Social Media - Restoring the American Dream?

May 12, 2008 at 6:49 am · Filed under Blogging, Collaboration, Columbus, Energy, Peak Oil, WOSU

When de Tocqeuville came to America he was stunned by how Americans did not wait for the official authorities to fix local problems as they did in France. He saw that Americans usually got together as a community and worked things out for themselves. Most of see now that this response has been lost.

But there are signs that blogging and social media is restoring the original values of America. Here is how “The Other Paper” is describing the work that WOSU is doing to spark the Bloggers in Columbus to life as a real force in the city:

A civic divide is growing in Columbus. For the past decade or so, ordinary people have become less inclined to call their political representatives or drive all the way down to City Hall to personally lobby government officials.

But a community of tech-savvy, affluent white kids say they’re picking up the slack. Columbus’s bloggers believe they’re furthering democracy, improving the economy and advancing humanity—all without missing Grey’s Anatomy.

Ranked as the No. 8 most active blogging community in the nation, an estimated 10 percent of Columbus inhabitants regularly pounded the keyboard in 2007, offering up online commentary themselves or consuming somebody else’s, according to Nielson Media Research.

If you’re among the remaining 90 percent, all this probably seems like a colossal waste of time.

In fact, according to the bloggers themselves, they’re saving the city.

“The need for two-way or conversational media is more vital than ever,” said Jeff Johnson of the Urban Infill blog.

Johnson compared his medium with what he called the “doomsday” style of the mainstream media. Traditional outlets simply report troublesome news, he said. Bloggers, on the other hand, “have a propensity for uncovering solutions,” he said.

When bloggers get together, “We create ideas. We create a vibration that this city is thirsting for.”

There are problems that just cannot be solved by the “authorities”. Will the school system reform itself? How will the mortgage crisis resolve iself? How will the middle class and the working poor cope with higher oil prices? My bet is that these kinds of issues can only be resolved by communities working with each other.

Here is how they are helping with the Mayor’s plan for bringing back streetcars:

“These are the kind of people who will make Columbus great as we move forward,” said Mike Brown, spokesman for Mayor Mike Coleman.

“This audience is important to the mayor, and he is paying attention,” he said.

Nevertheless, the mayor is eager to capture the hearts and minds of the demographic that lean toward blogging, Brown said.

“Many of them are young, creative professionals. He loves the energy.”

One reason Coleman might love the energy is that bloggers have embraced his pet proposal: streetcars. The online community has been more supportive than the public at large for the mayor’s plan, which is now stalled, to run a streetcar line between Downtown and campus.

Many bloggers have put “My blog supports Columbus Streetcars” icons on their websites. RetroMetro’s Paul Bonneville has launched Columbus-streetcars.com, the “unofficial citizen support site for the Columbus Streetcars.”

I think in 2008, the pips will begin to squeak. Higher food and energy costs will begin to fracture how we all live. Where I live on Prince Edward Island in Canada, the average wage is $26,000. Half the people live in rural settings and have to have a car/truck. We have a 6 month heating season. Many are hanging on by their finger nails right now.  I am sure that large parts of America are in the same situation.

I think it will become clear soon that we will have to re-design nearly every aspect of how we live becuase the design we use now assumes affordable energy prices.

Social Software may well be at the heart of how we do this re-design.

Comments

Survey: Demand for Web 2.0 Skills Hot, Getting Hotter

April 18, 2008 at 2:55 pm · Filed under Blogging, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Google, IT Department, Microsoft, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Yahoo, enterprise software, mashups

I recently completed work on a survey report for Evans Data measuring the impact and trends shaping Web 2.0 projects within the enterprise.

The survey of 385 corporate managers and developers covered Web 2.0-based development mechanisms — such as mashups and gadgets/widgets — as well as social networking tools. Both types of environments are now very much a part of the corporate scene, and have become important tools for corporate applications, the survey finds.

Demand for Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 talent is hot, as a matter of fact. Two out of three respondents say their demand for such talent will increase over the coming year. That’s because there is a lot of strategic business-to-business and internal business development going on by software developers in the survey. Developers are working on Web 2.0 software for business applications in several areas, including interface design, gadgets and widgets, and social networking.

Most Web 2.0 applications are being targeted at internal corporate requirements, versus consumer engagements. Close to half of the survey participants are focused on developing applications for internal use inside their companies. Less than a third are building Web 2.0 applications intended for delivery on a subscription base to online users.

Forty percent of interfaces for Web 2.0 applications are “mixed” web-rich clients that include AJAX for fast downloads of pages that include live feeds of data (gadgets) and other dynamic components found in Web 2.0 applications. An overwhelming majority of respondents are using gadgets and widgets (portable Web parts) from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo! and others to deploy fast, lightweight business applications and services.

More than four out of ten companies encourage social networking; however, most feel the business value still needs to be demonstrated at this time. Social networking is strongest among developers in scientific and technical fields, who see social networking as a communications and collaboration medium, and among OEMs and systems integrators, who see benefits in product delivery.

Comments (1)

Blogs and Jobs

April 14, 2008 at 11:34 am · Filed under Andy Carvin, Blogging, David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Jeff Jarvis, Paid Work, Seth Godin

Jeff at NPR with Andy Carvin, me and David Weinberger taken by Doc Searls

Jeff Jarvis writes today about the value of his blog - He says that it has got him all his work over the last few years. The same is true for me. NPR, all my work in New Media, Blackwater, Education - all my paying gigs have come through this medium.

Our money comes largely as a side effect: Here is Seth on that -

At a seminar at the local library, someone asked, “how do I make a lot of money blogging?”

My guess is that at least week’s seminar, the one on growing orchids, no one raised his hand and said, “how do I make a lot of money growing orchids?”

Sure, people make money growing orchids. Some people probably get rich growing orchids. Not many though. And my guess is that the people who do make money gardening probably didn’t set out to do so.

Blogging is much the same way. The best bloggers make money, but mostly as a side effect, not as a direct result of setting out to use a blog to make a profit. It’s just too long a ramp up time, too frustrating and too uncertain to be the best path to make a living.

If it makes you happy (and your readers happy) it’s a great place to start. Step by step you get better at it, and then you discover the ancillary benefits. But the benefits kick in best when you don’t set out to achieve them.

What about you?

Comments (2)

For All Those Who Have Said Blogging Was Just A Fad …

March 9, 2008 at 11:51 am · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Blogging, Business Model, Culture, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Messy World, New Realities, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Services, Wisdom of Crowds, enterprise software

I remember literally scores of conversations over the past five years with smart people in various areas of business and the professions … almost all of whom were over approximately 35 years old … in which they were dismissive of blogging, for one or other of the various now-well-known reasons that blogging is often portrayed as demonstrative of human foibles, warts and the fact that not everyone is a well-read, thoughtful and considerate person when expressing themselves.

Here, via the Guardian (UK) is a brief report that demonstrates how far and wide the impact of blogging has spread.  We know that many mainstream online publications have adopted many of the features, and worked at increasing interactivity with readers, and I suggest here that this is but a harbinger of things yet to come.

.

The world’s 50 most powerful blogs

From Prince Harry in Afghanistan to Tom Cruise ranting about Scientology and footage from the Burmese uprising, blogging has never been bigger. It can help elect presidents and take down attorney generals while simultaneously celebrating the minutiae of our everyday obsessions.

Here are the 50 best reasons to log on.

.

The spread of the use of wikis and blogs into the world of enterprises began being considered not long after the rise of blogging as a sociological phenomenon, and made clear the different dynamics and structural impediments that would be encountered as the tools and services spread into the organizational environment.  Humans spend a lot of their time communicating with each other … always have done, and always will do so.  And wikis and blogs make it easier to do so in an interlinked environment in which humans use integrated information systems, keyboards and computer screens and software to enable their communications.

I know I am stating the obvious here, but the concepts of knowledge work and knowledge workers take on additional meaning, I  think, when one considers that much of the products we purchase and use are manufactured elsewhere, such that much of business and the activity of many organizations consists of exchanging information in the pursuit of product design and development, marketing, sales and customer service.

Email is still in many cases the "killer app" for human communications, but the advent of wikis and blogs lent some additional structure and focusing-of-purpose (in the context of knowledge work in an enterprise) to communicating for the purpose of accomplishing objectives.  That’s a key reason why essentially every purveyor of enterprise software has incorporated the capabilities of wikis, blogs and easy publishing to the Web into the collaboration suites  they are now working at selling to the enterprise IT function.

It was this realization, for example, that led to the writing of "Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of Web 2.0".  I was a reasonably early adopter of blogging, and because I had been involved in the issues of work design for the past two decades, I became convinced that wikis and blogs would spread into the enterprise setting.  I thought they were a natural extension beyond using email for people to communicate and share information that may be useful to small groups of other people interested in the same or similar issues.

In 2003 I began arguing about that with a man who was on the Board of Directors of the blogging start-up I co-founded (Qumana) and who at one time had been the head of KM research at the Gartner Group.  His position was that it was just a fad that teenagers and cranks were using to bleat on about whatever it was they wanted to bleat on about, and my position was that "yes, there was that aspect to it", but that it was also a natural way for people to express ideas, opinions, point others to useful information, carry out arguments and dialogue and spark insights and the need to collaborate.

Well, blogs and wikis continued to spread and eventually Web 2.0 and then Enterprise 2.0 became recognized as domains of ongoing activity in which participation, interactivity and collaboration were key dynamics.  In 2006, he (the man I was arguing with) basically said  "OK, you win" and challenged me to add the observations and knowledge about the use of social computing (wikis, blogs, etc.) to the existing edition of "Making Knowledge Work" which had not foreseen the rise and penetration of Web 2.0 tools, services and dynamics into the enterprise setting.

It will be most interesting to see what the state of human communications looks like in 2015, both inside the firewall of organizations, and outside … although it may be that the lines between "inside" and ‘outside" continue to blur, the beginnings of which we have already seen and which has been much discussed, though to date mainly in the realms of marketing, PR and more recently product development.

.

Powered by Qumana

Comments (6)

Wal*Mart Speak Truth to Power

March 3, 2008 at 6:57 am · Filed under Adoption, Blogging, Enterprise 2.0, WalMart, Web 2.0

Who ever would have thought that one of the real early adopters in corporate blogging would be Wal*Mart?

Well they are: Checkoutblog.com

Their corporate blog is not written by a senior executive a la GM or Boeing but a by a gang of buyers - who let it all hang out. Like many or all new bloggers in the corporate world - speaking the unvarnished truth was not the first step that Wal*Mart took: (NYT)

This is not Wal-Mart’s first plunge into the blogosphere. Several years ago, when the retailer’s public relations problems began to mount, it turned to the Web for relief. It created one blog, Working Families for Wal-Mart, to trumpet the chain’s accomplishments and ding its critics. It created another, Wal-Marting Across America, to highlight the good deeds and productive careers of Wal-Mart employees.

Critics dismissed both as thinly veiled extensions of Wal-Mart’s P.R. department, and Wal-Mart shut them down.

The lesson seemed clear: create an authentic blog or don’t create a blog at all.

Wal-Mart employees began developing Check Out (subtitled “Where the Lanes Are All Open”) a year ago and recruited a handful of buyer-bloggers last fall, giving them rudimentary training on how to post their writing, upload videos and create hyperlinks.

The focus of the Web site, the novice bloggers decided, would be electronics, given the reliable appetite for gadget reviews and news on the Web, with a sprinkling of posts on the environment, toys and furniture.

After heeding the lessons of Wal-Mart’s earlier blogs and consulting with several well-known bloggers from sites like the Huffington Post, the buyers decided the site would succeed only if they wrote in their own voice, free from censorship and corporate review.

“Readers can tell if people are being genuine or monitored,” said Alex Cook, the merchandise manager for Wal-Mart’s entertainment division, who blogs about computers and electronics (and who wrote the lukewarm review of Windows Vista).

Anil Dash, a blogger at Six Apart, which makes blogging software, said the evolution in Wal-Mart’s thinking about blogs was typical. “You start with this total lockdown, suits read everything, one post a month model,” he said. “Then you evolve. A year later, you get one that is more open. A year after that, they start to do something that is far more authentic.”

Mr. Dash said Wal-Mart’s decision to let buyers do the blogging reflected a growing recognition that “trying to control who can speak and what they can say does not work.”

Mr. Agarwal said the company had no problems with any of the posts so far. “If you are a vendor and you talk to your Wal-Mart buyer all the time, you are going to know their likes and dislikes anyway,” he said.

I think that this is wonderful - there is really no excuse for others not to take this step now. What is this doing to the culture inside? Some one really put a stake in the ground and has created the kind of space where it is safe for these folks to do this - I would love to hear more.

For me now the issue is not “What” I think that we know the What. It is “How” How do organizations who have made control their bible allow themselves to allow this?

Comments

Andrew McAfee Must Have Been Quite Persuasive …

February 24, 2008 at 9:03 pm · Filed under 2.0 Design Thinking, Blogging, Change, Culture, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, FASTforward08, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, podcasts

I don’t think it was as a result of Andrew’s presentation at the recent FASTForward 08 conference, but may have been related to the recent Enterprise 2.0 / KM discussion reported on this blog involving Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee, moderated by colleague Jim McGee.

David Gurteen reports in his most recent newsletter that Tom Davenport has agreed to understand that social software and social computing has a growing and perhaps central role in the ongoing evolution of knowledge work.  This is news because it was, I believe, beginning to seem as if Davenport was becoming a somewhat curmudgeonly holdout against a growing consensus that wikis, blogs and social computing are having a clear impact on the nature of knowledge work and the "management" off socially-constructed just-in-time knowledge.

As a general assertion, I think it’s fair to say that social computing is bringing new capabilities and capacity to the (interactive) construction of just-in-time knowledge in an environment characterized by ongoing flows of information

Tom Davenport quoted in the Gurteen Knowledge newsletter:

.

" Still, that E2.0 is the new KM didn’t hit me for a while. But when Andy said the ultimate value of E2.0 initiatives consists of greater responsiveness, better "knowledge capture and sharing",  and more effective "collective intelligence", there wasn’t much doubt. When he talked about the need for a willingness to share and a helpful attitude, I remembered all the times over the past 15 years I’d heard that about KM."

and later

"I admit to a mild hostility to the hype around Enterprise 2.0 in the past. I have reacted in a curmudgeonly fashion to what smelled like old wine in new bottles. But I realized after hearing Andy talk that he was an ally, not a competitor. If E2.0 can give KM a mid-life kicker, so much the better. If a new set of technologies can bring about a knowledge-sharing culture, more power to them. Knowledge management was getting a little tired anyway."

.

Actually, it’s not fair to say that Tom Davenport "has agreed to understand" …. it’s more fair to say that the context in which terminology and jargon are being used has become clearer to him and more commonly shared amongst participants in (an important) conversation.

It seems clear to me that "Enterprise 2.0" is here to stay … the clearest signal to date is the raft of changes made over the past two or three years to the mainstream offerings of the biggest workplace productivity vendors to enable many forms of collaboration, combined with acquisitions, strategic alliances with innovative smaller E2.0 players and the beginning moves by the major consulting firms (such as publishing white papers, surveys and research reports) to pay attention to the emerging Enterprise 2.0 field.

I believe that social computing in the workplace will lead to the re-design of the fundamental principles of knowledge work.  Dave Snowden is a well-known KM guru who has said as much in a podcast created several months ago wherein I asked him about the likely impacts of Web 2.0 on knowledge work and knowledge management. 

Here’s a link to that podcast, wherein in my opinion Dave holds forth on the coming changes to the design and dynamics of knowledge work in a particularly clear and coherent manner.

Dave Snowden is also fond of saying that "one should not throw the baby out with the bathwater" … and in the context of this post I think it’s useful to note that one of the happy outcomes of our growing understanding of the Enterprise 2.0 field is that the advent of using wikis and blogs and widgets and social computing inside the firewall does not mean that all the thinking, theorizing and implementation of initiatives related to KM 1.0 needs to be tossed away.  Rather it seems that much of what has gone before can be built upon and enhanced, and notably in the areas of cultural adaptation and changes to management practices.

Indeed, I (and my co-author Jim Bair) have tried to reflect these emerging perspectives in a just-published industry book titled "Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of Web 2.0" - (ARK Group UK), recently given an initial once-over on this blog by colleague Bill Ives, wherein I cite Andrew McAfee, Tom Davenport, Dave Snowden, Dion Hinchcliffe, Ikujiro Nonaka and a number of other well-known KM theorists and practitioners.  I like to believe that the book’s content has struck an initial balance between the complex taxonomies of many organizations’ accumulated "knowledge", the large investments made over the past decade to enterprise information architecture, many workers’ need for some structure and direction and the clear power of more organic social computing carried out by interconnected individuals with a wide range of styles when it comes to cognition, learning and ways to turn pertinent information into useful knowledge.

I also think it’s clear that we are all going to be learning a lot more about the design, dynamics and management of knowledge work over the next several years.  It will never be left to be completely organic - free-flowing, self-assembling and emergent.  Humans are tinkerers, especially in a technocratic era and even more so those of such an era who are bent on having organizations perform more and better.  They will always be looking for ways to make knowledge and knowledge work more effective and more profitable. 

FASTForward 08 made that clear.

Powered by Qumana

Comments (2)

Sandy Kemsley, consultant and blogger

February 20, 2008 at 9:42 am · Filed under Blogging, FASTForward '08, User Revolution

Sandy comments on the empowerment of the individual/user and the power shift that has occurred that allows them to do things they couldn’t have a decade ago.

 

 Sandy Kemsley: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (218)

Comments

Sited … CounterIntuitive

February 8, 2008 at 10:16 pm · Filed under Adoption, Blogging, Culture, Dead Paradigms, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, New Realities, Social Computing, Trust, Twitter, User Revolution, Web 2.0

Via Jeremiah Owyang on Twitter, I learned that George Colony, Forrester’s CEO, has recently started a blog (… as Rob Paterson has been pointing out, Twitter is a great place to pick what’s of interest to you out of a flow of murmurs, pointers and other snippets from a bunch of smart people)

I think Forrester has been pretty steady and early in their understanding that blogging is here to stay and will have large impacts upon marketing, PR and the evolution of knowledge work inside the enterprise.  Forrester’s Charlene Li was early to the party and produced some good research about the blogging and social software phenomena in a business context …

• Blogging:  Big Deal or Bubble?  (November 2004)
• Corporate Blogging Policies (Public Wiki)
• The ROI of Blogging - The "Why" and "How" of External Blogging Accountability (January 2007)

.

… and more recently Forrester had the good sense to hire Jeremiah (Owyang), a smart and well-informed fellow.

.

.

It will be interesting to watch and read Colony’s blogging, and over time see if he, like many other people, comes to believe that it is useful to think, question and listen in public and "out loud".

.

Tags: Forrester, CEO blogging, Charlene Li, Jeremiah Owyang

Powered by Qumana

Comments (1)

Forrester’s Most Recent Predictions for the Emerging Enterprise 2.0 Market

January 28, 2008 at 9:23 pm · Filed under Blogging, Change, Economics, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, IBM, IT Department, Social Computing, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0, Web Services, Wisdom of Crowds, enterprise software

This just off the presses at ZDNet …

It won’t be a surprise to most of the FASTForward blog readers, as I think there’s probably a unanimous consensus amongst analysts and pundits who write on this blog that social computing in an enterprise setting and the related architectures of hardware and software is an important and massive shift that will affect knowledge work and organizational structures.

And it’s now clear that Forrester, Gartner, Jupiter, McKinsey, Deloitte Touche, Watson Wyatt, Ernst & Young, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun … all the major ‘brand name’ providers of advice and technology to enterprises … are taking the emergence of Enterprise 2.0 very seriously.

.

Enterprise Web 2.0 predictions from Forrester

Forrester published a report, “Top Enterprise Web 2.0 Predictions For 2008” ($775, about $100 per page), which concludes that blogs, wikis, and social networking will further gain importance in 2008 as enterprises look to Web 2.0 tools to solve long-standing worker problems.

Not a big revelation.

.

..

UPDATE:

Huh ?  42% "Not on our agenda" and 32%  "Not a priority"  translates into Forrester’s "Web 2.0 will be a 2008 priority" ?

Did that non sequitur get your attention ? It did mine.

The next section of the short ZDNet piece states:

Forrester expects at least half of the 42 percent of enterprises that say Web 2.0 is not on their agenda to make it a priority by year’s end. Here’s why:

First, the IT shops that began experimenting with enterprise Web 2.0 tools for their own use in 2007 — for tasks like help desk ticket resolution, standards and documentation tracking and IT project management — will begin rolling out these tools more broadly to lines of business as they pass IT muster.

Second, CIOs will concede that they cannot quell passionate employees’ use of consumer-oriented or SaaS Web 2.0 tools and will mitigate risk by deploying enterprise-class tools in their stead.

Finally, for IT departments aspiring to be more relevant to the business, enterprise Web 2.0 tools will be a high-impact, low-cost method to show leadership and innovation.

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Forrester

Powered by Qumana

Comments (9)

Here’s how Enterprise 2.0 can fix vexing management issues

January 7, 2008 at 9:38 pm · Filed under Blogging, Business Model, Change, Culture, Economics, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Messy World, Public Insight Journalism, Relationships, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution, Wisdom of Crowds

Getting people to work effectively together in organizations has been a challenge since Og and Um opened their first wheel shop in 10,000 B.C. Over the ages, various motivational and management techniques have been employed, from floggings to trinket rewards to floggings.

In the 20th century, we saw the rise of “scientific” management, but still, organizations continued to look like pyramids — with a few individuals on top, and the rest at the bottom.

Will Enterprise 2.0 flatten the pyramid, once and for all? Gary Hamel is Visiting Professor of Strategic and International Management at the London Business School says that the Web may finally be sweeping away the rigid hierarchies and replacing them with truly participative and collaborative networks.

Here’s how he says it can happen:

Encourage more corporate democracy: Before, employees further down the food chain rarely had their views heard. Hamel urges organizations to use blogs to unleash the same “citizen media” forces within organizations as is happening across the Internet at large.

Unleash formerly hidden creativity. As Hamel puts it: “Make no mistake, your company is filled with video bloggers, mixers, hackers, mashers, tuners, and podcasters. The question is what is your company doing to help all of these ingenious people become fully empowered business innovators?”

Non-traditional funding for new innovation. Hamel notes the rise of non-traditional lenders, enabled through social markets, which potentially can create more funding options for employees eager to experiment with new ideas. Imagine, he says, a company in which managers and employees “was given permission to invest up to 55% of their discretionary resources in any idea, anywhere across the company that they deemed attractive. Suddenly, internal entrepreneurs would have the chance to appeal to dozens of potential ‘angel investors.’

Internal market for decision making. “The Web is a great tool for collating the views of hundreds—or even thousands—of individuals and has spawned a wide variety of ‘opinion markets,’” Hamel says. Suppose “your company created an internal ‘market for judgment’ that aggregated the views of a broad cross section of employees with the goal of establishing the odds that a particular project will meet its intended return. For every big new project, employees would have the chance to buy a security that would pay out only if the initiative achieved a predetermined rate of return.” Such online markets already exist for predicting the outcome of world events and elections.

Liquid power. “An ideal management system would be one in which power was automatically redistributed when environmental changes devalued executive knowledge and competence,” Hamel says. “You may find it hard to imagine an organization in which authority is a fluid commodity, flowing smoothly toward leaders who add value and away from those who don’t, yet this is how the Web works today. In the online world, power and influence are the product of de facto leadership, rather than de jure appointments. Hierarchies get built from the bottom-up, rather than from the top down.”

Comments (1)

Scenes from the New Workplace

December 20, 2007 at 11:16 pm · Filed under Blogging, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 may have interesting ramifications on workplace interactions. Once again, Oliver Widder of Geek & Poke fame enlightens us.

Comments (1)

The History of Social Media

December 14, 2007 at 7:56 am · Filed under Andy Carvin, Blogging, Enterprise 2.0, NPR, Social Media

Andy Carvin will be on air on Morning Edition talking about the history of Blogging and its impact on society. In preparation he asked for help on identifying milestones.

Here is the list that he is currently considering - he and I both agreed on the first - unusual one -  What do you think?

1st Century BCE: Julius Caesar writes De Bello Gallico, raising the bar for military bloggers more than 2,000 years later.

1690: Benjamin Harris of Boston publishes the first independent newspaper in North America, presaging the golden age of late-18th century American pamphleteers. The four-page broadside left the final page blank so readers could add their own comments and news stories before passing it on to another person. The paper was a flop.

1776: Thomas Paine, unofficial blogger-in-chief of the American Revolution, publishes the influential pamphlet Common Sense.

1945: The Atlantic Monthly publishes Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think, which examines the future of knowledge and prophesies the development of the Internet, desktop computing and personal publishing, among other innovations.

1984: The creation of Listserv, the first email discussion group software.

1986: The launch of Cleveland Freenet, one of the first “community networks” through which residents could post community updates and discuss local issues.

2003: Iranian Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi launches his own blog, well before many U.S. politicians catch on to the idea.

2003: In one of the first major audio blogging experiments, public radio host Christopher Lydon publishes mp3 files on a website, using an RSS feed developed by Dave Winer so people could subscribe to them. That same year, Winer would organize Bloggercon, one of the first national gatherings of bloggers.

2004: Ben Hammersley, in an article for the UK Guardian newspaper, d