Perfect Elevator Pitch for Blogging

Well, there is no such thing as perfect of course. But from the seventeen entries in the Perfect Elevator Pitch for Weblogs Contest the winner has now been selected and it's...............Lee Lefever (why don't you stick up a hand so people know who you are)

Ok, thanks, Lee. And congratulations!

The runners up were:
Second Place - Randal Moss

Third Place (tied) - Michael Angeles and
Jack Vinson

On the judging panel were a whole range of interesting bloggers and myself:
Dave Pollard, Dina
Mehta, Don Park, Flemming Funch,
Jim McGee, Lilia
Efimova, Martin Dugage, Phil Wolff,
Ross Mayfield,
Scott Allen

Judging was an interesting experience, and it would be fun to carry on some conversation about what we learned at the SocialText workspace we used as our judging room.

One thing which to me was interesting to see is that a lot of the pitches took up one characteristic of blogging, such as context with Lee, but also storytelling, filtering conversations, etc. whereas noone would cover them all. To me it seems a lot as if the format is too much taylored to the old industrial way of talking about things. Explain to me neat row of causally related steps that show me return in numbers, by the end of next month, or this quarter at the latest.
No wonder Lee had such a time-consuming experience crafting his pitch. Is this a case of wrong vocabulary of sorts? Not that results don't matter, mind you, but causality is, especially in knowledge intensive environments, not so predictable beforehand as our business models tend to assume. With hindsight, yes, but not up front. You know, complexity and stuff.

And I didn't believe most of the ROI stories I heard about a lot of more traditional investments to be as straightforward and simple as presented. So when we are moving into intangibles and more socially oriented tools I think it will get near impossible to do this, and the format of elevator pitches will seize to be useful.

The text of the winning pitch is:

First, think about the value of the Wall Street Journal to business leaders. The value it
provides is context — the Journal allows readers to see themselves in the context of the financial world each day,
which enables more informed decision making.

Weblogs serve this need.  By making internal websites simple to update, weblogs allow individuals and teams to
maintain online journals that chronicle projects inside the company. These professional journals make it easy to
produce and access internal news, providing context to the company — context that can profoundly affect decision
making.  In this way, weblogs allow employees and leaders to make more informed decisions through increasing their
awareness of internal news and events.

Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at April 27, 2004 07:08 PM)

BlogWalk 2.0

In March the first BlogWalk meeting took place in the Netherlands.
Next month this series will see it's second event, this time in Nürnberg, Germany.

The date will most likely be, Friday May 28th. The topic of discussion will be:

The role of personal Webpublishing for self-organized and informal learning.

The event will be relatively small scale, but with intense dialogue and exhaustive conversations.
Mark your diaries and let me know if you want to be invited, as this is an invitation only meeting.

A third meeting is scheduled on Sunday July 4th, the day before BlogTalk, in Vienna, Austria. There the route from ideas, generated in creative groups like groups of webloggers, to action will be explored. Again, let me know if you want to be invited, as this is an invitation only meeting.

For impressions of the first meeting last March, see the list of related blog-entries at Topicexchange.

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at April 21, 2004 03:22 PM)

Strengthening the Network Fabric

Ever since I visited BlogTalk last year May in Vienna, I am sure that the networks we bloggers form have potential on a personal and business level.

Initiatives like BlogWalk (second event coming up on May 28th) and the Actionable Sense Troupe (can you suggest a better name?) are not only aimed at realising that potential but in themselves a proof of concept as well.

Tonight I will have dinner with Jon Husband, of Wirearchy, and one of the Actionable Sense gang, who is currently visiting Europe from Canada, together with Lilia Efimova and Elmine Wijnia.

Face to face meetings help strengthen the fabric of the networks we have woven, add value to it, and increase likelihood of working together. I'm looking forward to it!

Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (4) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at April 20, 2004 01:34 PM)

Music Industry Should Stop Whining

.....and critically look at themselves and their ageing business models, in stead of criminalising their customers.

In the Netherlands international record companies broke up contracts with Dutch artists, claiming declining profits due to filesharing as primary reason. The artists believed the story. Harvard Business School sure doesn't:

A long standing economic question is the appropiate level for protection of intellectual property. The internet has drastically lowered the costs of copying information goods and provides a natural crucible to assess the implication of reduced protection. We consider the specific case of file sharing and its effect on the legal sales of music. A dataset containing 0.01% of the world's downloads is matched to U.S. sales data for a large number of albums. To establish causality, downloads are instrumented using technical features related to file sharing, such as network congestion or song length, as well as international school holidays. Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales. (via Martin Dugage at Mopsos)

Now let's see if this filters through to main stream press, who have been accepting the music industries explanation without critical examination.
This further backs up the story from Australia where the music industry just had their best year ever, and tried to cover it up, to not undermine their crusade against file sharing.

Oh and if you want to contribute to ending the scam, and getting artists their earned income: Gary's out to slay the RIAA dragon. (see his list of related entries)

Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at April 13, 2004 07:19 AM)

Dutch Bloggercon?

I often wondered about the relatively silent Dutch blogosphere. Mainly lifelogs and linkdumps, hardly anything else. In fact most Dutch bloggers I read aren't even writing in Dutch, they use English.

Now Peter Breuls, commenting on how he can't go to the Bloggercon this week in Harvard (Will you be at BlogTalk then Peter?), proposes to organize a blogging conference right here in the Netherlands.

Being one of the people organizing BlogWalk, and as the first event took place in the Netherlands, I am certainly interested in this initiative. Also I'm willing to help organize it.

Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at April 12, 2004 11:09 AM)

Embryonal photoblogging

My partners mother is an avid photographer. She used to have her own dark room etc. Since some time she's experimenting with digital photography quite successfully, and whenever we visit Elmine's parents a new set of pictures will decorate the kitchen door. As a kitchen door is hard to pass around to others to look at the pictures, we set up a photoblog for her.

Over at fenneke.wijnia.com you'll find the basic set up. Current content is just some holiday shots from our own trip to Denmark in 2003, which we used as testing material. I'm confident more interesting stuff will show up there in the coming days.

Oh, and while I was at it, I created a photoblog for myself as well, which I named Sensory Input. Don't know if I'll be a regular poster, but it might entice me to do more with the pictures I take than just transfer them from the camera to the hard-drive.

A big thank you to Martin Röll (from Bilder im Kopf) and Anders Jacobsen (from Extrospection) for providing me with their templates. I'll try and alter the templates in time, so that my photoblog (phlog?) does not seem a 1:1 copy anymore. ;)

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at April 10, 2004 06:07 PM)

All BlogWalk 1.0 Yellow Notes

I've put together a page with all yellow notes that were used during BlogWalk 1.0 on March 19th in Enschede.

Just one shot of many yellow notes

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at April 7, 2004 09:45 PM)

Blogtalk 2.0 Line-up Announced

The proposals for BlogTalk 2.0 have been reviewed by the steering committee, and the line-up is now announced at Randgaenge.

Some familiar names, some hoped for names, and some unfamiliar ones. Now all that is left for me to do is booking a place to stay.

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at April 7, 2004 09:12 PM)

Google-bombing for Good

Jew

(for an explanation, please read Scot Allen's weblog.

[Update] As soon as I posted this, I saw in Google that the result is already achieved. The Wikipedia page for Jew is now in the number one spot. Whereas the hate mongering site has dropped down to number 2.

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at April 6, 2004 07:33 AM)

Lessons from volunteering

This is social networking in practice.
If you have been wondering why Phil Wolff was blogging so sparsely on Klog Apart, you now know why.

I've been rationalizing the 30-50 hours a week of grassroots campaigning I've been investing in the local Kerry campaign since last summer. Changing the world is great, and we're doing that. My takeaway is what I learn from it, how the work itself changes me. Here are a few lessons learned.

Interesting nuggets in the lessons Phil took away from campaigning locally in the primaries in the U.S.

Especially about how to bring people up the ladder of activity after you, and on how to deal with the enormous variety of people involved. Thanks to Phil for sharing this.

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at April 5, 2004 08:57 PM)

BlogStories

Lilia Efimova and I, on the night before BlogWalk, were talking about how we tend to start talking about the technology involved when people ask us about blogging. We throw in RSS, trackback and whatnot. Probably because the tools are what all blogs have in common.

But that is not why we find blogging so useful. That is about how it changed and shaped us, our learning, our professional development etc. So we thought about gathering blog stories to illustrate how blogs made a difference to you (and me).

I've opened a wiki-space, called BlogStories, where you can add your story / stories.

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) (posted by Ton Zijlstra at April 1, 2004 10:01 PM)