Tag Archives: blogging

My “top 10″ 2007 blogging moments: #2

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My #2 moment has everything to do with the highs and lows of blogging…

Back on May 11th I wrote this post about a major anti-abortion rally where the rally organizers main banners had the Government of Canada trademark logo on them. My post was fairly apolitical – I considered it merely interesting that the banners were using the logo (which requires Treasury Board’s consent) and so wondering if the Government was either directly funding or endorsing the march (5 Conservative Ministers did participate in the rally).

Several anti-abortion sites started linking to my site and numerous comments were posted outlining the legality of the logo’s use (thank you Tina P.) As a result of the growing online debate the Canadian Press wrote a story about it which the Globe and Mail picked up on and published. This in turn caused Treasury Board  to launch an investigation into the use of the logo which has so far resulted in the Campaign Life Coalition having to put the banners in the closet.

So the cool part about this story is that a humble blog post can end up being picked up the blogosphere, and then by a newswire, which can then land the story in the national newspaper. Hardly a new event, but cool when you are the instigator.

But here is the frustrating part. The Canadian Press story and the Globe and Mail story (now hidden by the G&M’s silly firewall) both reference anonymous “bloggers” in their stories. The Globe and Mail ran this version:

A photo of the banner has been circulating on the Internet since last week, with bloggers using it to suggest that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Tories appeared to be funding anti-abortion groups when they’ve cut funding for women’s equality programs.

In this version bloggers are made to be part of the story, not its source. While some bloggers were part of the story it was a blogger who picked up the story. If what I’d written had been on the Vancouver Sun’s webpage then journalism etiquette would have dictated that the Globe reference the source. Somehow however, when a blogger is the source, this etiquette goes out the window. One can’t help but infer that this choice springs from traditional media’s contempt for new media in general and bloggers in particular.

So the cool part – the post generated some interesting press.

The uncool part – Canada’s traditional media still doesn’t understand the internet. While they accuse bloggers of being leechers of their content – they do the reverse as well, leeching ideas and discoveries of those who blog without referencing the source. At least (good) bloggers hyperlink to the articles and sources in their posts.

However, for both reasons it was a cool moment for me in blogging – a window into the problems and opportunities of new media in an old media world – which is why it makes number 2 on the list.

My "top 10" 2007 blogging moments: #3

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I’m invited to the June 2007 Executive Summit conference in Montebello to give a keynote on Gen X, Gen Y, Web 2.0 and the challenges of public service sector renewal. This is where Treasury Board gathers the CIO’s and other key IT people from across government.

After my presentation I end up in discussions with various friendly and engaging public servants. During one conversation a senior public servant challenges the notion that any government service – especially critical ones – could ever adopt the principles or ideas used by open source, or even Web 2.0 technologies. After all, he notes, we can’t rely on people, that’s why they pay taxes, so they can rely on government. This subject being a passion of mine we end up in a mini-debate during which he demands an example of an open system presently being used by government.

I ask him for a few hours and promise to blog my response.

Turns out one of the the most critical systems of our infrastructure – one that citizens expect to protect and save them from a variety of problems on a daily basis – is almost entirely dependent on a open system to deploy and allocate its resources with pinpoint accuracy. Is the entire system open source? No. But a critical component is. (Hint, it’s probably the one phone number we all know).

My “top 10″ 2007 blogging moments: #4

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July of 2007 – the 10th anniversary of blogging comes and goes and no one in the Canadian media notices. Of course given that the traditional media spent as much of 1994 to mid-2007 as they could ignoring the internet, this should surprise no one.

So Taylor and I take matters into our own hands and publish this opinion piece in the Toronto Star where we try to reign in technophiles’ overhyped promise of a coming blogosphere instigated social media utopia while at the same time hammering at the Andrew Keen like technophobes who see only doom and gloom.

My “top 10″ 2007 blogging moments: #5

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I commit in the autumn to write posts 4 out of every 5 business days and succeed more weeks than not.

So why make this a top 10 blogging moment?

Well, I made the commitment in part because I was (re)inspired by this great story told by Brad Isaac about his brief encounter with Jerry Seinfeld. While I encourage everyone to check out the link the most relevant part is this:

I (Brad) had to ask Seinfeld if he had any tips for a young comic. What he told me was something that would benefit me a lifetime…

He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. But his advice was better than that. He had a gem of a leverage technique he used on himself and you can use it to motivate yourself—even when you don’t feel like it.

Anyone reading this blog will know that the most humourous things found in my posts tend to be my gaffs and typos. However, the Seinfeld story resonates with me and, from time to time, it is important I remember why I started this forum: to improve my writing and encourage a community of peers to push me on my thinking. It’s why, long before I’d read the Seinfeld, I subtitled this blog – “If writing is a muscle, this is my gym.”

The simple fact is, I find writing hard. But this blog – and its readers – give me motivation to write something almost every day. Often this may mean it’s 2am before I’m finally logging into wordpress to bang out a post – but the internal drive and the external expectations (real or imagined) I suspect some loyal readers have is, I believe, making me a better writer.

So, with that said, I’m a) saying thank you to anyone who’s ever emailed me or commented on my blog; and b) I’m getting back to my roots. I’m resurrecting my blog’s old tag line.

Writing is a muscle. And this is my gym.

My “top 10″ 2007 blogging moments: #7

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What a lot of anti-bloggers and technophobes don’t understand is that blogging becomes fun because of the sense of community it cultivates. People end up reading, linking and sharing blogs for all sorts of reasons: they find common cause, interests or values or maybe they think someone is smart, or fun or insightful. In short, a blog can lead people to connect, enabling them to exchange ideas and/or just get to know one another. Whatever David Suzuki may say, this is a real community.

Better still. while sometimes this community is online (more on that later), sometimes it transcends into real life. I’ve made this easier by posting my physical location in the right hand column of my blog (a hack I’m pretty proud of) (For those interested, I also use dopplr). Often friends refer to this to find out if and when I’ll be in town. A highlight reel moment though was when fellow blogger, ex-pat Canadian and open source fan Harley Young – who’s emailed me about some of my work and whose blog I visit – noticed we we’re both in Chicago and suggested we grab dinner. How 21st century…

While I started to blog in order to practice writing, probably the biggest unforseen benefit has been all the people its enabled me to meet – virtually and in reality.

My “top 10″ 2007 blogging moments: #8

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Since it’s the holidays and everybody’s too busy shopping and seeing friends to read blogs – my meta posts will continue! Always nice to take stock.

Blogging moment number 8…

After reading a Globe and Mail report in which Harper mocks the Liberals for caring “too much” about the welfare of imprisoned Taliban insurgents I threw the paper down in disgust and banged out this blog post in literally 15 minutes. Four days later, the Star agreed to publish it as an opinion piece.

Here is the cool part:

For the first time in my life, something I wrote as a blog post gets published as opposed to something I published getting cross posted to my blog.

“If writing is a muscle, this is my gym.”

Op-Ed in Yesterday's Toronto Star

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Taylor Owen and I published this piece in the Toronto Star on the 10th anniversary of blogging and its impact on news media. (PDF version here)

Blogosphere at age 10 is improving journalism
Jul 30, 2007 04:30 AM
David Eaves & Taylor Owen

Although hard to believe, this month marks the 10th anniversary of blogging, a method for regularly publishing content online.

And what a milestone it is. A recent census of “the blogosphere” counted more than 70 million blogs covering an unimaginable array of topics.

Moreover, every day an astounding 120,000 new blogs are created and 1.5 million new posts are published (about 17 posts per second). Never before have so many contributed so much to our media landscape.

Despite this exponential growth, blogging continues to be misunderstood by both technophiles and technophobes. For the past decade the former have maintained that blogs will replace traditional journalism, ushering in an era of citizen-run media. Conversely, the latter have argued that a wave of amateurs threatens the quality and integrity of journalism – and possibly even democracy.

Both are wrong.

Blogging is not a substitute for journalism. If anything, this past decade shows that blogging and journalism are symbiotic – to the benefit of everyone.

To its many ardent advocates, blogging is displacing traditional journalism. But journalism – unlike blogging – is a practice with a particular set of norms and structures that guide the creation of content. Blogging, despite its unique properties (virtually anyone can reach a potentially enormous audience at little cost), has few, if any norms.

Consider another, more established medium. Books enable various practices, such as fiction, poetry, science and sometimes journalism, to be disseminated. Do books pose a threat to journalism? Of course not. They do the opposite. Journalistic books, like blogs, increase interest in the subjects they tackle and so promote further media consumption.

The same market forces that apply to books and newspapers apply to blogs.

Readers will judge and elect to read based on the same standard: Does it inform, is it well researched and does it add value?

Because blogs are cheaper to maintain they will always be numerous, but this makes them neither unique nor more likely to be read regularly.

Ultimately blogs, like books, don’t replace journalism; they simply provide another medium for its dissemination and consumption.

If technophiles mistakenly claim that blogging competes with – and will ultimately replace – traditional journalism, then technophobes’ fear of being swept away by a tsunami of irrelevant and amateurish blogs is equally misplaced.

Traditionalists’ concern with blogging is rooted in the fact that the average blog is of questionable quality. Ask anyone who has looked, and cringed, at a friend’s blog.

But this conclusion is based on a flawed understanding of how people use the Internet. The Internet’s most powerful property is its capacity to connect users quickly to exactly what they are looking for, including high-quality writing on any subject.

This accounts for the tremendous amount of traffic high-quality blogs receive and explains why these bloggers are print journalists’ true competition. As technology expert Paul Graham argues: “Those in the print media who dismiss online writing because of its low average quality miss the point. No one reads the average blog.”

Once this capability of the Internet is taken into account, the significance of blogging shifts. Imagine that only 5 per cent – or 75,000 – of daily posts are journalistic in content, and that only 1 per cent of these are of high quality. That still leaves 750 high-quality posts published every day.

Even by this conservative assessment, the blogo- sphere still yields a quantity of content that can challenge the world’s best newspapers.

In addition, as a wider range of writers and citizens try blogging, the diversity and quantity of high-quality blogs will continue to increase. Currently, the number of blogs doubles every 300 days. Consequently, the situation is going to get much worse, or depending on your perspective, much better.

As bloggers continue to gain tangible influence in public debates, our understanding of this phenomenon will mature.

And this past decade should serve as a good guide. Contrary to the predictions of both champions and skeptics, blogging has neither displaced nor debased the practice of journalism. If anything, it has made journalism more accurate, democratic and widely read.

Let’s hope blogging’s next decade will be as positive and transformative as the first.

The Trust Economy (or, on why Gen Yers don't trust anyone, except Jon Stewart)

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I was listening to Dr. Moira Gunn’s podcast interview of Andrew Keen – author of “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture” – and was struck not only by how Keen’s arguments ate themselves, but how he failed to grasp the internet’s emerging trust economy.

Keen is the new internet contrarian. He argues that the anonymous nature of the internet makes it impossible to trust what anyone says. For example: How do you know this blog really is written by David Eaves? And who is David Eaves? Is he even real? And why should you trust him?

According to Keen, the internet’s “cult of anonymity” creates a low-trust environment rife with lies and spin. But the real problem is how this erosion of trust is spilling over and negatively impacting the credibility of “old media” institutions such as newspapers, news television, movie studies, record labels, and publishing houses. With fewer people trusting – and thus consuming – their products, the traditional “trustworthy” institutions are going out of business and leaving the public with fewer reliable news sources.

Let’s put aside the fact that the decline of deference to authority set in long before the rise of the internet and tackle Keen’s argument head on. Is there a decline of trust?

I’d argue the opposite is true. The more anonymous the internet becomes, and the more it becomes filled with lies and spin, the more its users seek to develop ways to assess credibility and honesty. While there may be lots of people saying lots of silly things anonymously, the truth is, not a lot of people are paying attention, and when they do, they aren’t ascribing it very much value. If anything the internet is spawning a new “trust economy,” one whose currency takes time to cultivate, spreads slowly, is deeply personal, and is easily lost. And who has this discerning taste for media? Generation Y (and X), possibly the most media literate generation(s) to date.

The simple fact is: Gen Yers don’t trust anyone, be it bloggers, newscasters, reporters, movie stars, etc… This is why “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” is so popular. Contrary to popular opinion, The Daily Show doesn’t target politics or politicians – they’re simply caught in the crossfire – the real target of Stewart et al. is the media. Stewart (and his legions of Gen Y fans) love highlighting how the media – especially Keen’s venerable sources of trustworthy news – lie, spin, cheat and err all the time (and fail to report on the lying, spinning, cheating and errors of those they cover). In short, The Daily Show is about media literacy, and that’s why Gen Yers eat it up.

In contrast, what is being lost is the “blind trust” of a previous era. What Keen laments isn’t a decline in trust, but the loss of a time when people outsourced trust to an established elite who filtered the news and, assessed what was important, and decided what was true. And contrary to Keen’s assertions, those who struggle with this shift are not young people. It is rather the generation unaccustomed to the internet and who lack the media literacy is being made transparent – sometimes for the first time. I recently encountered an excellent example of this while speaking to a baby boomer (a well educated PhD to boot) who was persuaded Conrad Black was innocent because his news source from the trial was Mark Steyn (someone, almost literally, on Black’s payroll). He blindly trusted the Maclean’s brand to deliver him informed and balanced news coverage, a trust that a simple wikipedia search might have revealed as misplaced.

Is there a decline in trust? Perhaps of a type. But it is “blind trust” that is in decline. A new generation of media literates is emerging who, as Dr. Gunn termed it “know that it’s Julia Robert’s face, and someone else’s body, on the Pretty Women posters.” And this skepticism is leading them on their own quest for trust mechanisms. Ironically, it is this very fact that makes Keen’s concerns about old-media unfounded. This search for trust may kill off some established, but untrustworthy “old media” players, but it will richly reward established brands that figure out how to create a more personal relationship with their readers.

A note to friends on starting a blog

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Many of you have said how my starting a blog is either prompting you or renewing your energy to start a blog. Just want to let you know that the barriers to entry are indeed low… even for the technically unrefined. That said, drop me a note if you want some help, setting this thing up has generated a lot of lessons learned that I’m happy to share.