Social Media, Blogging and Technical Content

Phillip Greenspun's book on creating communities was not only pioneering but also a premonition of times to come: he proved out to be right

If you are a technical professional you see how social media, specially blogging is being used. In a recent interview, John Chambers, Cisco's CEO described internal company video blogging. He seemed surprised at the change in his attitude towards blogging. Apparently as recently as two years ago he would not have taken up blogging, it was for non-business techies and leisure time teens. Until his managers eased him into it and he noticed the results. Cisco has also adopted an external blogging effort which is a good example on how to start (see Cisco's blogs). Cisco is similar to other large technology companies and their need to communicate very deep technical messages to a small number of busy decision makers (Intel's blogs, Oracle blogs). In a recent article, Bob Scheier a technology writer, described this phenomena in an article with an interesting title: "Still Think Social Media is Only for Teenagers or Ditsy Trend Followers?" (see article). Blogging is not new to technologists, actually blogs and wikis have been used for Linux support in the early days of the Linux. I wrote a while ago about Phil Greenspun's social commenting features as far back as the 1980's in Photo.NET. Phil was awarded a Ph.D. from MIT for his effort and at the time he commented how the old guard professors, the ones teaching operating system and adaptive systems, were wondering what was happening to their MIT graduates now that they are not solving differential equations or comming up with theories in computing. Phil put up a photo commenting and uploading site and quickly realized that the "community" can get more photos and helpful information on photography that he can ever do by himself. That mix of curiosity and technical ability created Photo.NET and eventually Ars Digita a pioneering company using open source code to build communities for corporate customers (Ars Digita Community server is not open source and lives beyond the company) [Greenspun's book: Philip and Alex's guide to Web Publishing / Amazon / B&N / Borders].

Blogs are now the preferred format for technical communication. They are focused channels for information, ideas and discussion. In some companies like Red Hat, blogs are not yet a corporate policy, they are not a business driven channel (which Oracle has done for a long time now) (Red Hat Apps blogs). But the Fedora blog is an interesting departure. The Fedora blog is an interesting and informative channel mixing personal life stories with useful technical information. Even if you are not a technologists and even if you do not work with Fedora, this is an excellent example of a blog for techies. I can immagine a Fedora system admin or developer reading this blog on a regular basis and getting a sense of community. This is something technology marketers aim for in their work and rarely achieve with any other method. In the past we went to conferences in snazzy hotels for a few days just to rub elbows and exchange ideas. Technology companies still hold seminars and send out printed newsletters, which serve as community information channels. Now we can do it in more depth and have our birthday pictures viewed by everyone to boot (post also on the Fefora Planet blog August 30, 2009).

Finally, I don't think that blogging is something that the entrenched managers "don't get". It is more of seeing and using than "getting it". It is like most technologies which are very different than what we do today. Until now discussion groups (message boards) were not friendly ways to get people to communicate so we only used them when we needed crucial information. Groups like Yahoo-Groups were focused but had difficult interfaced to deal with. Blogs are a forward step, progress is a nice thing in technology. If you are a curious and daring soul, try blogging. Put time, energy and creativity into it. Learn from the thousands of free resources, blogs about blogging were the big thing when blogs started a decade ago, the articles are still there. And send me your blog address or a good story. After all, this is what social media is all about.