Tag Archives: Doc Searls

Blogging isn’t a business

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Doc Searls was one of several blogger biggies taking part in BloggerCon IV (“Celebrating the art and science of weblogs”), this weekend in San Francisco. Looks like all of the sessions are available as MP3 downloads and I’m looking forward to the one titled “Making Money.” Doc’s take on blogging and business makes a lot of sense to me:

First, blogging isn’t a business, any more than emailing or phoning are businesses. It is, however, becoming more important to many businesses. And to the nonbusiness lives of millions. This is an example of what I call The Because Effect. In the Making Money session yesterday, John Palfrey called this “making money Off blogging” (“as opposed to making money by blogging”).

Mark Cuban on cursing

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“I like to curse. I like to curse because I enjoy how it gets everyone in an uproar. I won’t curse in an environment where I have accepted an invitation or am a guest of someone else. I will play by their rules. But if you come on my home turf and want something from me. It’s my rules.”

— Mark Cuban

Yes. Yes, indeed. And smays.com is my turf so you should expect to see a profanity or an obscenity from time to time. Please reference this post.

Who you are

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“Job titles, boxes in org charts, are so last-millennium. They are relics of an Industrial Age that was born of the doomed notion that people are best understood as cogs in corporate machines. … What matters most in the long run is who you are. Not who you work for.”

— Doc Searls on Robert Scoble’s value to Microsoft:

Retirement: Relic of the Industrial Age

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“Funny thing about getting older. Time goes faster. When you’re young you do time on the bunny slope, easing along at a slow and careful pace. Then as you grow up and become an adult, you go over to the intermediate slope, making the most of time rushing by. Not quite finally, as your dotage approaches, you move over to the black diamond slope, and you carreen downward to Certain Death. … I’m enjoying work now more than ever, running life’s slalom like a wacko skier in a Warren Miller movie. The certainty of death doesn’t bother me. If anything, it motivates me. But the word “retirement” creeps me out. It’s a relic of the Industrial Age I’ve devoted my life to ending.” — Doc Searls

Every time the idea of “retirement” comes up, I’m the only one in the room who hopes to work until the day I die. It’s comforting to know there are others out there.

Corporate blogging

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Clyde (the president/CEO of our company) popped in this morning with a page torn from the December 26, 2005 issue of Forbes. It was an article (“My Life As a Blogger”) by Rich Karlgaard, the publisher. Our CEO is not a blogger (yet) but he likes reading them and commenting.

Forbes did a cover story a couple of months ago, titled: “Attck of the Blogs” that was pretty much full of shit. So I was surprised at how clued-in Mr. Karlgaard is. He’s been blogging for a couple of months and concludes (full post):

  • Blogging is not overhyped.
  • Don’t judge blogging by the “average” blog.
  • The best bloggers write about what they know, and when the don’t know, they link to more knowledgeable sources.
  • Blogs really do threaten the mainstream media.
  • Good companies and honest businesspeople have little to fear from bloggers. Bad companies and shady dealers will get their heads handed to them in the blogosphere.

Forbes and Learfield don’t fully grok “the blogging thing” yet but they will, because they have really smart guys at the top. Which is, of course, how they got there.

Bonus link: Interesting post by Doc Searls on corporate blogging, branding, etc.

Garrison Keillor: Confessions of a Listener

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“The deregulation of radio was tough on good-neighbor radio because Clear Channel and other conglomerates were anxious to vacuum up every station in sight for fabulous sums of cash and turn them into robot repeaters. I dropped in to a broadcasting school last fall and saw kids being trained for radio careers as if radio were a branch of computer processing. They had no conception of the possibility of talking into a microphone to an audience that wants to hear what you have to say. I tried to suggest what a cheat this was, but the instructor was standing next to me. Clear Channel’s brand of robotics is not the future of broadcasting. With a whole generation turning to iPod and another generation discovering satellite radio and Internet radio, the robotic formatted-music station looks like a very marginal operation indeed. Training kids to do that is like teaching typewriter repair.

After the iPod takes half the radio audience and satellite radio subtracts half of the remainder and Internet radio gets a third of the rest and Clear Channel has to start cutting its losses and selling off frequencies, good-neighbor radio will come back. People do enjoy being spoken to by other people who are alive and who live within a few miles of you.”

— From the  The Nation (May 23) [via Doc Searls]

Podcasting: New life form

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“Podcasting is a whole new system, a whole new class of activity. It may be like radio, but we make a mistake if we understand it in terms of radio. Think of it instead as a new life form that’s native to the Net. That some of it can be leveraged, or harvested, for the radiosphere, fine. But understand that the pioneers here are blazing new trails, opening new frontiers. Not restoring old burned-out cities.”

— Doc Searls on podcasting and broadcasting

Business Week: “Blogs Will Change Your Business”

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I haven’t seen it, but Doc says it’s the cover story (May 2, 2005) in Business Week. In Blogs Will Change Your Business, Stephen Baker and Heather Green offer this warning: “Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.”

There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. Let’s assume that 99.9% are off point. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.

While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to.

The divide between the publishers and the public is collapsing. This turns mass media upside down. It creates media of the masses.

Companies over the past few centuries have gotten used to shaping their message. Now they’re losing control of it.

The dot-com era was powered by companies — complete with programmers, marketing budgets, Aeron chairs, and burn rates. The masses of bloggers, by contrast, are normal folks with computers: no budget, no business plan, no burn rate, and — that’s right — no bubble.

A prediction: Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like — you guessed it — blogs.

We’ll see. In the meantime, I’m getting a thin spot on the top of my head from people patting and smiling when I talk about blogs. I’ve bookmarked the new blog at Business Week Online(Blogspotting.net).

cc: world.

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Ian Kennedy was fortunate enough to be at the Bite blogging seminar in San Francisco this week pulled some golden nuggets from remarks by Doc Searls. I believe those that understand these ideas will thrive in the networked world, and those that do not…are fucked.

* On Blogging – email that I would write with “cc:world”
* On time it takes to blog – if you look at your email, the volume you put out in email probably exceeds what’s up on my blog.
* On marketing – it’s about conversations and not messages. Branding was a concept that P&G brought from the cattle industry. Branding is about putting out 8 boxes of soap and “singing about the difference.”
* On writing as content – John Perry Barlow once said that he never heard about content until the container business felt threatened. Once you start talking about “content” you’re already off base.
* On the Net – it’s a place, not a medium. The nodes of the net are not seperated by time or space, a blog post is immediate. You don’t send a message using “content.” You’re having a conversation in a place. You are “on the net,” you use real estate metaphors to describe the net.

As a parting thought, Doc described (paraphrasing) his life before blogging as one of, “pushing many big rocks a short way uphill” and his life now as a blogger as, “rolling many snowballs down a hill with the compelling ideas gaining mass as they roll downhill.”

“My Very Own Radio Station”

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Michael Bazeley, writing in the Mercury News (My Very Own Radio Station), does the best job of ‘splaining the podcasting thing I’ve come across:

“Thanks to a new technology called podcasting, I’ve turned my iPod into a personalized radio station, loading it with talk shows and cutting edge music that I’d never be able hear on traditional radio stations. It’s transformed my listening habits overnight. Although it’s new, I’m convinced podcasting will transform the way many people consume media, just as blogging and TiVo have. When you can program your own radio station, carry it with you anywhere and pause and restart it at will, who needs mainstream, advertising-supported broadcast radio?”

His piece quotes Doc Searls who believes:

“Podcasting will shift much of our time away from an old medium where we wait for what we might want to hear to a new medium where we choose what we want to hear, when we want to hear it, and how we want to give everybody else the option to listen to it as well.”

Hey, I’m just posting this shit so I can say I told you so.