Jarrett House North

Steve Kirks nails a vision statement for the future of Radio Userland: “Remove the barriers to get your content on line. Become your lightweight personal content manager.”

This is interesting timing, coming as it does at a time when the Berkman Thursday Meetings crowd is taking up the topic of the future of weblog software again. When you have a product vision, it’s a lot easier to take input from passionate users like the Berkman crowd and figure out which of the ideas you should work to turn into reality.

The Federal Election Commission’s Bradley Smith says that blogs, or at least political blogs, might get regulated soon, as part of the ongoing rollout of McCain-Feingold. (Thanks to Dave for the pointer).

On the one hand, what kind of crack is he smoking? Regulating the right of a blogger to link is like regulating the right of a human to breathe; it would be a draconian curtailment of freedom of speech. On the other hand, in this country campaign finance laws already curtail certain freedoms of speech in the interest of limiting the influence of deep pocketed contributors in the political process.

Except, of course, that our belief in general is that blogs re-democratize the individual citizen and enable them to participate in the process to a very large extent. That appears to be the angle that Smith is covering in raising the specter of Internet regulation.

The one piece that makes me nervous about the article is that Smith is a Republican member of the election commission, striking against a move by Democratic members of the commission. Is his alarmism merited, or just a partisan tactic to put his Democratic commission mates on the defensive? Where is the perspective in favor of taking this action? This is one of those issues where there are more layers in the mix than just blogging and speech.

Micro Persuasion: WSJ Extols Business Blogging. The WSJ article says that business blogging has shown its value as part of an online strategy by allowing customers to connect to the business on a personal level and by keeping them coming back to the business’s web site regularly.

The first point is the core of the reasoning behind Microsoft’s entry into business blogging. This, in fact, underlies my objection of the WSJ’s claim that “small businesses may benefit most” from business blogging. I’m not sure you can measure the impact of putting a human face back onto the largest software company in the world, but I’m pretty sure it has a pretty dramatic impact on the business’s future. That said, I certainly agree with the points the WSJ made about a blog’s power to make a small business or consultant an authority in a field.

The second point? You know, I’m going to go out on a limb and say something heretical here. You don’t need to start a business blog to keep people coming back to a corporate web site regularly. You just need frequently updated, honestly and directly written content. What you get from a blog is a framework in which you can publish that content which is:

1. Search engine friendly: all the content has a permanent address and can always be found again. Contrast that with a corporate website where marketing content gets published, then silently disappears.
2. Interactive: easy support for features like comments and trackback.
3. Easy to syndicate: Built in RSS or Atom support allows users to read the content in other formats or recombine it in digest form to make it more useful to them—and incidentally to spread your message.
4. Easy to navigate: A chronological architecture overlaid on top of the content makes it easy to follow evolutions in the story.
5. Easy to find just the topics relevant to you: Support for categorization, keyword tags, and other taxonomy technologies makes it easy for a user to filter the content to find just the stuff he or she is interested in.

Plus, by starting a blog you sign a social contract. Whaaaah? Well, posting a blog these days, thanks to the work of blog practitioners like Scoble and others, is equivalent to signing a contract with your customers that you want to speak personally with them; that you want to hear what they say; and that you will be updating the story regularly. In short, you are saying that you want to establish a relationship that will be deeper than a single transaction. If you don’t go into business blogging with this spirit, you’ll get no value from it.