Blogs As Barrier to Conversation and Nonprofit Barriers to Blogging and Tagging ....

I've had a couple of ideas swirling around in my head  ....  mostly about the process and mechanics of blog conversations. Are blog conversations as satisfying, rich, or stimulating as other methods?  Can blog communities be facilitated?   What are the similarities and differences between online discussion boards and blog communities?  The question about nonprofit adoption of these tools for conversation.

The triggers:

A blog conversation on Jilliane's Smith blog that became a community blog conversation about nonprofit tagging on netsquared.   

My participation in an online discussion at Web 2.0 and Communities of Practice Conference where this article/visual was shared clearly outlining the differences and predicting some hybrids of the two.

Amy Gahran wrote two thoughtful posts about cross-blog conversation  - "I wish blog comments were easier to follow!"  and- "What does cross blog conversation look like?" -- on the second post I pointed the nonprofit tagging conversation.

Amy pinged me to let me know she has posted a third thread to this messy conversation, "Blogs As A Barrier to Conversation."  She is basically saying that blogs aren't for everyone and the importance of respecting the spectrum of options available for conversation and individual comfort levels. 

Blogs are only one type of conversational media tool. There are others, including e-mail lists, web-based discussion forums, chat rooms, call-in talk shows, and even (to a certain extent) podcasts and wikis.

You don't have to like blogs or even read them at all in order to benefit from conversational media. Also, some non-blog options for conversational media offer unique benefits.

She also touches on the issue of nonprofit adoption.

But Steve's point was one of those "aha" moments for me. If the people that nonprofits need to reach don't generally like or use blogs, then why bother?

...Or maybe that in itself reflects an underestimation or misperception of blogs by nonprofits. I dunno, I'll have to think about this more.

I'm not sure the issue is so black and white.  Like all technology tools, we aren't going to see all nonprofits adopt all the tools.  However, I think there are probably some places where it does make sense for some nonprofits to use blogging and the other Web 2.0 tools.  Perhaps there may some scaffolded ways to introduce the use of these tools to realize outcomes like knowledge sharing, organizational learning, or efficiency.

There are barriers, of course -- like some of the tools aren't there yet (still too geeky) for wide spread nonprofit adoption, there's not a lot of training aids, to adopt it involves incredible amount of change in personal work habit and organizational culture not to mention time and without a lot of awareness of the examples of the benefits for nonprofits - that's a hard change to make.

Yes, but .... I'm thinking about the blog (and phone) conversation I had with Andy Carvin about podcasting in the developing world - in places without electricity. I asked him - given all the barriers perhaps podcasting is not relevant at all.  His take:  "We shouldn’t discourage people from experimenting."   

I also think we should learn more about what has been learned from these early nonprofit adoption experiments and forge ahead with some more action learning.

What do you think?

Technorati Tags: CoP2.0, CP2Web2, net2, nptech, nonprofit, ngo, non-profit

Comments

[Marshall Kirkpatrick]

e-mail lists, web-based discussion forums, chat rooms, call-in talk shows...I would not have gotten 1/10th of the understanding of what you are thinking and the info you aim to share, Beth, if I had been participating in any of those media with you instead of reading your blog. Call in talk shows certainly have advantages, but people don't do them very often. All of those options are unweildy, akward and inefficient relative to blogs and RSS. Maybe that's not the case for folks who are just begining to learn how to use these new technologies, but I'm concerned that a desire for familiarity and an underprioritization of training and experimentation could be philosophically justified by allegations that the tools themselves are too unuseful. But then this is what I spend all my time on, too. I admit that.

Thanks for bringing all these discussions together. I hadn't read any of them before.