Syndicate - Voices From Within: Harnessing the Power of the Individual

As I wrote before, I'm moderating two panels at the Syndicate conference on Wednesday. I won't be able to make it to the sessions on Tuesday, because InfoWorld is having its second SOA Executive Forum just uptown at the Parker Meridien and I'm doing the CTO Reality Check panel there.

The first Syndicate panel for me is Voices from Within: Harnessing the Power of the Individual, where I will be joined by Jon Udell, Tim Bray, and JD Lasica (congrats to JD on the release of his new book, Darknet). Below are some thoughts on where the panel might go, keeping in mind that the purpose of Syndicate according to the conference planners is "for senior publishing executives, corporate marketing professionals and related professionals (advertising, public relations, intellectual property experts) to learn about these emerging technologies [e.g. RSS, Atom, OPML, et. al.], understand the social trends driving syndication, and inform their business strategies to take advantage of new opportunities." I can't promise we'll cover all of these or that they won't change completely by the time we do our panel.

[Update: When Denise Howell linked back to this post and noted that I was going to talk about many of the issues she had been discussing, I realized that I forgot to mention that I listened to her IT Conversations podcast about corporate blogging (with guests George Lenard, Steve Rubel and Jeff Seul) for inspiration when preparing for the panel. Definitely check it out if this subject is of interest to you. Thanks, Denise!]

When and why did you start blogging? How blogging helps you in your work, helps you as a journalist / software developer / etc.

Tools of the trade: Walk us through a specific experience where you used a collection of the new tools to accomplish something important to you and your company that would not have been possible before you were blogging.

Corporate blogging policies. Tim helped draft a policy for Sun. Jon took the "just do it" approach to blogs, i.e. we gave him space on the server to move his existing blog and he started publishing to InfoWorld. Big law firms are issuing legal alerts to employers about blogging. The EFF is urging employees to blog anonymously. What is to be made of all this?

Blogging at Sun: Among large public companies, Sun seems to be uniquely blog-friendly, with the rare company President (Jonathan Schwartz) blogging regularly. Schwartz posted first in late June 2004, just weeks after Tim posted the draft of the corporate blogging policy mentioned above. What happened inside Sun between the time Tim was hired on March 15 and the time Jonathan Schwartz started blogging in June?

Criticizing one's employer in a blog. On April 22, Tim wished the "The Wrath of Heaven" upon vendors who use the word "solution" to describe "disk drives, network routers, printers, computers, or pretty well anything that contains silicon and plugs." Generic enough, but then Tim took Sun to task: ". . . I looked at our front page and it still contains four instances of that vile word “solution”, plus more in the menus, plus it infests the rest of the site like aphids on a rose-bush. Bah. Dear world, take it from me: at Sun we sell actual real computers and networks and consulting and infrastructure services and software subscriptions; you can safely ignore the marketing-speak." I'd like to hear more from Tim about how the culture at Sun developed to a point where this level of frankness was not only tolerated, but (presumably) encouraged.

Starting corporate blogging: content and tone. OK, so your company has decided that it needs to start blogging. What makes a good blog, and what type of content and tone should be avoided? To me, an example of a not-so-good corporate blog is the Google blog, which seems a little forced and disingenuous at times. On the positive side, the GM Fastlane blog can be surprisingly candid, like this recent post. There’s no denying that we’re going through some tough times right now. It seems like every day I read or hear news stories that focus on the negative. I won’t say that it’s all undeserved. However, every once in a while there’s a good news story that I wish would get a little more attention. There it is: that mix of pride and we-could-do-better feeling that real employees of real companies seem to share.

Grassroots media: What can businesses learn from the kind of grassroots efforts we are seeing via sites like Ourmedia?

Wikipedia: This panel is about harnessing the power of the individual, and Wikipedia is a unique phenomenon in this regard. Why is Wikipedia significant to this audience?

Blogs as recruiting tools: Finding talent is as difficult as ever. How have you used blogs to help your company attract employees, evaluate business partners, etc.?

What are your 2-3 favorite blogs and why? What companies are doing a good job in respect to employee blogs?

If anyone has any thoughts on these topics, wants to shoot them down or add your own, send them my way. (chad_dickerson at infoworld dot com).

Posted by Chad Dickerson at May 16, 2005 10:50 PM