Blogging as Pinball

23.01.05

At BlogWalk in Chicago this weekend, the question was discussed how to convince a corporation of blogging. I think there are two major directions of emphasis.

• The more social aspect of conversations and reflecting the organization's culture. A lot of possible resistance was discussed, and I am sure that, in technical environments I am used to, this sort of evangelism would not be successful.

• The other line of arguments is the added value for knowledge management, filtering and reflecting new relevant information for the intranet, leveraging both the new channels of personal trust and the serendipitious blend of push and pull flow.

  I would also emphasize that blogging must remain optional because its work style may not suit everyone, but it will probably suit more occasions, including incremental reflection of non-finished remarks, for more indeterminate audiences than email targets, and with less intrusiveness or flow-breaking than email notification. R. MacManus predicts even more interesting future usage of RSS, other than conversations.

The conversation aspect of the blogoshpere is also a very fascinating, but IMO secondary, phenomenon associated with the blog's new sort of information flow: if you picture the latter as the path of a ball in the pinball game, the conversions may be seen as the ball's exciting quick moves from one bumper to another and back. But still, the game is not ping pong.

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