In the early days of the personal computer revolution there were “evangelists” at every turn, and evangelist was a well-understood and respected role. The most famous was Guy Kawasaki, whose title at Apple was “Chief Evangelist.”
The goal of the personal computer evangelist was simple: Get more people in your company, neighborhood, social set, and family using personal computers. This goal was highly achievable, as personal computers became readily available. It was a measureable goal, the best measure being “number of users added,” and in many companies and schools large numbers of new users were added.
At Harvard Business School, where I worked at the time, a revolution was started by providing all incoming MBA students with compatible personal computers, in 1984/85. Soon other business schools followed.
Imho, it would be quite interesting to do the same thing with blogs at Harvard Business School in 2005/06.
Now why am I ruminating on this ancient history? Because the gating issue today for the second superpower, for citizen journalism, and for the spread of personal expression and personal syndication is still a lack of content in many arenas of knowledge, particularly outside of the US, UK, and Japan.
And for this we need more evangelists. Dave Winer has been a model of this, of course, touring around the country in his van, spreading blogging to various centers of knowledge, including our own Harvard program. But he can’t do it alone.
More than a year ago at BloggerCon a number of us agreed to focus on getting blogging going on, and in, countries around the world. Britt Blaser challenged members of the group to pick a country and focus on it. This led some of us to start Sudan: The Passion of the Present; as well, Rebecca McKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman, convenors of the session, have made Global Voices into a phenomenon.
But we need more. We need to have dedicated, skilled evangelists pushing blogging into every knowledge space that exists. We need evangelists to find ways to inspire and encourage new bloggers, to bring them relevant traffic, good tools, and help them develop their online communities. And we need companies and wealthy individuals to support the evangelist corp. This initiative is critical to the expansion of the new communication and knowledge ecosystem enabled by blogging and RSS.