I’ve gone about a week without posting, which is rare, but I’ve been up to my eyeballs. The best news is that I’m working on a proposal for a book about social media. A couple of people I know in the publishing world are pretty positive on the idea. If it comes through, I’m going to have my head down working on it for a few months.

I had an interesting interview with Darren Paul of NightAgency, a two-year-old advertising firm in New York that specializes in viral marketing and social media. He told me about a campaign they’re doing right now for iTravel, which is an oddly named shoe company. They built a travel site, j3tlag.com, that’s composed almost entirely of travelogs submitted by bloggers. They marketed through link exchanges and e-mail lists, mixed in a contest and some giveaways and the site’s been going gangbusters. Paul said sales of iTravel shoes are up 250%. It’s a cool site (when it’s working; it’s delivering some ghastly mySQL error messages this morning!) and an example of how content-based marketing and social media can work together. In this case, the builders have put together a compelling destination site by tapping the blogosphere for contributions. It’s also given some bloggers a chance to make a little money, which is never a bad thing. On that I’ll blog more later.

As I packed up after a late night and headed for bed early Wednesday morning, I was relieved to hear flash TV news reports that 12 of the 13 miners thought killed in an explosion in Sago, West Virginia had in fact been found alive. Which made it doubly heart-wrenching to awaken six hours later and found out that all but one of the miners was dead.

The reasons for the tragic miscommunication were still a little hazy as of this afternoon but it appears that someone overheard a comment from a member of the rescue crew over a police band channel and misinterpreted it to mean that the miners had been found alive. That information was then communicated to the anxious relatives gathered in a nearby church. The news media assumed the information was correct. The governor chimed in with “Miracles really do happen!” and it was off to the races. It wasn’t till three hours later that the awful truth became known. This despite the fact that the mine’s owner, International Coal Group, knew within 20 minutes that the report was false.

The blogosphere has been all over this story today and there’s little I can add to the excellent analysis posted on John Cole’s Balloon Juice or the account of events posted on Rodger Morrow’s This isn’t writing, it’s typing. But since I’ve been following community journalism so closely, I’ll make a couple of observations.

First, Wikipedia shone on this story. From the first posting at 10:38 p.m. EST on Jan. 2 through nearly 400 updates and revisions during the next 40 hours, the site organized a voluminous amount of background information on the mine, the explosion, the dangers inherent in mining and the controversy surrounding the false rescue reports. The reports were so timely that they challenged anything you could have found in the mainstream media. While Wikipedia editors lacked the access to government officials that CNN and The New York Times had, they reported updates from those news sites within minutes after they were posted. Anyway, it turned out that having access to government officials wasn’t such a great thing in this case after all.

Wikipedia’s history feature, which allows readers to track edits as they are made, gives some fascinating insights into the chronology of the events. A comparison of the posts preceding and immediately following the news that the 12 miners had died is especially poignant. Students of history will no doubt study wiki revision histories of major events like this because they offer insight into how people reacted to events as they unfolded. They are like little snapshots of time, much deeper and more personal than what the media provides. The first draft of history, really.

Wikinews, the experimental news analog to Wikipedia, didn’t come close to providing the level of detail that Wikipedia did, raising the question of whether the smarter course in the future will be to build out news as a spur to Wikipedia rather than a separate site. I also thought that Wikinews’ angle on the story, which stressed the communication problems rather than the death of the 12 miners, was off base. Perhaps community news editing is impractical without an experienced news editor at the helm. I’ve noted this problem in previous posts.

The news media itself turned in a shameful performance on this story. Print, broadcast and online media all scrambled to report the good news that the miners had been saved based on what turned out to be very flimsy evidence. Standard journalistic practice dictates that you confirm any news before going live with it but there is no evidence that that practice was followed in this case since most accounts indicate that the sole source of the erroneous report was one individual with a police scanner. Even The New York Times got taken and several morning newspapers trumpeted the good news about the rescue hours after it had be confirmed that the miners had, in fact, died.

Of course, you would have been hard-pressed today to find much explanation in the mainstream of why so many professional news organizations got this one wrong. Mainly they blamed the governor, the mine owner or people at the scene for leading them down the wrong path. This excuse looked flimsier and flimsier as the day went along and it became clearer how little evidence there was to report the rescue in the first place.

Recent news media debacles, such as 60 Minutes’ reporting on President Bush’s National Guard service based on bogus documents, have raised a lot of questions about the mainstream media’s ability to participate in this more competitive news world. If the response of the leading news organizations to increased competition is to run with more speculative information and flimsier confirmations, then they will continue to drain away their most important asset, which is their credibility.

In the meantime, this was Wikipedia’s finest hour. The site provided fresh, accurate, current information and was a useful backdrop to ongoing coverage. It’s not a leap of faith to see Wikipedia evolving into an information resource that could be every bit as useful as CNN in understanding the context of breaking news.

I spent some time on the phone today with Andy Abramson, a longtime blogger and marketing/PR strategist who coordinated the blogger outreach program for the launch of Nokia’s new N90 video phone. Nokia took an innovative approach toward engaging bloggers in this program. Some 50 influential bloggers were selected to get N90 phones and review packages and 22 have posted reviews so far, which is a remarkable percentage only five weeks into the program.

Abramson outlined some key lessons he learned from working with bloggers:

Choose bloggers carefully – Nokia had hundreds of bloggers to choose from but narrowed the field down to 50 by researching those who were the most prolific writers and who had the largest number of links from the community. Calling this “more art than science,” Abramson said the key is finding people who are passionate, prolific and popular with their peers.

Don’t insult their intelligence – Bloggers know their stuff, so treating them like newbies will blow up in your face. In fact, bloggers generally understand technology better than their counterparts at trade publications, so don’t insult them by talking down to them or following up frequently with empty questions. Give them the equipment and the fact sheets and let them go to work.

Be transparent – Nokia committed early on to publishing a summary of and a link every blog entry about the N90, whether it was good or bad. The company stuck to its promise. The blogger section of its site indexes every blogger entry, regardless of tone.

Be responsive – This is a near-real-time medium and bloggers expect to get quick answers to their questions. Your staff needs to be available nearly 24X7 to handle inquiries. You can’t put people off for a day or two. They won’t tolerate it.

After listening to these critical success factors, it struck me that most of them would apply to any media campaign, not just one aimed at bloggers. Abramson agreed but pointed out that the blogosphere is especially unforgiving since the authors are smart, opinionated and don’t necessarily play by the media rules. In essence, I think he was saying bloggers are a more demanding audience than journalists.

Fancy that.

I couldn’t help but be intrigued by this draft posting on wikinews.org about a diner in a Buffalo restaurant who allegedly found a rubber glove in his sandwich. Yuck. The story interested me for reasons other than the weirdness of it, though.

For one thing, the draft has no names. Neither the customer nor the store manager is identified. There is also a nonsequitir at the end of the second paragraph referring to the restaurant’s efforts to expand and tear down an old house in the process. I couldn’t understand what this information had to do with an unpleasant dining experience.

Standard journalistic practice is to seek comment from both sides, so I called Pano’s Restaurant and spoke to owner Pano Georgiadis. He was unaware of the Wikinews posting and vigorously denied that this incident had happened. He called it “fiction.”

I wanted to contact the author to get his or her side of the story but the author is merely an IP address at Adelphia Communications, so that was a dead end. Adelphia does serve the Buffalo area.

I looked a little more into the reference to the restaurant’s plan to demolish an old house as part of an expansion effort. There’s a website about the house that explains some of its history and mentions Pano’s expansion plans. It looks to me like this is a pretty contentious issue in that neighborhood.

So put two and two together and it starts to look like this “news story” may have been the work of a disgruntled neighbor who’s pissed off at Pano’s. That’s just speculation, of course, but there’s no way to find out since the author can’t be reached. Anyone could have made the story “news,” though, by simply changing a tag. Then it would have shown up on Wikinews’s front page, right up there with the Saddam Hussein trial.

It’s also interesting to noted that this story had been reviewed by other people. There had been 15 edits by four other people, who dutifully rewrote it, polished it and corrected grammar errors but never bothered to check its accuracy. Community journalism, in this case, was really community copy-editing.

The more I look at the Wikinews model, the less I like it as a mainstream information source. When it’s good, it’s very good, as I noted in an earlier analysis. I think it could be a great adjunct to existing news media – and some newspapers are experimenting with this – but the potential for damage through abuse or just plain ignorance is too high. There are certain journalistic disciplines that have to be enforced or the process just doesn’t work.

BTW, I checked the LA Times, which launched a wiki in June, to see how it was coming along. It’s been shut down “because a few readers were flooding the site with inappropriate material,” a notice says.

The dark side of community journalism.

Talking to a lot of people about community media lately, I notice one word that comes up often: fear. Part of it is fear of the unknown as in people don’t really understand community media so they’re afraid of it. But a more troubling issue is fear about the blogosphere as an arena for ambush and attack, a place where well-meaning people dare not tread for fear of their reputations.

I think this image is an embedded problem for the blogosphere that will hold back its potential as a socially acceptable medium for discussion and influence.

The First Amendment made my career possible and I wouldn’t think of advocating against free speech. But free speech and responsible speech aren’t the same thing. Bloggers don’t have editors, professional societies or codes of ethics, nor do they want them. That makes it incumbent upon bloggers to create their own ethical standards. That’s a tall order in a world that’s growing as quickly as this one without any underlying governance principles.

What are we trying to achieve? If it is just to speak, we’ve got that. If we want to spout off, we can do that too. Will people listen? Well, there’s no way to insure that but for most bloggers that isn’t really the point. They’re just digging on the freedom that the media provides.

But if we’re going to take blogging to the next level, then it’s up to the blogosphere to make itself a force that markets will want to listen to. We’re off to a good start but there’s still a long way to go.

It seems to me that blogging stands at a kind of turning point right now.

Down one path lies the road to places like Yahoo newsgroups and Usenet, which have degenerated into spam, chaos and character assassination. That’s what happens when the crazies take over and the good people basically run screaming.

Down the other path is the innovation created by cable TV and community publishing. While there are certainly problems with both those media, there’s no question they have created a richer information environment than the cartels they replaced. We are better off because of them.

A personal experience. A few years ago I had some brushes with a group called Team OS/2. It was a loose federation of users organized by some IBMers and sent out to evangelize OS/2 when it was still in a trench war with Windows. It was a good idea and I admired the group for its commitment. But over time Team OS/2 became less evangelical and more vigilante. Reporters and editors who criticized OS/2 were verbally ambushed and beaten by postings in newsgroups, forums and letters to the editor. If our crime was ignorance, then we were stupid. If we favored Windows, then we had been brainwashed. There was no middle ground with Team OS/2. And as the operating system slid further off the market share charts, Team OS/2’s tactics became more desperate, pathetic and ugly.

My own Team OS/2 encounters prompted me to write an editorial that was probably the closest I ever came to flame mailing someone myself. It was a disturbing experience.

The blosophere is full of people who just want to rant, protest and puke all over the institutions and people they don’t like. There’s always going to be a certain amount of that behavior and that’s fine. The challenge is to make those people the fringe. I believe that the real voice of this community lies in the leaders who are defining it: people like Dan Gillmor, Adam Curry and Dave Winer. They have a vision of the blogosphere as a kind of new manifestation of democratic speech, one in which thoughtful, rational and constructive voices rise above the noise and help the medium achieve its potential.

The only way we have to support their efforts is through our links. Linking is the currency of the blogosphere and it will choose the winners and losers. Ranters and flamers will always have their place (hopefully in a corner :-)) but I hope they aren’t rewarded with clicks and links. Choose the people whose opinions you value and reward them with your time because they’re the future of this new medium.

Google has introduced Blogger Web Comments for Firefox, a plug-in for the Mozilla browser that embeds links to blog commentary right in the frame of a webpage. The feature appears as a small icon in the lower right-hand corner. Click on it and get a summary of what bloggers are saying about that page. This is a great tool for business marketers who want to track what’s being said in the blogosphere about their companies. In my tests, the utility didn’t distinguish on dates very much but it did a good job of scouring both Blogger and non-Blogger sites for information and it presented them cleanly and fast. I presume a version for Internet Explorer is on the way.

A friend of mine, a very successful public relations professional, recently told me that many of her clients are now asking her about blogging because they believe it’s a critical part of remaining competitive, that their clients are all doing it so they should be doing it too.

This came just after a chat with another friend whose boss started a blog because his superiors told him he had to. The problem is that the boss doesn’t have time to maintain the blog so my friend is updating it for him.

Both situations are emblematic of what’s wrong with corporate blogging today. Too many businesses are diving into blogging because they think it’s a checklist item, that they need a blog because their competitors have one or because it’s the “thing to do.”

Those strategies – if you can call them that – are doomed to fail because blogging isn’t about satisfying a competitive mandate; it’s about having something to say.

That’s what I told my friends. The culture of the blogosphere demands that people who blog should do so because they have a need to communicate that is unmet by traditional channels. It’s not a checklist item. People who blog out of obligation or resignation will fail because they will bring no passion or commitment to the process. It’s passion that makes blogging work.

I’m not denigrating the role of corporate PR. I think it’s appropriate that PR should create and enforce corporate standards for disclosure in any communications, online or otherwise. Microsoft and Sun both have very active blog cultures, but they also have strict rules on accountability, insider information, forward-looking statements and other activities that tend to draw the attention of the SEC.

There are ways that even publicly held corporations can blog successfully, though. Look at Stonyfield Farms, the yogurt maker. Its four corporate blogs talk about child-rearing, organic farming, healthy kids and women’s issues. They’re successful because they touch a nerve with customers and don’t necessarily involve promotion of Stonyfield products. You can get good information from these blogs about nutrition news and government programs without ever knowing or caring that it’s a yogurt company that’s providing the information.

This is the way corporate blogging should develop, I think. The topics should be selected because they resonate with customers who have similar values and interests, not because they promote a product. The corporate marketing strategy of the ’00s is all about this kind of “soft” selling because it promotes a brand without shoving it down the customer’s throat. Blogs are a way to pick up smart and interesting people within a company and showcase them to the outside world in a way that makes their interests and values a part of the public’s interests and values. It is, as Stonyfield’s website says, “a chance for you to get inside Stonyfield and get to know us, and us to know you.”

Smart companies increasingly will understand this.

I’m delighted to report that the editors at BtoB Magazine have relented to my ceaseless badgering and agreed to let me take on a monthly column about social media beginning in January.

This is good stuff because BtoB is a well-read and respected publication in the advertising and media profession with 45,000 paid subscribers, two-thirds of them marketers. The decision to give regular space to analysis of the world of blogs, wikis, podcasts and other community media is an important endorsement of how important those influencers have become to mainstream business.

I need your help. If you’re a marketer or PR professional, please write or post here and tell me what you want to know about working with the blogosphere. If you’re a blogger who regularly writes about businesses, tell me what information and support you need from them. Help me choose the best conferences on this topic and help me find the best bloggers and podcasts in this area.

With all due respect to my friends in high tech, I am particularly interested in hearing from people outside of the computer industry. We know that a lot of computer makers “get” social meda but they don’t reflect the real world. Since 3/4 of BtoB’s audience is non-tech, I’d like to hear more about their concerns so I can educate myself and target the column to a broader audience.

I’ll post links to the column when it starts in mid-January. Please contribute your comments and ideas so the column reflects as wide a variety of topics as possible.

The science journal Nature performed a head-to-head comparison of Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia and found that Britannica was only slightly more accurate than its online, community-edited counterpart.

The average science entry in Wikipedia had four errors to Britannica’s three. What I found surprising was the Britannica had three errors on average to begin with. Didn’t we used to pay thousands of dollars for bound copies of that reference work?

So if you’re the publishers of Encyclopedia Britannica, how do you respond? Here’s what the Britannica spokesman said: “It is not the case that errors creep in on an occasional basis or that a couple of articles are poorly written. There are lots of articles in that condition. They need a good editor.”

Um, maybe so. But you charge $70/year for your service and Wikipedia is free. What’s more, Wikipedia is less than five years old and is going to get better. Britannica’s been around since 1768 and still has three errors per article.

The Britannica spokesman doth protest too much. Maybe a better approach would be to emphasize the superior quality of writing in Britannica (that’s a structural weakness of wikis), the top-name authors and the links to other proprietary information within Britannica’s reference source family. Attacking a free competitor that’s almost as good as a paid service is dumb.

Oh, and Britannica just cut the price of the 32-volume encyclopedia set to $995 for the holidays. Such a value. If I’m Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales, I’m already talking with O’Reilly about publishing a competitor.

What would you do if you were Britannica? Post your comments here.

I highly recommend that you download and listen to this podcast with Professor Thomas Barnett of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies at the U.S. Naval War College. It’s nearly an hour long but worth every minute.

Barnett talks about global politics in the context of technology. He points to one of the most dramatic developments of the last 15 years: the reordering of global priorities from superpower confrontation to containment of individual madmen and the opportunity it presents for the U.S. economic and political model to become transcendent.

Barnett, who’s written two influential books on the changing nature of global politics, notes that the issues facing governments and economies have changed dramatically in just a short time. As late as the mid ’80s, the threat of nuclear annihalation was a very real force in our day-to-day lives. The end of the cold war erased that threat and refocused our attention on state-to-state conflict as epitomized by the war between Serbia and Croatia. But that threat has vanished, too, he argues. The only major major inter-state conflict in the world today is between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Today, the political priority has turned to containing madmen like Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden, who disrupt global stability through targeted attacks but who don’t threaten the supremacy of market economies. This is an important and very positive change.

Barnett argues that the U.S. economic model has won and that means the political model is winning as well. About 2/3 of the world’s population lives in countries that have bought into capitalism and these countries will be tied closely to the U.S. in the future. In fact, he suggests that Americans may actually have more in common with China and India than we do with Great Britain and France because those Asian countries are embracing free market economies over government protectionism. Opposition is weakening. The Taliban promises a return to the past, which is unappealing to most people. These dissonant forces will fade with time as the superiority of the global free trade model triumphs.

Where’s the tech angle? Not where you’d expect. Barnett believes that Y2K was a watershed in global politics. The date-change phenomenon created a heightened sensitivity that global networks could be disrupted and global commerce compromised, he says. Whether Y2K was a real problem or not is almost unimportant. The fact is that it forced people to confront the possibility of a world without computer networks and that created awareness of the importance of connectedness to the global economy. That awareness convinced people that maintaining supply chains and business linkages between countries was vital their well-being. And that undermind the power of local dicators.

Barnett uses terms like “open source” and “operating system” to describe characteristics of the global economy. If you’re a techie who wants to understand the value of your work on a macro level, I recommend listening to this podcast.