Blogging

True story: At the height of the dot com years a friend fell in with the New Jersey punk scene. About the same time, the punk scene discovered blogging. Punks blogged about all sorts of things, but mostly they blogged about each other. It was lively and scurrilous and probably libelous; and like watching a slow motion cat fight, it was utterly gripping. Until it became hard work to read.

Following any particular conversation involved jumping between a dozen different blogs, chasing it through posts and comments from at least as many actors. It made me wonder why the punks didn’t just use a forum instead, but I was missing the point. The culture of the crowd was self-expression; forums tend to be topic-centric, blogs are people-centric. Whilst a forum would have been more efficient, it made much more cultural sense for the conversations to happen via blog posts and comments.

Collaboration tools are not all alike, and often approach the same ground from very different starting points (usually reflecting the heritage of their makers); some focus on people, some on files, some on converations, some on project management. All are perfectly valid approaches.

For communicators embarking upon the journey towards Enterprise 2.0 I think the blogging punks can offer us an interesting lesson: that a tool which is culturally aligned with a group has as good a chance of success (if not better) than one which meets all the requirements on paper but is somehow alien.