in the Web world?

It certainly was interesting to participate and hear the differing opinions of Schmidt, Glaser, and the other industry luminaries that took part in the colloquium. Thanks go to HBS Profs Rob Austin and Steve Bradley for an excellent event.