The Second annual New Communications Forum (tag newcomm) got off to a spectacular start with a keynote talk by Rebecca Blood, author, blogger and thinker who was articulate, passionate and visionary in her talk.
Rebecca Blood, said, “we are standing at a unique moment in time. Technology connecting people will shape the coming age into which the world has so recently entered. Blood started blogging in April 1999 when there were about 90 bloggers worldwide and she was one of six women pioneering the new conversational medium.. That summer, blogging tools came out came out making blog authoring easier, and the number of bloggers jumped almost immediately to 1000. Now there are 27 million.
People describe blogging differently depending on what they do for a living—“diaries, communications channel, knowledge management” are all used by different segments . To Blood, blogging is part of something that encompasses it all called “participatory media,” and the importance of it is that the internet enables this level of participation.
She believes that blogging is different in many ways from traditional journalism. “Most bloggers are not reporting, they are adding opinion and expertise. It has blurred the lines between professionals and amateurs, but that still doesn’t explain why 28 million people are blogging. “
So what s going on? Why have we gone from the group of less than 100 that Blood joined just over a half dozen years ago? She says its because blogging has made writing non-threatening and lots of people have something to say, even if it is just one thing. “Blogs happen in real time. People can add bits of a story as it breaks. Bloggers can add readers for their opinions and facts. This is called, among other things “ open source journalism.”
And as tools improve, the new internet-based conversational mechanisms will expand. “As soon as podcasting is as easy as sending an email will take off” to the same degree as blogging, she forecast.
The essence of what is happening with the explosion of social media is nothing new.” Everyone has a story to tell,” she said, explaining that we have told each other stories since we were huddled around the fires in caves. Centuries later we did the same thing around the well in the marketplace. This essential need for people to tell their stories has now adapted onto the web.
Referencing Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point, she pointed out that mavens have existed for centuries. They the people who tell you how to take care of your houseplants or get you computer working. Online, these mavens become the connectors and the internet lets them transcend their own geographical limits to attain reach into global communities. An evidence of the power of these connectors is Wikipedia where there have now been one million entries by these maven-turned-connectors. The founders of this online encyclopedia, according to Blood have succeeded because they had “a deep understanding of human behavior on the web where consumers become contributors” and anyone can participate. If you know one fact, you can contribute.” This behavior is a carryover from other days and other media. For example citizen-scientists. Have been taking annual bird census as volunteers for the Audubon Society for 100 years, and that is the same mechanism. Withut the web, Audobon has more than 50,000 contributors. The internet has 28 million bloggers, giving some sense of the participatory scaling.,
This new era has just begun and where it is too early to define where it is going, Blood asserted. Calling it the Information Age is too myopic, sort of like calling the Industrial Revolution, the “Tool Age,” she asserted. She prefers to call it the Age of a Participatory Future. I’m not convinced that line will catch on any more than our own tag, of The Conversational Era. Both seem to contain the sae big thought about what has changed.
She does not believe tradition journalism, music publishing or PR are dead, but she does believe they are transforming. For example, she pointed out that magazines targeting very small, highly targeted audiences are enjoying a rebirth right now. The disruption s that the internet gives everyone nearly free direct access to everyone else who is connected.
Whatever we call this new era a key component, Blood argued, is the connectivity is essential and fundamental. The connectivity is enabled b the internet, and what’s important is that the web is not owed by anyone. It is owned by everyone. “People finally have a channel of their own, ”which allows them to reach everyone else without the traditional media serving as middlemen and gatekeepers.
If the rest of this two-day event is this good, then we are in for a very good conference.
I wish Rebecca Blood was right: Maybe the web isn't owned by anyone, but the infrastructure is owned by a few. The problem is, that we only see the anarchy of the web, but not the oligarchy of the infrastructure.
Posted by: Markus Pirchner | March 07, 2006 at 08:56 AM