I've had a good day today, reading about rock authenticity, authentic country music (and how it all began) as part of my studies. And then my mother sends me this story (what's up with mothers and technology these days - they've gotten faster than their kids when it comes to text-messaging and spam-emails...) about how happy we are in Denmark;

Reuters reports there's nothing rotten in Denmark in an article about the research of analytical social psychologist Adrian White. According to him we're at the top of the list when it comes to general happiness. At the other end - the very bottom - the Democratic Republic of Congo is to be found, accordring to White. He defines happiness somewhat different from Dr. Seligman but that's not going to take down my high spirit...

Read it all on Reuters.

I was just discussing with Birgitte which aspects of blogs and blogging (and social software in more general terms) are interesting to graduate or master students at the universities? Over the past few months I've met a few students who are writing their thesis on blogging. What catches interest? What are you writing about? If you were to have a workshop or class that had to do with blogs and communication/branding what would it be about more specifically?

Let me know!

calacanis.com

http://www.calacanis.com/2006/07/18/everyones-gotta-eat-or-1-000-a-month-for-doing-what-youre/

laver

Netscape

http://www.netscape.com/

som betaler sine brugere for indhold ligesom

digg

http://www.digg.com/

The media is no longer a distribution of communication created by journalists, it's becoming a forum or context (maybe even container) for communication created by users who are being coached by journalists and editors. The role of the media as well as the employees is changing.

Basically, the idea is not new. When I worked as a volunteer at the access-tv-network Portland Community Media in Portland, Oregon, back in 1995 (it was called something difficult back then, like PNWCA or something - the mission and the notable address on Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd is still the same though...) the entire idea was to let regular citizens acces and create media in order to say that everyone had equal rights to participate and promote their opinions in the media. And to some extend that was what happened. The equality wasn't that great given the budget of any cable/news-network compared to these community-radicals trying to get their opinions across (I had a pony-tale back then which I'm sure helped me fit in). The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation started organizing a program as early as 2001 based on the participation of viewers. Lots of other projects through the past 10-20 years carried the idea of involvement. What's new is the technology that lets everyone participate at an advanced level of media quality and distribution combined with the changing habits in media consumption. Suddenly it's not only on Channel 4 in Portland you will see my program (my favourite back then was "An hour of swill" which was a live music-showcase featuring two new local bands each thursday night - I mostly did the handheld camera but was permitted to direct the last show before I went back to Denmark). Now, it's any place that someone thinks of asking the same questions or wanting to share the same ideas or beliefs I have.

Back in april I wrote about the french sociologist Jean-Louis Missika who was at the time describing how french politicians were communicating - or trying to - through old media like newspapers. But they are not using the same channels and live in a different space (in all possible ways) than the ones to whom they want to get a message across. I guess this lack of understanding and difference in perspectives having business managers on one side (for reasons of simplicity, lets just put politicians and CEOs in that same box) and young people on the other is what drives us to ask things like "how many danish (or US) companies are blogging?". The answer - being a number - is not so important in itself. What is important is the change in understanding, perspective and behaviour that is behind it; Everyone can be a journalist (at least they can publish) and media is the media you choose out of an infinite number of possible combinations.

Lately the Korean citizen journalism media "OhMyNews" got a lot of attention. About 40.000 people are delivering 70% of the content and the readers can tip the writers, hence paying them for their contribution. What makes it interesting to me is not only the idea and the change of roles but also the scale! As one Maersk-senior is quoted (I think it was Lars Ginnerup that told me this): "The shortest distance between people are numbers". It's true. You can have some splendid idea and people will go "yeah, that's nice". Then you mention the number of participants - in this case 40.000 - and then they are all "Wooow, really?". I wonder what the journalism studies at different universities are going to teach in a few years when the students can expect to be paid by the number of readers or viewers and the job-description will be more in the direction of "coaching users in writing and tracking sources" etc. And what will my danish newspapers like Politiken, Børsen and Berlingske do? Recently I heard Thøger Seidenfaden from Politiken talk about a new strategy for their online media www.politiken.dk. Much needed, I think.

And then just a final word in this rubbish-post (excuse me, its 150 degrees here!), I just stumbled on Buzztracker which is the "World News, Mapped". Everything is a feed now so you can actually analyze whats going on and where the buzz is. Check it out: www.buzztracker.org/ (the top-picture of the world is from buzztracker)

Now you can get the podcasts from STAGIS to download automatically to your iTunes and iPod (or any other device you may use to organize and carry audio and video with you...). In iTunes you can simply choose "subscribe to Podcast..." and insert this link:

feed://feeds.feedburner.com/stagistalks

Or you can push the "Subscribe to my Podcast" on the right and subscribe to the RSS-feed (Really Simple Syndication). Learn more about RSS on Wikipedia.

And when you've heard one of them, let us know what you think? Are they too short or too long or just plain boring? Another one is coming up soon - I think some insider-stagistalk is on it's way.

Blogging and blogs are words that are slowly becoming part of the discourse when talking about communication and in particular the ways companies are communicating. This is both in the way that companies are talking about their products and their identity. Even if more people are getting more familiar with the term there are still many companies out there that either hasn't heard about blogging yet or are still trying to find out what benefits blogging gives their organization? What is it that makes blogs a unique form of communication channel? How does it rival other methods of dialogue with you customers? How can blogs help create new, interactive and dynamic networks? Are there any hidden dangers and worries that we should know about?

If you want to hear and learn more and join the discussion of blogging you have the opportunity at our after work meeting and workshop at DIF in august 2006. Im sure we will have som interesting hours - maybe Nikolaj will bring his chick?

As part of my studies (and Birgittes) I was just reading "blog!" by David Kline in which there is an interview with Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems. Sun is a server and network company founded in 1982 that employs 38.600 people worldwide and was ranked number 194 on the Fortune 500 in 2005.

Jonathan blogs about his business, the competition, how Sun is doing and new products. In monday's post he is writing about the new server and a couple of weeks ago Business 2.0 "50 People who matter" (good news is you and I - the consumer as creator - comes in on no. 1!). He explains why he is blogging with reference to reaching out to his employees and communicating with them as well as with customers without the filter that the usual corporate information-flow goes through.

The chapter in "blog!" is basically about authenticity. The very reason Schwartz is blogging is, he says, this is the only way that a manager can communicate authentically with each and every employee (in my case I can also just go talk with them - but the idea is the same) and Schwartz seems to be the type of CEO who brings the idea to good use; he is open and expressive about his ideas and opinions.

Recently Jonathan encouraged all of Suns employees to start their own blog and write about... anything! As he explains, there are so many issues that will be of interest to the customers which can be addressed and discussed to a much better detail by employees that work in a specific field than by the communications- or marketing department. Read some of the executive as well as employee-blogs on blogs.sun.com.

I spoke with a couple of danish journalists over the past couple of months about blogging and the use of blogs in organizations in particular. They all ask why there are so few companies that blog. And this morning I just thought to myself, well, everyone who has an answer to that question happens to be bloggers. And why would someone that's all head-over-heals about blogging know anything about the reasons not to blog?

In a recent blog-post UK-based e-consultancy speculates on the reasons for UK businesses not to blog. They've made a list of 12 reasons. Some of them are quite meaningful. E-consultancy also mentions Suw Charman and her list of UK companies that blog which she wrote about a couple of weeks ago. I think there are about 60 corporate blogs on that list and now BRITBLOG has a Business and Professional Blogs category.

My answer to the danish scene is related to the lack of knowledge on the subject as well as cultural issues. Danes (and possibly north-europeans) aren't that fund of showing off and talking about themselves. That seems to flow easier in the land of entreprenurialism, the US. As I've mentioned before I did a brief project with some co-executive-students at CBS last fall that certainly showed different personal motivations on becoming public and personal but I think I'll try and ask someone who is a CEO of a large danish corporation and actually doesn't blog. Maybe that would be the right person to explain what's going on and what the danish reluctance to blogging is all about.

Why are you not blogging in your work-sphere?

During the past month or two Mikkel and I have been working on the new stagis.com corporate website. And yet again I remember how difficult it is to work on your own identity. Not so different from standing in front of the mirror. Most of us loathe it and love it. Loathe it most of the time, I guess. Back in '99 I remember we were doing a Stagis brochure. It took at least six month to get it done. For any client the same task would have taken less than six weeks. Well, back in the trenches I'm hoping this will not be an all-year project. The old website is after all 5 years old and needs a serious face-lift!

So right now we're just sketching up some ideas and Mikkel have been playing with pictures (we will include the moblog and a comment-possibility in the design) and we have been developing a solution on long copy in flash (on flash sites you'll always find those "designed" scroll-bars only few pixels from the native scroll-bar of the browser window and they hardly ever work well so we wanted to work out a new way...). The idea came from folding a piece of paper that has to be in a confined space - in order to see any part of the copy you have to fold the top or bottom or both.

Check it out if you want - and comments are most welcome!!
stagis.com test