The trail of discoverability ... take 2

If you haven't been following the blogs are dead thread,  Sonny Cloward in Vermont offers a great summary of this debate about whether blogs are dead or not.  He points to post from Seth Godin about the digital divide between blogging and those that don't.  He adds his two cents ...

I'm not sure what will bridge this schism--which I believe to be one part generational and one part privilege--perhaps just time and some good ol' fashiong spin-doctoring. All I know is that I have been thoroughly enjoying this conversation and look forward to the next round.  Ding-Ding!

Meanwhile, on the West Coast, the thread continues from Ed Batista today with Baby Got Back(-End) where he fuses Ruby Sinreich's and Kurt Voelker's comments from the previous thread into a list of qualities of blogs (or bloggish web sites):

1. first-person -> authenticity
2. dialog (either between blogs and/or in the comments)
3. database back-end (enabling archives and syndication)
4. (or 3.5) permanently available archives [emphasis mine]
5. Discoverability.

And Kurt Voelker responded by my question about the practice of blogish behavior with this:

6 Guidelines to Behaving Bloggishly (or How to be Discoverable)

1. Speak in a human .
   
2. Place your message in context to others by directly linking to an existing article, post, story, web site, resource, or whatever.
   
3. Make your mission clear. If you dont have a position to be advancing, you're just noise.
   
4. Find like minds, and comment directly on their sites.
   
5. Find dissenting minds, and comment directly on their sites.
   
6. Ping the powers that be. Everytime you post, make sure to ping blog aggregrater services (I know we were trying to avoid tech tips, but needed to get that one in there)

And in a response to my comments about change issues, Ed pointed to two examples of blogging within an organizational context or bloggish web sites with two different implementations:

Adaptive Path - Blog is a personal blog of staff members and located on the staff members' URL.  The link to the blog is not on the top page, but located in the Team.   I had to click through to each staff person's information.     I found Jeffrey Veen's blog under his photo with "Visit Jeff's Personal Site"

ForumOne - The blog is a collaborative blog with its own url.   The organization's web site welcome page there is an RSS feed of headlines from the blog.

I'm not saying that one is better than the other - just different approaches.

Now, who can begin to answer Marnie Webb's questions as part of this thread:

I'd love to get to blogging 2.0. What metrics are appropriate ones to follow on a weblog? Why? What are organizations successfully employeeing this medium doing ....

Technorati Tag: nptech

Comments

[Kurt]

To quote my own post in response to Marnie's question - I can think of two nonprofit organizations advancing their missions with bloggish behavior:

From a grassroots/advocacy perspective, I would point to what Jason Lefkowitz is doing over at Oceana. By having Oceana staffers speak directly to the public, they are heightening awareness and extending their message in a way that no direct mail campaign ever could (or would, I should say).

From a policy standpoint, The Center for Global Development, is following these approaches with 2 weblogs: The Millennium Challenge Monitor Weblog and the The Vaccine Development Weblog. (full disclosure, CGD is a Forum One customer).

[Beth]

Kurt:

Great examples and thanks for weaving them into this post.

I asked Marnie this question as well - which I hope isn't too stupid - but is npoblogs the most comprehensive place to find a list of links to npo's blogs that is somewhat organized? Is there a delicious tag npoblogexample or something?