ext337

Jul 7, 11:40 pm: Blogging Boston's Berkman mtg from the afternoon comfort of my San Francisco desk

[I’ll hit save and update periodically. I’ll go back and linkify later]

Attended the Boston event from my West Coast desk via Skype and IRC. Downloaded skype at the beginning of mtg and was listening w/in 20 minutes. Nice!

For notes straight from the source: 07/07/2005 Meeting Notes

• DEF intro.
  • talked about Digital Divide network. Pointed out the ability of people to use the site for their own blogs and share it w/ a variety of specific communities.
  • made point about the importance of maintaining a cluster of blogs at a community

• kanter.
  • pointed to the Omidyar npblogs workspace
  • to npoblogs
    [from the audience]
  • talked about the Dean for America and the way trolls helped to bring together the community in response
    [back to kanter]
  • npo concerns about losing control and losing control of their message
    [DEF]
  • social workers training in confidentiality etc works against the concept of blogging and the associated lose of control
    [back to kanter]
  • quoted Gilbert (from interview) re: fear—sustainability
    [missing comment from the audience]
  • who’s blogging now? npo techies, staff members off hours.
  • no 501©3 blog census
  • a categorization of npoblogs that I missed. Hope it turns up on her site.
  • blog can be a way to introduce the clients to the computer and associated computer skills
  • talked about the nptech tag stuff
  • Kanter’s H2O playlist on nptech
  • Kanter talked about the tools being used to manage nptech tagging stuff
    [comment that I missed]
    [DEF]
  • folksonomies really happening in nonprofit technologies
    [more missed comments]
  • Brian Reich
  • I don’t have to to call my mother; how am I supposed to prioritze blogging
• visit other blogs; comment—very important
• community generated content: You don’t have to go it alone.
• huge opportunity
• launch a blog; easy to do—very hard, w/ 1,000s blogs launching, conversations starting, getting market share—getting a piece of the attention stream. How do you this?
  • plead w/ other people to link to you
  • difference between blogging and launching a blog
  • identify community network
• DEF
  • matrix of tools that are available to support community/interaction
• Brian Reich
  • internet strategists—talk about podcasting, etc not just blogging
  • blogging/podcasting are getting the buzz.
  • I have my studio but don’t have time to podcast.
  • it’s the activity not the launch that takes the work
    [from the audience]
  • different levels of activity?
    [Brian Reich]
  • yup. can apply different levels of effort to blogging
  • it takes time to blog
  • obligation to welcome all shapes and colors of bloggers
    [missed some comments]
  • I think that the gist was about participating in the community of bloggers and not just throwing out messages in bottles.
  • discovering the community of bloggers and talking to them is almost as important as doing your own blogging
  • don’t let the medium trump strategic intent
  • how do you measure the change that you are making? visits to the blog actually serve your mission?
  • what does success look like?
  • no good measures to define impact of blog

[my comments: a blog is about raising awareness and making sure that you are continuously engaging your network and then activating it when you need an action]

[question]

• how do you attract new audience to your blog?
  • some offline outreach—hand out pieces of paper w/ your blog address on it
  • people aren’t sure, yet, how they are supposed to interact with a blog; give them some direction for engaging
  • give people guidance, permission and an invitation to participate on your blog
    [DEF]
  • comment (w/ links!) to other blogs
  • reach out via email
  • blog explosion (service need to grab link)
    [Rebecca McKinnon—i think]
  • if you want people to read something, email the link to people
  • ask them to read it!
  • sometimes you want to do posts where you are just linking to what other people are saying about a subject
  • adding to the information stream

[my comment: blog as a clipping service]