Turning inside out

Dave Winer posted a link to some of the earliest podcasts recently, Chris Lydon’s interview series. In the header he used a photo from the first Bloggercon. (That’s me, on the left with my eyes down toward my screen, above one of many Mac TiBooks in the audience.)

It got me thinking about Bloggercon and looking back at some of what we learned, and in particular my two-part blog on takeaways, What is a blog? and Blogs providing voices/Blogs mediating connections. There’s a note in the second post that connected especially strongly with me today:

Blogs written by individuals inside institutions also, through their personal nature, offer the readers of those blogs a connection to the institution at an individual level that they would not experience otherwise. This empowers them through connecting them more closely to that institution and enabling them to better understand the institution. This is empowerment by access.

Finally, when the blogger outside the institution publishes a comment and a link to the work of the blogger inside the institution, and the institutional blogger reciprocates with a link, a relationship develops between the two, the outsider and the institution, that helps the outsider to understand, and in some cases affect, the institution. This is empowerment by relationship.

What I meant in writing this by “institution” was “any organization,” but how I feel it today is “a company.” There’s so much expertise tucked away within a modern organization that may not expose itself through a company’s official messaging, but which holds much of a company’s competitive strength. Like what it’s learned about aligning product management to the business, or doing agile at scale, or even applying agile principles to other disciplines like marketing.

Some of the value drivers for blogging seem to have weakened in the last 14 years, but this avenue of empowerment of the individual writer and of their audience by connecting with them is still deeply important.