Ludoo

Daniele, the author of the ASP blog engine Dblog, just sent me an email to announce the release of version 2.0. Being a Unix guy (even though I work in a mainly mainframe/Windows based company) I did not know about Dblog until tonight, but as it's one of the few Open Source projects developed in Italy I feel it my duty to announce it here. I hope Scoble notices it.

Reading Clay Shirky's A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy this morning for my proposal (BTW Ross, sorry for being late in replying to your thoughtful email, will do it soon), I was struck by how well Weblogs Inc's Star System implements three of Shirky's Four Things to Design For in Social Software:

The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in.

Second, you have to design a way for there to be members in good standing. [...] Have to design some way in which good works get recognized.

Three, you need barriers to participation.

WI's Star System has been running on a few of their blogs for the past couple of weeks, and it's a reputation system built on top of their readers' comments:

• users are identified (and comments approved) using their email addresses
• good comments have scores, and the system tracks and displays members with the highest score
• comments are approved only if the user's address is valid, by clicking on the comment approval link sent by email

The benefits for good commenters are not only in seeing their nickname listed in the blog's sidebar: if they provide a personal URL their nickname points to it with a link that shold bring some traffic (especially from the big blog like Engadget or Autoblog) and, missing the rel="nofollow" attribute, gives them ranking and linking status in search engines.

Jason is a not only a very smart businessman, but a real innovator. Now off to lunch. Update: Jason linked to this post.

Nick Denton's New York Times interview mentioned today by Scoble gives me the occasion to write a few thoughts I have been ruminating after LesBlogs, which I have been discussing for the past week or so with David Tebbutt in an ongoing email exchange.

Is there a "blogging revolution"? Yes, despite what Denton says to the NYT reporter. But the revolution is over, what we are seeing now is its secularization. A few things struck me at LesBlogs, all distinctive characteristics of revolutionary movements that, having exhausted their innovative charge, turn themselves into institutions:

1. the emergence of a new, self-referential establishment with its periphery of sycophants and wannabes (including myself probably)
2. the superficiality and repetivity of many discussions, which showed a suspect resemblance to a political party's official doctrine (or a large company's vision)
3. the feel that much of what was being said was for the benefit of potential customers, or of the many journalists attending the conference

It's very clear to me that a new hierarchy/power structure has emerged, with lots of capital at its disposal with which to fuel enough hype to try and push social software in the enterprise. It won't be long before we see CEOs and top managers falling for the new buzzwords, and forcing blogs/wiki/etc, onto their users and IT departments, without having a clue what they're about.

As for LesBlogs, I have finally understood why Dave Winer insists that BloggerCon remains a users' conference...

Constantin sent me a few selected Internal Business Blogs resources to aid with my project.

Even though they are all quite dated, they are very interesting given the scarcity of literature on what is going on behind the corporate firewalls. If you are interested in Corporate Blogging they may be worth a look.

It may be the first time an Italian blog makes the headlines in national news. Gianluca Neri, the host of the popular group blog Macchianera, has published today the full "declassified" text of the US report on Calipari's death in Baghdad. Gianluca has been the first to notice that the Acrobat file of the report distributed to the press was not encrypted, and had basic editing operations still enabled. Copying the text and pasting it a new file allowed him to restore the full text, circumventing the black mask applied to classified parts. The news is making the rounds of all national newspapers and TV stations. A commented timeline of the events (in italian) on Webgol. Bravo Gianluca.

I am still working on the Corporate Blogging brief I have to present to the head of our organizational unit. I had a look at a few resources mentioned on Constantin's extensive NewPRWiki, but the vast majority of them deal with external corporate blogs, which we are not yet ready to tackle. The most relevant resource I could find is the audio from Euan Semple's presentation at LesBlogs, and it's a bit ironic that I had to listen to it at home even though I was there, and had Euan seated on my right at the speakers' dinner. Guess I was too busy meeting people and worrying about my panel to be really interested in Euan's experience, since I only asked him a question about corporate politics in their blogs which he did not like too much and to which he gave me a half-answer.

Unfortunately I do not think we can follow the same bottom-up approach that has worked for the BBC, as we are a larger, more hyerarchical, less creative, and much much more conservative institution. People here tend to stick to an established routine and to use well known tools and practices, even outside the office when surfing the web at home (if they do it at all). So to be of any interest and attract a sufficient number of users, our internal blogs must either offer a valuable service, or serve as a direct communication channel with the upper management so that people will use it as yet another tool in their corporate politics arsenal.

It may be ugly, but I do not see other ways of introducing blogging here. If I can get the top management to adopt internal group blogs (what Fredrik Wackå calls Knowledge Blogs) as a way of efficiently communicating with their units, and people to read and comment on those blogs so as not to miss an opportunity to show off in front of their bosses and to have they voice heard, I'm pretty sure we will later be able to adopt other forms of internal blogs like "project blogs". And maybe start using news readers, and aggregating on the blogs data coming from various enterprise repositories.

Am I totally off the mark? Is there anything I'm missing?

Back from LesBlogs, I finally decided to write to the top manager in charge of my organizational unit to try and sell him on the corporate blog thing. It turns out he knows a bit about blogging (one of the things that made me write to him is his tech-savyness), and he asked me to put down a brief on possible internal uses of blogging and discuss it with him. Which would be a good thing if we were a tech company, possibly located in a more technologically inclined country, instead of a huge old-economy institution in Italy.

Blogging requires a change of mindset from the usual corporate apathetic routine, and pays off in proportion to the efforts that go into it. We will see, for now I am writing my brief and collecting resources on Internal Corporate Blogging, most of which come from Ross Mayfield, which seen from a distance a few days ago in Paris seemed to be one of the brightest of the a-listers.