Archive for the 'Weblogs' Category
May 15, 2007
The Only Interesting Use of Twitter I Have Seen
Adrian Bye went to Cuba and twittered from within the revolution. He is back home now but it was fascinating to read his miniature travelogue while he explored the island. Adrian couldn’t receive calls or texts while he was in Cuba, so he had no idea how many people might be reading his twitter posts.
Adrian is now posting several long entries in his blog about his experience in Cuba. Definitely worth checking out to hear his first hand account of what life in Cuba is like today.
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May 4, 2007
Blog Legal Issues
Here is a good resource making the rounds this week: Blog Law » 12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know. This covers the major legal issues for anyone running or thinking about starting a weblog. As always, you should consult your own legal counsel, but this will get you started and help you to push back on overly defensive lawyers.
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April 2, 2007
Notcasting: What Not to Do on Your Podcast
Paul Bissex has posted a great list of things not to do on your podcast:
- I Must Apologize for the Terrible Sound Quality of the Last Podcast
- I Must Apologize for the Terrible Sound Quality of the Present Podcast
- I Must Apologize for Not Making a Podcast in Several Days/Weeks/Months
- Thank You for All Your Emails Telling Me What I’m Doing Wrong
- I Need to Speak Very Quietly, My (Mom|Dad|Girlfriend|Ferret) is Sleeping
- There Is a Very Exciting Thing Coming at the End of This Podcast But I Won’t Tell You What It Is
- We Only Have One Microphone for the Three of Us
- We Are Laughing About This Thing, Ha Ha, You Kind of Had to Be There
- I Had Big Plans for This Episode But They Just Didn’t Work Out
- Please Listen to My Next Podcast, It Will Be Better Than This One I Promise
No one cares about any of that! Just do your best and be interesting. This is important because it is functionally impossible to skim a podcast as you can with text.
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November 22, 2006
Third Party Comments
I’ve talked to many people at organizations where they are interested in blogging but are concerned about liability from comments posted by third parties. Here is a bit of good news on that front: Court says blogs can’t be sued for postings - USATODAY.com
Bloggers and website owners cannot be sued for posting libelous or defamatory comments written by third parties, the California Supreme Court has ruled. The court said only the original authors of comments published online can be sued.Legal analysts say the 34-page decision, issued Monday, is significant because it brings California in line with other court rulings across the nation that have upheld the 1996 federal Communications Decency Act, which protects website owners from legal liability in libel or defamation lawsuits.
“Bloggers and website owners can all breathe a very big sigh of relief,” says Gregory Herbert, an Orlando lawyer who specializes in First Amendment issues. “This decision adds more uniformity to the law and reduces the risk for liability for even individuals who are posting things onto website message boards and chat rooms.”
Associations are often concerned about anti-trust issues as well. I’m not a lawyer and do not know if this ruling would cover that kind of activity as well but it is at least a step in the right direction.
Spotted over on Gadgetopia.
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October 4, 2006
Quoted in the New York Times: Blogging the Hand That Feeds You
Last week was media week for High Context Consulting! I was quoted last Wednesday in an article on blogging about work in the Times Circuits section: Blogging the Hand That Feeds You by Matt Villano.
Here is my bit from the end of the piece.
If it were up to corporate lawyers, the business world’s fascination with blogs would be short-lived. Daniel M. Klein, a partner at the Atlanta law firm Buckley & Klein, said that the “safest way to blog about work is not to do it,� adding that it’s “just a matter of time� before some of the biggest companies that endorse blogging lay off employees for going too far.
Others are less skeptical. C. David Gammel, the president of High Context Consulting, a Web strategy consulting firm in Silver Spring, Md., said that employee blogs were worth encouraging, as long as companies devised individual policies about blogging and incorporated them into the employee handbook.
“Human resources departments should simply add blogging to the list of activities in which employees should be careful about how they represent the company,� he said.
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August 14, 2006
Blogs for Project Management in PM Network
I was interviewed a while back for an article in PM Network magazine about using blogs and wikis for project management. The article is out in the August issue and you can read a PDF version of it on their web site. The magazine goes out to the Project Management Institute’s 200,000 members located in 125 countries around the world.
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June 5, 2006
Customizing for New Members
Michelle Frisque is thinking and writing about how to reinvent the American Library Association as part of a pilot course about inventing Library 2.0. Every association should be so lucky as to have members like Michelle, Michael, Jenny and others who are dedicated to their profession and will blog about how the association could best serve them and their peers.
Michelle also mentioned one of my articles in another post, which made my day!
Michelle recently wrote about how the ALA web site could do a better job of serving new members:
ALA is a huge organization. I remember when I first joined I found it very confusing. How do you get involved? What is ALA doing that affects me? What will my membership in ALA do for me? How do I network? None of this is easy to find on the Web site.
Something I got from Michelle’s post is the idea of customizing your association home page for new members. Help them discover the organization by highlighting information, services and opportunities on the home page when that new member is logged in. Change it every week or every day! You can phase out the special content over time or allow the member to turn it off when they no longer need it. It should be fairly evergreen content, which is great because it is relatively easy to manage once it is developed.
A few other ideas: Provide the same content in an RSS feed! Create a serial e-mail autoresponder for new members that gives them a new tip about the association every day for two week after they join! You get the idea.
(A serial e-mail autoresponder is an e-mail announcement list where all the messages are written and queued up so that a new subscriber gets each message in order at a specified interval. These have been around a long time but I’ve never heard of an association using them, oddly enough. Seems like a natural for a lot of association promotions and content.)
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May 26, 2006
Someone You Should be Reading: John Robb
John Robb has been blogging for the past couple of years about “the intersection of terrorism, infrastructure and markets.” I’ve been following John’s stuff since he was the CEO at Userland and was leading discussions about knowledge blogging. Many of the trends he discusses about warfare and terrorism have much applicability to self-forming groups and how they may impact associations. Hopefully that won’t involve a rogue committee bombing the electrical lines to your headquarters, however.
I suggest you add his blog, Global Guerrillas, to your subscription list.
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April 24, 2006
Card Sorting: The Book
Rosenfeld Media has announced their first author (other than Lou himself): Card Sorting by Donna Maurer.
Card sorting is a technique that is used to gather user input to design the information architecture of a site. The technique is easy to prepare and run, and great fun. But sometimes the results can be hard to interpret and it is not always clear how to use them to design the IA.
This short, practical, and accessible book will provide the basics that designers need to conduct a card sort in a project. More importantly, it will explain how to understand the outcomes and apply them to the design of a site.
I use card sorting exercises with clients quite often. I’m looking forward to reading the book when it is done and hopefully participating in its creation (this is a beta book type of publishing process).
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April 15, 2006
Messaging Bloggers: Doesn’t Work
Advertising Age has a great article on why marketers must really understand blogging before they engage in that space: Resist Corrupting Blogs With Messages. Those who start sending press releases to bloggers will only incite ridicule, if anything.
So, if marketers enter the blogosphere by messaging, they will stand out like an ad on a birthday cake. Messaging simply won’t work in the blogosphere because bloggers have gotten too used to the sound of honest talk with other customers. Worse, messagers will suffer perhaps irreparable harm to their reputations. Besides, blogs are much more interesting than marketing messages.
The opportunity is not for marketers to pick off the chickens one by one but for marketers to unlearn what they have spent so long teaching themselves. The blogosphere is a vibrant human conversation. If marketers can learn to enter that conversation as humans first, talking honestly about what they care about, identifying themselves and exposing themselves, then they will be welcome in the blogosphere. But, of course, that means they cannot enter it as marketers.
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