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Dina pointed to Brandon Wirtz with this interesting ‘late entry’ into the elevator pitch contest for corporate blogging:

Blogging to the outside is about building relationships. You don’t have to turn every reader in to a dyed in the wool customer, but you turn them in to some one who is willing to consider your company when they go to spend their hard earned money. You build loyalty, and you show that you do care about the feedback you get. Blogging is like sitting on your front porch and waving to your neighbors as they walk by. You don’t have to have a great dialog with each of them, but they will remember who you are and think of you when they need something, or be there to help out when they can.
Blogging to the inside is about building relationships, but it is also about perpetuating dialog. A blog lets you put your idea out for everyone to see. It is like the ultimate suggestion box. And because blogging happens on neutral ground no one has to take offense to contradictary ideas. You can say this is what I feel we need to be doing, and if some one else says, this is what we should be doing instead, the discussion can be about the ideas not the people. You don’t get that level playing field in a conference room where you worry about rank, or department, or even if you like the other person. Blogs are like coming home after work, sitting down on the front porch and having a beer with your co-workers.
Blogs are just a front porch.

Now, here in the Netherlands front porches would take way too much space, so we do without them. But the cultural icon is recognizable to me, watching American tv shows. I’m wondering what metaphor we should have to change this eloquent pitch into, for different cultural realms. Sidewalks for busy cities? Spending the first few hours of the evening out by the fountain on the market square? The corner caf�? These are all western examples, but how about India for instance?
This picture of front porches, people passing by, connects (through the sidewalks I just mentioned) to a book, (and it will make sense when you’ve read it yourself), I’ve just finished reading: Steven Johnson‘s Emergence, which connects several of my lines of thought, regarding evolution, blogs as bottom up filtering, and emergent behaviour, and how that to me spells radical change of how we should view and design our organisations. Jon Husband has coined this beautiful word for this new type of organisation: wirearchy. He was also the one who gave me the book Emergence when we recently met, which he in turn borrowed from Euan Semple. So while Jon set out to buy two new books for Euan and himself, he entrusted the other copy, which is starting to look like a well-worn item, to me, with the implicit understanding that I would find someone else to give it to after reading. With the upcoming BlogWalk 2.0 in N�rnberg, finding a suitable candidate won’t be too hard to find.
[UPDATE] Sebastien Paquet points me to this post by Peter Kaminski of January 3rd: Blogs are like front porches

8 reactions on “Your blog is your front porch”

  2. http://www.griffin-digital.com/200405archive001.asp#1083524745001
    Dina links to Ton who is looking for analogies to the front porch. In my backwards world with Amish nieghbors, and a community small enough that when you go to the grocery store you can be you will see someone you know. It is dificult to comprehend that there are places that aren’t like that.
    But in that same breath I realize that America is a young country and every one here remembers a time when land wasn’t at a premium. We can picture our parents and grandparents sitting on the porch sipping, Lemonade, or Beer, or Mint Julips depending on where in the US you are from. We can connect with the Bruce Springsteen music video that shows guys in the factory going home and grilling and drinking, equals at the end of the day.
    Not having experience in places far away and exotic I don’t know as I can help with an analogy, but it is good to think that people like the idea of the analogy.

  3. Interesting analogy, but metaphors can be slippery — in all my years rural and city living in Manitoba and Ontario, the only real front-porch culture of this welcoming sort that I can remember were the hippies of Yorkville. Only that wasn’t really a welcoming, it was more a flag-waving of “You got any? Wanna buy some?” …
    There was also Old Joe who sat there on his highway-side porch seemingly 360 days a year keeping his tabs on every movement in the village. True, when my old clunker of a car drained its battery yet again, as a newcomer to town, I went to Joe for assistance …
    “You want me to hook my ’54 Studebaker to that???” was the answer, but Old Joe did it anyway, and we were line-of-sight waving acquaintances afterward.
    In general, the porch sitters tended to have that reputation of the busy-bodies, the nosies, hardly a welcoming lighthouse, more like the Neighbourhood Watch … or the Thought Police.
    By contrast, our first real friend in that same village was the woman who threw down her window with a loud bang, stuck her head out at us strolling the baby by her yard and yelled in a voice only a country mother can truly fathom, “You comin’ in for coffee … or what?”
    The second and the rest of our friends in the village happened the same way they’d happened in Winnipeg, Ottawa or Toronto, and this is maybe apropos to this metaphor of the porch: They all happened via the Intranet, via the relatively closed and private laundry-hanging, over-the-fence and kids-playing spaces of the back-yards, the back staircases, the adjacent roof-tops, spaces where the casual public never goes, where there is only the Us, the In-Crowd of Insiders, those who are supposed to be here.

  6. Blo(g|ck) Party

    Seeing Rebecca Ryan’s post about the virtues of having a physical front porch reminded me of the cool intertwingled set of Ton, Dina, Brandon and me (via Seb) talking about blogs as front porches. It makes Eileen Foley’s Porch culture…

  7. Blo(g|ck) Party

    Seeing Rebecca Ryan’s post about the virtues of having a physical front porch reminded me of the cool intertwingled set of Ton, Dina, Brandon and me (via Seb) talking about blogs as front porches. It makes Eileen Foley’s Porch culture…

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