How to use blogs

Elizabeth Albrycht brings us a coolio slide by Ansgar Zerfass. My first sense is that it needs tweaking -- crisis blogs might help solve some conflicts, but not complex ones -- but I like the idea of mapping this.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 12:45am in Blog Management, Communication Skills, Corporate Communication, Knowledge Management, Online Media | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1)

Is Wikipedia fundamentally flawed? Sure, but it's no less useful for it.

Is Wikipedia fundamentally flawed?

Andrew Orlowski, writing at The Register, believes Wikipedia to be Utopian, and cites Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales' own post that some entries are "nearly unreadable crap".  PR colleague Jim Horton adds:

"The wikipedia was born of a romantic notion that people would put aside self-interest for the greater good. It doesn't work that way for long: It didn't work that way for wikipedia."

Friend and PR blogger Eric Eggertson disagrees:

"It may not be perfect, but it's good enough for a lot of people."

I'm with Eric on this. Let me explain why.

Yes, Wikipedia is flawed. Despite the neutral point-of-view policy, bias inevitably creeps in: one either thinks Intelligent Design is lunacy or doesn't; either way, it's hard to keep one's bias out. Either in the entries one makes, or the entries one does not make.

And inaccuracies float in: I wrote (most of) the article Tallulah Bankhead. In it, I accidentally created a dead link -- of course, I also brought my biases, since she's a cousin whom I admire.

But here's why Wikipedia works, despite the flaws.

1. While "anyone" can create or edit a Wikipedia article, very few do. My notes are in storage (my study is, as I write, being jackhammered to make a bigger study for my partner and me), but Jimbo Wales, speaking at Reboot 7.0, said that just a few hundred authors are responsible for more than 75% of Wikipedia's content. That "community" may not know everything but a) they know how to check sources and b) are committed to eliminating inacccuracies and bias.
2. The community is good at correcting bias. My views of George W. Bush would never pass the NPOV test; Karl Rove's views wouldn't either. But if any of us posted with a biased point of view, the balance would be restored in just minutes.
3. A history is kept of every edit on every subject. The feature is an excellent way to learn precisely what are the biases on a given subject.
4. Finally, the damned thing is free, easily accessed, and is rapidly approaching 1 million articles. That's just in English: there are also articles in Basa Sunda.

Would I write a scholarly paper based on information in Wikipedia? Of course not, no more than I would write one based on articles in Encyclopedia Britannica. But for most people, most of the time -- it's more than good enough.

Eric Eggertson prompted this post.

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Posted by Allan Jenkins at 10:25am in Knowledge Management, Reboot 7.0, Social Tools | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) | TrackBack (1)

Will internal corporate blogs outnumber external ones? It's a no brainer.

Fredrik Wackå, the thinkingest blogger in Sweden, writes that he's convinced internal blogs will outnumber external ones 10 or even 20 to 1.

Reffing a study by the Economist Intelligence Unit, he notes what anyone who's ever been in a large (or scattered) company can attest to: it's just impossible to exploit the information that's "out there" in the company.  He goes on to write:

"It's obvious to me that blogging should play a role in that exploitation. I see them as the "middle way". They're not the structured systems with elaborate meta data that we find in large KM solutions. They're not email either, but they're almost as easy as email -- which can't be said of the system approach... -- and that's the key to success."

Absolutely. I can't think of an organization of more than a few people that cannot benefit from internal blogs and wikis. But, and here's the catch, corporate communicators are just as reluctant to let go of the communication reins as any "mainstream media". The conversations I've had with internal communicators indicate  blogs make them very nervous.

Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:03pm in Business, Communication, Corporate Communication, Knowledge Management, Social Tools | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (3) | TrackBack (0)