Huh?

What to make of this?

In the comments to this post below, the following:

CRY FOR HELP

TIMBER WISDOM

A cryptic message from the Czar of B, perhaps? If so: thank you, B Czar...

Bloogle FAQ

Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: We are building a nuclear powered... Wait, you almost had us. We aren't telling, yet! But we will have more in a few weeks.

I would imagine that Ev probably 'has more' already - and he deserves every bit of it, fer sure. Blogger has indeed changed my life.

I just love spam...

Couple of toothsome morsels from this morning's inbox-clogging spammage:

1. An email from "Sevoithien" bearing the subject line: Gop, Hi! We Need Home Workers!

Oh boy, do you ever have the wrong guy...

2. An even more than usually aureate 419 message from "Prince Lawrence tarawally, the first son of Bridgedier Robert Tarawally the chief Commander of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) of the Republic of Sierra-Leone who was arrested recently by the United Nation Peace keeping force".

All I can hope for in this case is that Prince Tarawally is a relatively slim gentleman, as he warns me: "I am well confident of your capability of executing this business for the mutual benefit of our both families, believing that you will not expose or betray the trust and confident I am about to repose on you."

*oof*

"I know what I like, and I like a lot of it"



"...even if the only other thing you ate after this breakfast was oxygen, there's still a relatively high chance that your ass will grow hands and tie your intestines in knots to prevent this shit from ever passing through.

Coooo-eeee

The Haloscan comments widget is (temporarily) buggered, alas.

If you've something to say in the meantime, you'll have to grab one end of this:



Or you could email: michaelocc AT sympatico DOT ca

Ta.

Most compelling reason to Switch so far?

Homeland Alert displays Homeland Security Advisory status in the menu bar using a color-coded Aqua drop, numeric code and text label. Homeland Alert automatically updates the Threat Condition by periodically connecting anonymously to the ExitToShell.com web server. Future versions may incorporate region-specific Threat Conditions (New York city or California for example) and alter UI displays.

Alas for me, Homeland Alert v.1.2.5 only runs under Mac OS X.

Is this the real reason for RageBoy's Switch?

Crikey II

Be it known by those present that Wreckless Eric (Wreckless Bleedin' Eric, no less) is alive and kicking and has a website.

If you've never heard of Eric, you weren't there.

Crikey

I've just realised: it's only three more days to my second blogiversary!

That home-cooked taste

INGREDIENTS: Cream, Egg Bread (Enriched White Flour, Water, Glucose-Fructose, Yeast, Vegetable Oil, Salt, Dried Whole Egg, Defatted Soya Flour, Sodium Stearoyl-2-Lactylate, Monoglycerides, Calcium Propionate, Colour) Apricot And Passion Fruit Filling (Sugar, Apricots, Passion Fruit, Corn Syrup, Water, Modified Corn Starch, Concentrated Lemon Juice, Locust Bean Gum, Carrageenan, Sodium Benzoate), Sugar, Liquid Yolk (Contains Sugar), Salted Butter, Liquid Whole Egg, Currants, Modified Corn Starch, Vanilla Extract, Salt.

Just in case you can't work out what it is from this simple ingredients list, it's President's Choice Country Recipe Bread & Butter Pudding (of course!)

Ahhhhhh....Just like Grandma used to make. I can still recall how she used to rise before dawn to go gather the fresh sodium stearoyl-2-lactylates from the dewy mountainside.

At last, some perspective

Steve 'One Pot Meal' Himmer corrects the "Google is God" thing.

Of course Google isn't God. Gary Turner is God.

Super Powers

Shelley Powers over at Burningbird weighs in with a lengthy dissertation impelled, at least in part, by some of the stuff I’ve been posting here, and others have been commenting on elsewhere.

I find it hard to argue with quite a lot of what she says. Quite apart from anything else, she’s entirely right to be knocking the shine off my perky idealism.

I do have a tendency to go a little dewy-eyed from time to time and need a wet slap across the puss with the cold haddock of reality. Thanks for that, Bb.

She’s got me thinking harder about this one though.

A number of Shelley’s points spark further lines of consideration in my continuing attempt to figure out what the hell I think about the apparently inevitable war against Iraq, the Google/Blogger deal and weblogging in general.

This bit, for example:

“I've heard two common threads this last week: Weblogging is a whole new form of individual expression, without hinderance from editor or government; weblogging is a movement with power to report and shape the news. You can't have it both ways...”

Um. I don’t think the important thing is either of these. The important thing to me is the unprecedented speed at which the ‘Net in general, and weblogging in particular can move news.

By analogy, CNN wasn’t radically different from the TV news systems it surpassed – it was just faster, always on, and apparently able to cover more ground. Similarly, weblog-based reporting is not that much different from grass-roots journalism – it’s just faster, always on, and covers more ground.

Does this mean I think weblogs will completely supplant “Capital-J Journalism”? No. Indeed, I’ve argued this exact point in the past...

Bloggers and journalists exist in an AND relationship.

These persistent questions: “is blogging journalism?”; “are blogs the new new media?”; “can webloggers replace mainstream Capital-J Journalism?” are, frankly, valueless.

It really doesn’t matter whether one considers weblogs to be a “real” form of media or a threat to established media or not. In effect, the question (as much as it was ever remotely pertinent) has already been answered anyway.

As I’ve said before: Blogito ergo sum.

(and no – it didn’t get much of a laugh the first time around either).

Later in her piece, Shelley points out the rather hopeless fallacy in the heart of my earlier posts.

In response to my call for an army of mobile ‘bloggerists’ to be deployed to the frontlines in Iraq to report the unvarnished truth, she responds:

“What Michael forgets is that there would have been no witnesses because the people would be dead. In the starry eyed rush to show the glory of weblogging, and it's full unleashed power via Google, he neglected to remember that the people were dead. Dead people don't weblog.”

True, of course. She’s completely right here. Charlie don't surf. Dead Iraqis don’t blog.

I guess in my enthusiastic table thumping I wasn’t really clear enough about the iniquity that first lit my ire and the real direction in which I was trying to spin my wheels.

One step back to the first point I was trying (evidently failing) to make. The key factor that sent me off on one this time was my mounting outrage over the very widely documented concern that Bush Sr.’s administration, in collusion with the Pentagon, managed to almost completely control the flow of news from the Gulf War.

And I have checked this. No, I’m not a journalist – nor do I want to be. But FWIW, I have taken steps to do the research, and fact check for accuracy.

I quoted complete source references in my few posts on this subject, because I was able to – I’ve done the legwork. More – I’ve spoken directly with two journalists who were there in 90-91.

Go back to this comment I cited in reference to the Gulf War:

“The military...manipulated the packaging of information so as to favor television over other news media…by controlling the information through time, military authorities successfully maintained television's supportive role...effectively circumvented critical journalism, and ensured the war would be portrayed in the desired manner.”

I know it’s naïve and optimistic to think we can fix this stuff (I thought I’d even said so much in one of my posts, but when I went back to check just now I couldn’t find it – must have got lost in edit).

But all the same – the apparent fact of the military’s mendacious media meddling during Desert Storm v1.0 appears to me to be a clear case for the application of Gilmore’s law:



My hope is that the Internet, as the transport medium for bloggers everywhere, will route around the Pentagon’s Infowar techniques to at least some degree – to give us something approaching full and factual information flow for at least part of the time.

And before you all leap in to point out my innocence once again – I do know what I’m missing here. I’m well aware that the counter to Gilmore’s thesis might be:



Echelon, RIP, Carnivore, Yada, Yada, FUD, FOAF and suchlike bollockio.

If the U.S. military machine can filter the majority of hard news flowing out of Iraq via regular print and broadcast media, it can certainly find means to manage the flow of information on the ’Net – even to the extent of taking large parts of Iraq effectively offline, I’d imagine.

We certainly can’t underestimate the ability of the U.S. government to run an infowar with as much aggression and ruthlessness as their land war.

But there is also a noteworthy precedent here. Think about the way the world learned the story of Tianamen Square. Email, newsgroups (and plain old fax) helped spread the story, essentially bypassing all Chinese government censorship.

If one mobile blogger, standing in front of one tank, can get one uncut story out of Baghdad before the city falls – that will indeed be an inflection point worth celebrating.

Interestingly, last Thursday’s Guardian (in an article that I’m vainly tempted to think was at least partly inspired by my bloggling) addresses this subject in rather more depth and with more balance than my ramblings.

Well worth reading the whole thing, to get some additional perspectives on this discussion. Take this, for example:

"If things go wrong in Iraq, the first news most will get will be through the web," says Chris Hables Gray. "It's one thing to restrict a handful of reporters to sanitised news opportunities; it's another to keep all soldier/civilian accounts off the internet. Impossible really." Hables Gray points out that, during Vietnam, the underground press and the stories of the soldiers coming home helped spread anti-war sentiment along with TV news. "Now, the underground press is the web, and the stories of soldiers and civilians who experience the war will spread much quicker than they did 35 years ago."

Unfortunately, the Guardian piece also pursues one of the same red herrings as Bb:

“There have been suggestions that during a conflict, the internet could now be used by "moblogging" journalists, who could now, in theory, upload photos and video from the frontline direct to the net. [Brown University professor] Der Derian has doubts about this. "The mistake of the antiwar movement against the first Gulf war was to think that you could mobilise, as with Vietnam, after the war had started." But modern war happens too quickly.

Again – not quite the point and not really true, IMHO.

There’s a lazy elision here of two separate thoughts: the idea that “mobloggers” might be able to capture instant reports from deep within Iraq, on the one hand; and the suggestion that this is all something to do with the general anti-war movement.

The ability or otherwise of any anti-war campaigners to mobilise before, during or after the coming war is not the question. I’d submit that my rant is motivated by anti-censorship leanings; not necessarily anti-war, per se.

For the record – I’m not feeling too well qualified to judge whether I should be pro or anti the war at all, to be honest. I just don’t know. Saddam Hussein is a bad man. But war starts with Dubya.

I’m naturally predisposed to take the anti position, but then my brother points me to something like this, which should probably tip me further towards the anti camp, but I’m not sure I know where the hell I net out.

I should also point out that I really don’t, for even a nanosecond, “think everything will be different if we all just weblog” (to don the rose-tinted lenses Shelley lends me).

But I do think weblogging has already and will continue to make a difference. A difference measured primarily in terms of speed.

And I still think the combination of blogs and Google is an important one, the full impact of which we can only begin to grok.

Back on topic: I don’t think weblogging or Internet-supported communications make the prospect of war any less likely.

Nor do I think a handful of anti-censorship bloggers will make much of a discernible dent in the government’s ownership of the newsflow – even if they are able to blog from the Iraqi frontlines.

But it’s something to wish for.

I’d cite the example of Tianamen Square, again, and the positive impact of Net-based communications from that particular frontline. We’d do well to remember that one of the things that made the Democracy Movement’s rallies in Tianamen Square possible was the fact that the Chinese government did not yet have control over the means of communication.

Same deal with Vietnam, to a degree. If the American government had had better control over the flow of information back then, they might have been able to keep their messy, horrible war going a lot longer.

One of the journalists I heard from (not one of the ones with Gulf experience, fwiw) commented that the Pentagon “learned its lesson about press management from their disastrous Vietnam experience”. Indeed.

A good deal of the news from Iraq will still get out via traditional media. Of course it will. But much of it will be filtered, sanitized, spun. Blogs are, if nothing else, an alternative medium – and one I think we’re badly in need of.

So.

Shelley’s right - blogging won’t stop the war. But it might give us an alternative view – one occasionally undiluted by government spin engines.

Back to Iraq

I'm going to see about setting up a kind of portal blog thing to pull together any "bloggerists" (to use Jeneane's excellent, loaded phrase) actively blogging from within Iraq. All in the interests of some kind of balance.

Meanwhile, this is interesting:

"I'm Christopher Allbritton, former AP and New York Daily News reporter. This summer I went stumbling around Iraqi Kurdistan, the northern part of Iraq outside Saddam's direct control, looking for stories. (Some might call it "looking for trouble.") Well, now I want to go back in time for the war. So I'm asking your help in supporting independent journalism! Send me back to Iraq to report on what's happening"

The future is bright. The future is Google.

"Finally, Google realized they could grab a cut on the "Web of Trust" idea by offering their own verification and rating service, $15 a year to answer a questionnaire, have your credit checked, and fill in some bank account information. But people signed up, because Google was the marketplace; the Google seal of approval meant more than the government's."

This is August 2009: How Google beat Amazon and Ebay to the Semantic Web...and Paul Ford is a genius.

The Beeb on Bloogle-Glogger

"As American technology writer Dan Gilmor, who first reported the Google/Blogger story, has realised and publicly stated many times: with the advent of weblogging, the readers know more than the journalists. And the journalists had better remember that."

"Google's strategy is to make its search box deliver what users want, no matter what they type into it...They've noticed that people want the stuff that's happening right now, they want timely information and comment and the only place that can offer that is the weblogs." (Matt Webb of Interconnected, quoted in the BBC piece).

Blogspeed
[Updated]

What’s the biggest single factor in determining the importance of blogging in the pending US-Iraq fearstorm...?

The speed of information flow.

A few weeks ago, doing my Intranet Communications Strategy pitch, I posited this candidate Unfamous Quotation:



As in business; so too in the news ‘business’. Only for “rate-limiting” we could substitute “success” –



Viz:

“The military...manipulated the packaging of information so as to favor television over other news media. Military briefings at allied Central Command in Riyadh and at the Joint Information Bureau in Dhahran were always televised briefings, and were broadcast live twice each day for the first two weeks of the war...

“At the same time, military censors in Saudi Arabia often delayed stories submitted by print journalists until well past home-office filing deadlines in the US, thereby rendering the stories hopelessly dated even before they were set in print.

“Thus by controlling the information through time, military authorities successfully maintained television's supportive role...The live television briefings from Saudi Arabia effectively circumvented critical journalism, and ensured the war would be portrayed in the desired manner"

(Source: Susan Jeffords and Lauren Rabinovitz. Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf War. Rutgers University Press, 1994, p. 103).

Think about it.

The critical dimension in which bloggers absolutely have old media – both print and broadcast – smacked down cold is time.

It’s about blogspeed. Or more fundamentally: netspeed.

The rate of info flow directly from the news scene via the blogvines is currently exponentially faster than the rate of news dispersal via ‘traditional’ media.

Ev, Sergey and their advisors presumably chose to use a slightly more traditional Big Media outlet to break the Google-Blogger news first for very sound reasons (in this case it’s about reach).

But once Ev lit up the screen with his ‘Holy Crap’ post at the Blogosphere event – the news carried far and wide across the ‘Net way faster than it could have through regular news propagation.

There are other, more "mainstream" examples of the blogging community breaking or at least pushing news stories harder, faster and more completely than traditional media.

When majority leader Trent Lott made some offhand, implicitly racist comments in support of Dixecrat segregationist Strom Thurmond in the US Senate last December, the old media at first paid little or no attention.

Were it not for the amount of ruckus raised by blogs such as Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit and others, Lott might well have gotten away with his comments without any form of reprisal.

The fact that the “hive mind” of the blogging world suddenly became incandescent with noise about Lott’s remarks, probably had a great deal to do with Big Media sitting up and taking notice.

The ultimate outcome of this focused media attention, of course, was that Lott – a veteran Republican stalwart – was forced to resign.

And that is also why it’s so important that we get as many people in Iraq blogging as soon as possible.

Given what we know about the Pentagon’s media manipulation during Desert Storm I, we just can’t depend on old media to deliver the truth/whole truth/nothing but the truth - mini-army of ‘embedded’ frontline media or not. The embedded journalists will get to see and report on only what the Pentagon chooses.

As Jerry Garcia put it: "Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us."

Again, this is also why the Google + Blogger deal makes so much sense:



Your thoughts?

CNN vs. Blogger/Google continued...

Had a number of interesting reactions and responses, since posting and sending the screed below earlier today.

A fellow flack at one of the other outfits pointed me to this piece regarding the Pentagon's plans to 'embed' 500 reporters with their front line troops.

Hmmm. Couple of things here that leave me unconvinced:

Point 1. The article says: "Pentagon guidance issued to field commanders two weeks ago orders U.S. military units to provide the news media, "minimally restrictive access to U.S. air, ground and naval forces."

"Minimally restrictive access" is classic Powell/Cheney doublespeak. No evidence to suggest we should expect anything better than the 'minimally restrictive access' enjoyed by AP photographer and Pulitzer-winner Scott Applewhite - an accredited media pool member covering Desert Storm I - who was punched, handcuffed and abused by US Army MPs and had his film of the aftermath of a Scud attack ripped from his camera.

Scott is only one of dozens of journalists to have been treated to this particular brand of 'minimally restrictive' cooperation.

"For the 10 percent of us who went out to the field... we encountered multiple layers of control, at least one of which always seemed to be there. Barriers seemed to raise automatically to blur the reality; buffers were always at the ready to blunt the sharp edges of truth...For American troops, the single most violent event of the war was...an Iraqi scud missile...crashing through...a barracks...Scott Applewhite, an Associated Press photographer, was in the parking lot of the hotel...The military had spent hours showing US reporters how quickly they can handle casualties... But when he came near the real thing--as real as this war got--15 US and Saudi military police officers descended upon him.

"He was handcuffed, beaten and had one of his cameras smashed as he stood his ground, insisting that he was an accredited US journalist and had every right to be there. They demanded his film...For a couple of fleeting moments, the AP photographer had broken through the invisible barrier, a kind of plastic bag or cocoon of controls that the military preferred to keep around reporters in this war. While some of us managed to get out of the hotels, most of us never escaped the cocoon."

(Source: John J. Fialka. Hotel Warriors: Covering the Gulf War. Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1991, pp. 56-57).

Point 2. The article appears on CNN, goddamit. Well of course it does.

What the hell went wrong with CNN? And when? Or was it always this much of a Whitehouse mouthpiece, and I've only just twigged it?

In the interests of balance, however – CNN also has this report from Martin Savidge - one of the reporters 'embedding' with the US Marines en route to Iraq.

Savidge certainly appears to be the real deal. He’s the guy who kicked up a huge fuss in Afghanistan and ended up getting a little deeper ‘embedded’ than he may have bargained for, going from this:

"We had been camping out, literally, at the Kandahar airport, living on the base for about six weeks. You could see military coming and going, and it was frustrating that this sort of activity was going on and we couldn't go on it. We really were very much in the dark. The only insight we had was in the next day's briefing (when) they might tell us how many people were detained. And a lot of times information was coming directly from the Pentagon."

To this:

"I went outside to see what was happening, and then all hell broke loose. The ridge line where we came from had heavy mortar fire, tracer fire, heavy machine gun fire. It started as a small 'pop, pop, pop' and became a full-scale attack."

After his on air rant about access during CNN’s “American Morning with Paula Zahn”.

So who knows.

I still think we’d get a more complete picture if:

a. we could equip a corps of hardcase bloggers willing to ‘embed’ in the front lines and report live to the blogosphere everything they see, and;
b. the network for the HipTop/Sidekick thingy that Jeneane carries extended to Iraq.

Meanwhile, I also came across an interesting, earlier version of the Patrick Sloyan piece that lit my blue touch paper this time, here.

Final thoughts before (uneasy) sleep, from William Arkin, writing in the LA Times:

"Increasingly, the administration's new policy -- along with the steps senior commanders are taking to implement it -- blurs or even erases the boundaries between factual information and news, on the one hand, and public relations, propaganda and psychological warfare, on the other. And, while the policy ostensibly targets foreign enemies, its most likely victim will be the American electorate"

Times like this, it can feel kind of queasy being a flack. But it could be worse. At least I don't work here.

We can’t trust CNN this time.

From Friday’s Guardian newspaper:

"In 1991 American voters rallied behind President George Bush Sr for the seemingly bloodless confrontation with Saddam Hussein...Neatly hidden from a small army of journalists was the reality of war - a reality that can make these very same voters recoil in disapproval...

"...About 150 American journalists, photographers and film crews were scattered among attacking units. Their reports were supposed to be fed to a rear headquarters and then shared by hundreds of journalists from around the world...Not a single eyewitness account, photograph or strip of video of combat between 400,000 soldiers in the desert was produced by this battalion of professional observers.

"Cheney, brimming with contempt and hostility for the press, saw journalists as critics of the military who must be contained. "Frankly, I looked on it as a problem to be managed," he said after the war. "The information function was extraordinarily important. I did not have a lot of confidence that I could leave that to the press."

This suggests an urgent need to recruit and train an army of Iraqi bloggers, either here in the 'Free West' (*cough*), with strong connections to feet & eyes still resident in their homeland, or preferably right there in the thick of the horror.

We should arm them with satellite WiFi blogging tools and digital cameras to record and publish the unvarnished, un-CNNed truth.

Perhaps some of Ken Nichols’ “Human Shields” could be recruited to assist - to get the full, horrific graphic news out past Cheney's attempts to 'manage' the information flow. They've already got the stones to put themselves in harm's way. Asking them to document, in real time, what they witness is a logical next step.

And if we’re searching for yet another way to justify the Google/Blogger deal (Bloogle? Bloggle? Glogger?), this could be it. Ponder the combination of Google News + Blogger in a situation like this.

If any communications channel holds the potential to carry the full and complete truth, it's the blogosphere, in all its uncensored glory.

Assuming, of course, that the content at source can be identified and streamed in without interference from either end of the “nexus of terror” that starts in DC and ends in Baghdad.

Think about it: this could become an infinitely more powerful source of real frontline reporting than CNN could ever be. (That's 'reporting', not necessarily 'journalism', btw - I'm not getting into that debate here).

Perhaps verifiably Iraqi blogger Salam Pax could be persuaded to weigh in on this one...

And perhaps Doc could be persuaded to donate the balance of his Chris Pirillo laptop fund to purchase a robust digital camera and deliver it to Salam, or one of his countrymen willing to venture into the combat zone, in the interests of securing at least one unfiltered feed live from the coming obscenity...

What's Left?

"The left is not a word that you mention in polite company here" Karen Rothmeyer, editor of the Nation, quoted in “Left over?” a piece by Gary Younge in yesterday’s Guardian.

“The left in America was once a powerful force that fought for civil rights and helped to end the Vietnam war. But today, with the US poised to attack Iraq, where are the voices of dissent?

“You can tell a lot about what is on a nation's mind from what is on its bookshelves. And in America that makes for sobering news. The top five non-fiction titles on the New York Times bestsellers list at the end of last month were: 1) Bush at War; 2) The Right Man (Bush's former speechwriter relives his first year in the White House); 3) Portrait of a Killer (Patricia Cornwell on Jack the Ripper); 4) The Savage Nation (A rightwing radio talk show host saves America from "the liberal assault on our borders, language and culture); and 5) Leadership, by former Republican New York mayor, Rudolph Giuliani.”

Depressing.

Is Canada any better off? The Globe’s top five non-fiction titles at the moment are:

1. Stupid White Men by Michael Moore
2. Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan
3. Journals by Kurt Cobain (!)
4. Leadership by Rudolph W. Giuliani
5. 9-11 by Noam Chomsky

Which seems promising – Moore and Chomsky (and Cobain!) beating out Frum’s “The Right Man” (at #7) and Woodward’s “Bush at War” (#9). And Naomi’s globalization piece in at #10.

But where are our strong left voices? And leaders?

Jack Layton...?

“We believe a war in Iraq is wrong and on Saturday, will stand with the world’s growing peace movement,” said Layton. “To George Bush, I say read our lips: Your daddy was wrong on Iraq and you are, too.”

Fighting words. Certainly not something one can ever imagine Chretien saying. So, maybe it’s Jack...but I’m finding it hard to convince myself. What am I missing?

Could be worse, mind you. At times like this I find solace in the thought that if we'd stayed in the UK instead of moving here, we'd probably be feeling really guilty right now about having voted for Blair and his Third Way...

GULF WARS - Episode II: Clone of the Attack



Evidence that, every now and then, MAD Magazine can still pull one off...

The most beautiful poem in the English language

Unto us another sprog is blogged

Sincere and hearty congratulations to Ben and Tempe Vierck on the long-awaited birth of their baby Rebecca.

Web chat 911 saves life

As an antidote to the dreadfully sad story blogged by Jeneane about the live online death of Brandon Vedas, comes this remarkable story of Darlene Laurie, net-savvy grandmother who suffered a minor stroke whilst chatting online and was rescued as a result of people in 10 states of the US working together to track down her address and alert the RCMP.

From today's Globe & Mail:

"Someone in Pennsylvania had a phone number for Ms. Laurie; someone in Connecticut had an address. Someone in Kennewick, Wash., contacted the RCMP in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby.

The police sent a patrol car to Ms. Laurie's home and, after receiving no response, the Mounties forced their way in.

Less than two hours after she lost consciousness, Ms. Laurie, who is housebound with an autoimmune disease that is progressively damaging her eyes, kidney and heart, was under medical care at a local hospital for a minor stroke.

A lot of people dismiss a computer as an impersonal machine, Ms Laurie said yesterday in an interview. "It is not. There are real feelings in there."

That's it. A Small Piece, Loosely Joined - kept alive by the connections.

Intranet Comms Strategy Coda

Forgot to mention: anyone who was actually at the conference for this session on Monday, and has any thoughts, feedback, criticism or suggestions - please let me know. You can click on that 'comments' thingy just below, or email me.

Ta.

Intranet Communications Strategy

Well, 'tis done. And could not have been done without the assistance of all of you who sent messages, left comments or, in one case, sent through entire draft presentations (!)

Thanks to everyone for responding with ideas, encouragement, research materials and suggestions.

Thanks in particular to Jeneane Sessum - for support above and way beyond the call of duty. Jeneane loaded up the comment box and my email inbox with splendid, targeted, interesting and really useful content. Jeneane – you are the best.

For the record, Jeneane and I work for competitive PR agencies: yet she went out of her way to offer the advice, research materials and insights I needed to get this thing done. She's one of the very few people in this world with whom, if I had to, I would be confident heading off to war. And I've never met her - never even spoken to her on the phone. Proof yet again that the power of the blog is mightier than the mere pen. Or something.

My pitch actually seemed to go down remarkably well too, I'm more than a little surprised to say. Helped that we had a pretty receptive, post-lunch audience - much warm chortling at my lame jokes and self-referential silliness.

FWIW, I tried to centre my presentation around the one fairly simple idea that real intranet success comes from a willing devolution of ownership to the user community.

Seems to me that the question of who 'owns' a corporate intranet is one of the most interesting and useful discussions in this broad topic. I know I didn't have enough prep time to really do this justice, and left numerous gaping holes and inconsistencies in this hastily constructed thesis; but as I took pains to point out the gaps in my thinking, I hope not too many people felt cheated by my lack of preparation. (Heck - I had a pretty good excuse).

As you might expect, I even managed to weave in some discussion of blogging as a potential means to foster personal expression and individual ownership of valuable, opinionated content as sidebars to the main corporate communications function of a healthy intranet.

I went with a wishful thinking approach - "wouldn't it be great if individuals' personal web spaces were accepted and promoted as valuable in their own right as parallel streams to the main intranet?" Didn't have time to turn up a real world example of this thinking in action - but I'm sure there are a few companies out there experimenting with the idea. Cisco was toying with it for a while – not sure how far that went.

I cited Weinberger too, of course. I realised that many of the key questions concerning a solid intranet strategy are the very same questions one asks in building a knowledge management plan.

Well, duh.

So some of the ideas in my pitch sprang directly from old discussions with pre-Cluetrain David (back when he and I were briefly competitors - in his days at Open Text and mine at PC DOCS), and from work we did together trying to synthesise a coherent KM vision for the merged PC DOCS/Fulcrum company.

I also really liked, and used, the suggestion from Rikard Linde in Sweden, which I paraphrased as “Management’s Intranet Response Paradox Effect (…paradigm…thing)”

The dilemma, as Rikard sets it up, is this:

1. Management builds systems to change (‘improve’, ‘streamline’) the behaviour of their employees.
2. Employees like new tools they can use without changing working habits.

This seems to me to ring manifestly true. Thank you, Rikard – I gave you full credit for this idea in my pitch. (I'm really enjoying reading the articles at Rikard's blog, btw - smart, smart guy with a great turn of phrase).

Reaching back again to some old DOCS/Fulcrum thoughts, here’s how it played out:

The User Perspective: “All I want from the intranet:”

Make my life simpler:
- I don’t want to remember where to find things
- I don’t want to want to remember where to put things
- Keep me in the know with the right people

Make sure my contributions are:
- Meaningful to the organization
- Recognized appropriately
- Easy to share with others

Just let me to do my job better!

The Management Perspective: “All I want from the intranet:”

Institutionalize knowledge:
- Preserve our investment in k-workers
- Keep our IP secure in one ‘place’
- Re-use & re-purpose successful/valuable content

Manage behaviour:
- Ensure consistency & accuracy
- Reduce exposure to errors & omissions
- Reinforce standards and best practices

Just let us be seen to do our jobs better!

And therein lies much of the pain in the many intranet projects that fail to live up to expectations.

This also evokes some of that by now ancient Standish Group research about software development projects that thrive or fail. Old research, but still, IMHO, valid.

The top three reasons so many internal development projects fail:

1. Incomplete requirements
2. Lack of user involvement
3. Lack of resources

Compare that with the top three reasons some projects succeed:

1. User involvement
2. Executive management support
3. Clear statement of requirements

There was much more than this in the pitch, but there was some good stuff woven around these thoughts. Maybe I’ll get the chance to speak on this topic again some time soon – which would give me the impetus to refine and finish the argument and close up some of those truck-wide gaps.

Thanks again to all who helped.

And apologies also to today’s audience for my being so poorly prepared. I know you paid good money for this conference, and I feel more than a little guilty about showing up with what was at best a scrambled together presentation. Hope it wasn’t too painful.