BloMob: the future of digital publishing

One of the most frequent excuses I hear from clients, students and colleagues when we are discussing blogging and the use of digital publishing tools to encourage sharing and collaboration, is "I don't have time to blog".

One of the reasons I think Twitter is so popular is because the format is so limited that people feel less pressure when posting and can publish ideas without expanding on them.

The problem is that Twitter is limiting as well as limited...and there are many ideas and comments that cannot legitimately nor legibly be reduced to 140 characters.

The growth of tablets like the iPad has probably helped people create content on the go....although it's not easy to type on most tablets while on the move.

Recording thoughts like a personal podcast is possible on a variety of platforms like AudioBoo, but the disadvantage of audio is not being able to skim-listen, unless you are partially sighted and used to absorbing audio information really really quickly.

So what is the future?

There are two sides:
a. It has to be mobile, clearly, to allow people to develop posts on the go.  But that's not ideal as this post can attest....being written through an app on a train....creating links and embedding images is fiddly to say the least...
b. dictablog: being able to dictate thoughts into a mobile or other device and hoping it correctly transcribes the dictation into text. It would also need to become clever enough to insert links and images... and you have the downside of having to speak loudly and clearly into your mobile, possibly in public, definitely looking like a fool.

So what alternative is there?

Simple....keep your thoughts to yourself....           

Censorship Works - should be the name of the department

I've come to Beijing as part of my MBA course and everything is wonderful, different, exotic, interesting, new and, well, what I like about travelling.

But we're also here to work. So I have the laptop plugged in to the internet through the hotel - a good four star hotel in the centre of Beijing.

And I thought 'I know, I'll update my blog'. Well, a good idea, but not easy to carry out. According to the internet from China, my blog, or indeed any blog at www.blogspot.com doesn't exist.

You can't find it.
No excuses.
No apologies.
No explanation.

You simply get a page that says the website doesn't exist. Now if I didn't know that my own blog existed, I might leave it at that. Fortunately, without being an übergeek I have geek tendencies and know that I can connect to the servers at my company through a VPN connection.

When I do that, I'm seeing the internet as if I was in London, not Beijing.

But most people aren't geeks, and much less übergeeks, and if faced with a page that says a particular website doesn't exist, will accept it and move on to another.

Another couple of websites that do not exist in Beijing?

Facebook, and Twitter.

It is an admirable system. Censorship is crude - they don't put a false page there, they simply say the page doesn't exist - but effective. Censorship works here. The only ones who can breach it are geeks and techies...not the majority of the population.

What would be fascinating to find out is how much 'dissent' there would be if people were to have access to completely uncensored internet. The US and the UK have, more or less, just that - barring a few websites promoting terrorist idealism - but are the people better informed about the world outside? Arguably no. But it would be an interesting research project to undertake - to see how informed people are about the general state of the world, and how much they bothered to change it, if they had access to all the information of the internet.

Is it possible, therefore, that China is using a hammer to crack an egg? Let the eggs become chicks and chickens and they will be obsessed with finding grain, growing, and laying eggs. They probably won't even notice that they're penned in and unlikely to survive the season.

The blind leading the blind

I've just helped one of our MBA students set up a blog and I showed him all the technical things, but I'm telling him how to write and it occurs to me "what do I know?".

I'm still a novice blogger... he's blogging on the company systems and yet I'm using blogspot? Why? Well - he asked for the company systems... whereas I know their limitations and want more flexibility in what I can do.

So - here's the question: how can someone who's supposed to get people within an organisation to engage with new technology if they don't use it themself?  Actually - of course - that's not true. I do use it, just not the inhouse stuff... and we come back to the same old question of how to make sure the inhouse stuff is as good as the outhouse stuff, but with the company branding?

I don't have the answer - so if you do, I'd love to hear it.

How do you get people to blog?

Here I am, sat in a meeting about getting a group of people to blog on a particular subject... not easy. Everyone says 'yes - lovely' and then forgets about it.

For example, can I get the Ashridge Leadership Centre team to blog together?

People like the idea... they say they're interested... but it takes  a 'champion' to get started.  Web 2.0 is not a 'bottom up' philosophy.  It obviously isn't top down.  

And it's not enough to just 'create it and they will come'... those of us that know, know. Those that don't, really often have no idea... so it requires education as well as encouragement (and beatings) to get the blogging underway.

So what is not bottom-up and is not top-down?  'Top-up' sounds like a pre-paid travel card or mobile phone, so how about 'bottom-down'.  It has the potential for innuendo, which is always good - and I'll quickly copyright the term before it becomes common knowledge...