In a business meeting today, I went through my shpeel on who I am... "Hi, I'm Jeneane Sessum. I worked at Ketchum as the Senior Technology Writer for the last five years, was the voice behind communications at big brands like IBM, Cingular, Nokia, and AMS, and helped launch more companies that I can count during the tech boom. Over the past 20 years in marketing and technology, I've written every type of deliverable for every type of company in ever industry. Before Ketchum blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah blah blah..... I also have a passion for the place called the Internet and the people gathered there. I'm a well-known weblogger who started blogging in 2001, blah bl---"
"OOOh. Weblogs" (one voice)
"What's a weblog?" (another voice)
"It's an online diary (first voice to second voice)
"It's kind of where people write what goes on during their day. (third voice)
Me: "Well, not really. Kind of. Sort of. But not just."
"Tell us." (all voices)
"oh fuck." (my voice in my head)
Me: "It's a diary in the sense that it's regularly updated and is date and time stamped, and some bloggers treat weblogs as personal diaries, but they're much more than that. We are people who live out there, connecting with one another through our weblogs, writing not just about technology or marketing or gardening, or porn, or whatever our interests happen to be, but about our life, or loves, our kids, our hurts, our hate, our joy. We connect there. At the bottom. And we talk, not just on our blogs, but many of us talk by phone, meet other bloggers we care about, we know each other, we care about what happens to one another."
I keep going.
"And guess what: Bloggers do other things to earn a living. Get it? So most of us (well, not me) work someplace. And so, you see, I trust Michael O'Connor Clarke who happens to work at Weber Shandwick. I know him through his tremendous writing, I've bounced his ideas inside my head and back out to him over the last six months on many occasions. More than that, I trust him as my blog friend, because I was there when he germinated Blog Sprogs, and I was there when he and Sausage had Ruairi, and we were praying when Ruairi got sick. So who do you think comes to mind when someone asks me for a PR firm, or what I know about Weber? Do you think Ketchum comes to mind? My contacts there? No. Because those are fleeting relationships--one dimensional--even when I was there. These are human connections that exist outside of, and yet among, the construct of corporations. SEE? We are people who happen to live both on and off the net. Some of our lives are connecting both places now. Not up here (me pointing high), down here (me pointing low). That's where it starts."
I keep going.
"That's just one example. Now with Google buying Blogger, and with Google striking a deal with Amazon, do you know what that means?"
heads shake no.
"That means that one day when you're looking on Amazon for a book on kids and strep, or maybe even marketing writing, I think you'll find my blog (or a blogger like me) listed as a resource in some way shape or form along with the results returned for that book/cd/whatever. That's what I think."
Or I said something like that.
And my pal at the meeting says, "I know what it does. When I search up my own name on Google, Jeneane's blog is the second reference because she wrote something for me and uses my name on one of her blog pages."
Yes, there's that too.
I tell them about bottom up versus top down, explain it's not about getting product mentioned on people's blogs (though that sometimes helps, but most usually serves to spark discussion both good and bad, which is what you want ultimately, in other words, don't look for glowing reviews because this isn't mainstream media, it's real). It's about you guys starting to write, to blog, about what interests you--not just about marketing or technology or sales, but about you--you start blogging and you'll connect and you'll see the power of these connections, what it does for your head and heart first.
I tell them why blogs don't work like mainstream media and touch a little bit on sponsorship, but eyes have begun to glaze over and some are wondering why we're talking about this blogging thing at all.
I feel like I said some useful things. I also felt excited that real live adults cared to hear why I care about blogging.
Perhaps Google can tap into the folks who have helped them translate their site into more languages than I knew existed to bridge the gap on whatever information comes out of Iraq, or out of those who know Iraq intimately, if this all begins, which I guess we're all afraid by now that it might.
Some time ago, I wrote a few emails back and forth with Hoder (Hossein Derakhshan), an Iranian blogger now living, if I remember right, in Canada. He is a good writer--and writes in English, so I can tell you that first hand. He has an interesting post about top officials now actually leaving comments in popular Persian weblogs:
"I'm not exactly sure if this has happend anywhere else. But some top officials are not only reading and following Persian weblogs, but also are responding to and commenting about some posts in popular weblogs. After Fazel Larijani called me when I wrote a pieace on his newly started mission in Ottawa as a cultural embassador, 2 of top reformist officials -one of them is a an MP from Tehran- put comments on Sina Motallebi's post about Iranian journalists' association's lack of support to the recently-arrested journliast, Alireza Eshraghi. There were other news that many top politicians are closely following these writings, but this is the first time they actually reacted to them."
I imagine progress through comment boxes, including the excluders in the discussion without requiring that they fully participate. That could actually be a very good thing. Google may need to give us a more robust and reliable comment feature, while they're at it.
His blogroll list a bunch of Iranian bloggers, if you're interested in reading more.
Khorishid Khanoom is another Iranian blogger I emailed a couple of times, but how to get by the language barrier. She's on my blogroll and every now and then I go there and look at the characters--it's more like art than language to me. You can still get a tinsy bit of English--more like punctuation than English--like at the very very end of this post.
I don't know how, but Google has to find a way to let us read and understand one another regardless of our native language. And to make it simple for non-bloggers to participate in cross conversations through more robust commenting functionality than we now have.
We need a bridge somehow across languages through language.
Michael O'Connor Clarke on Google/Blogger as the New CNN...
Here and here. Among other good points, Michael makes this one:
"The critical dimension in which bloggers absolutely have old media – both print and broadcast – smacked down cold is time. It’s about blogspeed. Or more fundamentally: netspeed. The rate of info flow from the news scene via the blogvines is currently exponentially faster than the rate of news dispersal via ‘traditional’ media."
This is one of the reason's Michael thinks it crucial to have bloggers posting from Iraq--to give us the unfiltered human story, the story we won't get from CNN this time.
"Given what we know, we just can’t depend on old media to deliver the truth/whole truth/nothing but the truth. Mini-army of ‘embedded’ frontline media or not. The embedded journalists will get to see and report on only what the Pentagon chooses."
One thing we can do is search out and find more bloggers writing from inside Iraq. And we can hope to perhaps have a team of human blog translators engaged since I doubt if Google can boost its language capabilities to translate Arabic in time.
I wonder what it would take to send "bloggerists" there. Should we begin a blog sponsorship campaign to sponsor some willing bloggers to go to Iraq? What would it take, and what would they need to take with them? How long might they be there? How would we keep them funded? How would we get them access to the front line? Or should we? How would we get their stories back? I wonder if at a different time in my life I would have said, "Send me." Probably not. There was a time when I longed to be a front-line journalist, though, but that's another story, a lifetime ago.
If they go--one or more--they will make journalistic history. Because we'll be sure of it. And Google will help. Beyond that, they'll be transmitting unfiltered human voice, which is as close to truth as we ever get.
Dave Weighs In with a Thoughtful Essay on the Google Blogger Deal
"In other ways, the Blogger-Google deal may signal a change possibly as deep as the personal computer revolution, where huge glass palaces controlled by technologists were routed around, by software and hardware that did the same thing, for a fraction of the cost. "
I was thinking about the Google + Blogger deal as I drove Jenna to school today, and although I'm too sleepy to do it justice, I began thinking that this would be an interesting time to know more languages than just English, and the useless bit of Latin I know from three years of study. Why? As coversations among regular people get bumped up a notch or two or three in frequency and access with Google's likely incorporation of weblogs in their offerings, I want to be able to communicate--albiet not perfectly--with folks whose language I don't speak or read. I started thinking, which language class would I take, if I decided to really take this on.... French? German? Italian? Portugese? What?
And then I thought about Google's language translation tool. AND THEN I came home and looked at my google tool bar. AND THEN I thought, yes. They could do that. Google could add a translation engine behind the blog interface and give us an easy way to translate what we're writing and reading into our languages of choice. No, it wouldn't be perfect. Yes, some miscommunication might arise among onliners whose thoughts get garbled in the translation. But this happens among those of us talking to one another in a common language too. So what's the difference? Anything that keeps the conversation going and arching outward is significant.
So google, my wish number one is to make your language translation machine more robust--offering more languages and more precise execution--and for you to bundle it in my blogging application with your usual grace and ease and understanding of what we want, and what we haven't even thought of wanting yet...
