musings about blogs

I tend to get stuck right about here. I've been to too many conferences with blog-boosters who stand around talking about how in five years (and it has been almost that since I first heard this line, so the end must be nigh) we won't even need organizers or non-profit organizations because we'll have blogs. It usually turns into one of those fabulous ships passing in the night conversations where all I can really think of saying is "um, you are insane. Do you live under a rock?" and so I say "Um, right. Oh look, I didn't realize there was tea. Nice to meat you." Blogs as a social movement that will overtake community organizing? Not any time this week. But blogs as a tool for more than just posting press releases and event reports -- that is interesting. I think that one place to start is by talking about the fact that most organizations don't update their websites and they spend ages making plans for a website that they could update more quickly and they still never seem to get there. So blogging as a tool for maintaining a more accurate, searchable web presence is interesting to me. With a smart combination of tags and categories, you can keep a range of people up to date on the progress of a campaign really quickly. There are two, slightly different issues to bring to a session (I guess that "how do I do it" would make three) -- (1) why bother --do blogs and bloggers impact anything? How are they different from conventional media? and (2) how to play the game. Using a blog to put information out there and make it accessible to folks who are already reading your site is one thing, but really stepping into the fray means figuring out how to encourage other bloggers to link to you and getting your stories posted in more widely read blogs. I don't really know how to play the blogosphere game, but I know that Digg and Technorati are part of it, and that plugging into them is valuable if you want to be getting other folks to blog about the issues you are raising. Participating in other people's conversations is also part of playing nicely in the blogosphere, which means using tools like technorati to find people who are writing about the same issue and comment on their posts. I also know that a lot of community blogs (there are zillions, but any blog with multiple authors qualifies) will invite people to blog. You have to be willing to frame your story as something more than a press release, but that is really just a change in tone. I wonder if part of the workshop isn't really a variation on how to write a press release. So then we get into the "why bother" question and I don't have good answers to that. I know that Witness spends a fair amount of energy working on getting bloggers to write about the human rights issues that they focus on. They might have better stories about why it is worth it. I think that a lot of the same questions apply to conventional media and most of the same answers do as well. I know that Beth Kanter has lead some smart sessions on non-profit blogging and that Global Voices has spent some time thinking about this stuff. Their name escapes me, but OSI works with a Russian group that does workshops on blogging, too. Hows that for thoughts?