Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

A new Pew study reports that many many individuals are putting content on the Internet.  The study released today suggests that there is major demand among individuals for ways to put content on the web.

In my view, this is bullish for mainstreaming personal publishing and blogging–that is, for “crossing the chasm.”

And wow, talk about the spin added by the mainstream media.  I just posted a note based on the AP summary of the study. The AP summary was titled “Study: Blogging Still Infrequent” but the actual Pew study emphasizes the amazing degree to which individuals contribute content to the web, and the many different ways that individuals do so. 

The Pew study is quite bullish on personal content publishing–which is the essence of the blogging movement.

Below, fyi, is a direct pointer to the Pew study on the Pew site, as well as the verbatim summary of the study as provided by Pew.

A new Pew study of blogging, just out today and reviewed by the Associated Press here. The AP reporter emphasizes that the study shows that there are few folks blogging, but a direct look at the study indicates that it also shows that people are findging many ways to put content on the web–and that this is a major trend.

Even the AP’s limited summary highlights some intriguing findings.  Most interesting is that it reports that somewhere between two and seven percent of Internet users have blogs.  As described in the AP story, the discrepancy between two and seven is that when the main polling was conducted, in late 2003, it found the two percent figure.  When follow-up polling was conducted in 2004, it found seven percent.  Perhaps blogging is rising fast?

Second fascinating finding is that seven percent of people sampled reported that they had web-cams that let others watch them over the web.  Hmmm.  More have webcams than blogs?  Hmmm. If true, that is an interesting finding, indeed.  But it makes me wonder a bit about the Pew study..

Dave Winer did a nice thing by asking a group of non-developers who use blogging software what they would like in terms of next generation tools.
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/bloggerCon/2004/02/24#a777

Here are my thoughts:

Blogging friends,

As Geoffrey Moore (no relation, except in management thought lineage) emphasizes, products and industries often must change as they seek to “cross the chasm” from selling to early adopters to becoming part of the daily life of mainstream users.

I’d like to see millions more bloggers.

From my vantage point, blogging is facing its chasm. Despite strong absolute numbers and growth rates, our total share penetration of the computer and Internet world is tiny. For example, when I tried to find Iowa bloggers to put into BloggerStorm and Iowa Caucus News, I could only locate a few handfuls. I was in Microdesign yesterday—this is the big computer store near MIT—and there is no shrinkwrapped software that even references blogging, with the exception of Microsoft Frontpage, which does so deceptively in relation to Sharepoint.

I would like to see an all out effort to make the use of blogging software mainstream. With that in mind, here are my candidates for new developments:

Improve and simplify editing: Drag and drop posting of photos, audio/music, and video, within the basic central editor. Spell checking, thesaurus, easy posting of links. Overall, take WYSIWYG to the modern level. Current editors are a lot closer to Wordstar circa 1984 than to Microsoft Word of today.

Improve and simplify aggregating. Make aggregators available freestanding. Stop emulating complex email clients such as Outlook. Instead, build on the simple Manila-style aggregator format. Post most recent first, and display whatever a person wants in terms of headlines, summaries, and full posts.

Put development resources into ease of subscribing: auto discovery of feed urls, one-click subscribe and unsubscribe.

Improve how aggregators handle photos, audio/music, and video, especially in relation to getting content from the server to display without end-user intervention. For example. Improve auto-display and auto-run, auto-discovery of the media player being used, and auto-choice of file size/compression.

Put more effort into evangelizing blogging. IBM contributed a great deal to the spread of personal computing in the 80s by making available retail stores and business consultants. Blogging needs to do whatever the 2000s version of this is, in order to mainstream itself.

Finally, consider changing the name. Blogging may seem a warm and inviting term to those of us who are initiates, but I think that market research would document that the term is strange and off-putting to outsiders. Blogging, in my view, is a word that is a closer analogue to “cold, dead fish” than to “sushi.”

Best,

Jim Moore

PS: Dave has gotten great comments, many displayed at
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/bloggerCon/comments?u=bloggerCon&p=777&link=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.law.harvard.edu%2FbloggerCon%2F2004%2F02%2F24%23a777

Kos has this important post on data from mediachannel on how the media is starting to go negative on Kerry, similarly to how they did in Iowa on Dean just before the Iowa caucuses..

Jerome Amstrong insightfully points out on DailyKos
that the hitman story is the front of an expected wave.  The
so-called “527s” are now being tested as vehicles for libel and fraud:

“Sure, the 527 will be used as a means to register and turn-out voters;
but overwhelmingly, we’ll see it used for effective political “hit man”
TV advertising, negative to the hilt, all summer long until September
2nd.”

Joe Costello, former speechwriter for Howard Dean, responds to my post on should political libel and fraud be crimes:

The question of political libel is extremely problematic. Simply, one cannot
have the government be the judge of political speech.

The biggest reason negative campaigning and innuendo works so well in this age
is the complete decimation of old political structures or associations. Modern
politics has become a despicable alliance of big money, powerful corporate
media, and a mercenary professional political caste.

There are no longer party organizations or any political associations that vet
candidates and create strong allegiances that would hold up to negative
attacks.

In the old days, candidates at local and state levels were promoted through
party and other political structures. They were given endorsements by these
organizations and thus gained legitimacy. In most cases, the organizations had
more legitimacy than any specific candidate. When attacks came, the
organizations could vouch for the candidate and they could better withstand the
blows.

Also, when there were actual party organizations, which stood for something,
once you had the party’s backing, people could better look past the human
foibles because they believed the candidate stood for a larger political
agenda. For example, the political association created by the Dean campaign
held up against the onslaught and amazingly collected another 9 million dollars
at the height of the attacks.

Today, the only initial vetting process to running for office is whether the
candidate can fund their campaign. In modern campaigns, if the money can be
had, a candidate can rise from relative obscurity and gain recognition.
However, this recognition can be relatively thin and thus when attacked and
muddied, a new candidate can quickly fall, because there is no underlying
political associations to defend them or provide greater legitimacy.

Understand that John Kerry faces the same problem right now and will be open to
a tremendous onslaught by Bush. This will be from both sides one of the
dirtiest and foulest campaigns in American history.

Having been through the Dean campaign, everyone has also witnessed the abysmal
role of the national corporate media. They believe it is their role to pick a
candidate. They focus on process and scandal but not on issues. They’re own
vested power interests go unchecked and unbalanced.

The rotted and corrupt political process we now have has evolved over the last
forty years. Its technological foundation is broadcast television. The net and
other technologies allow us the opportunity to restore a healthy politics not
through libel laws, but by building new information channels and creating new
vibrant political associations – that’s the hope, that’s the challenge.

Emergent democracy is a precious, fragile thing.  It needs to be
protected from assaults, especially those that rise to the level of
crimality:  Libel, fraud, extortion.  Without legal
protections, our newly sprouting digital democratic
processes will be stamped out before they can flower.

This vulnerability to oppression exists in third world countries–and
it exists in more subtle but also more powerful forms in the United
States, Japan, and Europe–and in all other nations on earth.

In the normal, everyday world we recognize certain kinds of behavior as
criminally damaging to individuals and to society.  Libel and
fraud are among the most pernicious of actions.  A person’s career
and contributions is undermined by libel in an near
instant.   The fundamental trust necessary for personal
relationships and commerce is profoundly shaken by fraud.

But somehow in media space, and in its subset, cyberspace, we allow
libel and fraud to go largely unaddressed.  And in the political
arena of media and cyberspace, we allow it almost unbridled freedom.

The result is a politics of libel–”negative campaigning” is the nice
word for it.  And a politics of fraud–”getting the facts wrong.”

Now, I understand that there are serious concerns about government
involvement in politics, concerns about government repression of
political speech.  But on the other hand, with little or no
government involvement, we have evolved a very damaging, unsafe,
unsatisfactory situation.  Voters are cynical, campaigns are
fundamentally libelous and fraudulent.   Honest, kind people are
driven out of the democratic process.

I think we need a serious national debate about crimes in the political
arena.  I think we need to consider how we might define crimes,
and enforce the law in this sphere.  And we need to start this debate now–before this summer’s campaigning.

I don’t think watchdog groups
and citizen action can hold the line anymore–particularly not with the
speed and micro-targeting of new forms of media.  The candidates
have “rapid response networks” but these don’t seem to be doing the
job.  Push-polling,
for example, targets individual voters for phone calls that seem like
unbiased polls, but the “polls” are designed to sew doubts about
particular
candidates.  Many believe that push polls were used against Howard
Dean in Iowa, but the allegation is very hard to investigate, much less
to prove. 

Even television ads, when used in negative, targeted ways by disguised
third parties
hits fast, hard, and is very difficult to detect and counter. 
This, of course, is the nature of libel in the everyday world. 
For example, the intent of the
notorious Osama television ad (view the ad here) is only now being fully understood because its
perpetrator has decided to brag about his prowess.  This situation
illustrates both the stealth nature of these abuses, and the brazen
stance of the abusers. The abusers are more likely to gain accolades
(e.g. speak at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard) than to be
criticised or charged with a crime.  And yet almost any observer
recognizes the harm caused to individuals and society by these forms of abuse.

This piece by Gladwell is getting a lot of links, and it deserves them.  It is a classic of reporting, analysis, and insight.

The subtext of this article about Detroit and cars and psychology and
safety is that we are creating a more and more deeply irrational
society, with our industries pandering to our lowest instincts
(literally reptilean) and allowing us to pull ourselves down a rathole.

Hey, how come a famous author gets more famous–deservedly–by writing
like this, and our presidential candidates avoid all of these sorts of
issues?  What’s wrong with them?

Oh, yea, winning elections is about getting the support of big numbers
and large percentages of the society.  The same folks who buy the
stupid trucks that Gladwell is writing about, determine who will win
elections.

And success as an author like Gladwell is garnered by having a large
(think: critical mass) of readers who are passionate about your
issues.   But it does not depend upon your percentage of the
total electorate.  Gladwell is not competing against People
Magazine, or even Time, for market share.

So what we all see now is the political challenge of mobilizing a core
of thoughtful folks, and empowering them to the extent that they can
then enlist (or overcome) others who are not paying the same kind of
attention.

But is this the right way to see the problem?  Hmmmm.  Not sure…….

LaGuardia, the Story*

Some nights I make a killer pot of coffee —

I put on the music that I love,

and dance. Sometimes I dance for hours.

Go to your phonograph. Put on

Brandenburg Concerto Number Six.

This is about something very hard.

– This is about trying to live with that music

playing in the back of your mind.

– About trying to live in a world

with that kind of music.

           
           
           
           
    *a poem by Jane Mead