“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:
“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.
“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
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).
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.”