Full Circle Associates

Updated Feb 21 with links and formatting...

I’m sitting in the back of the room with 220 other people at NorthernVoice. As I attempt to blog parts of Northern Voice, the first keynote is just ramping up. What follows is my best attempt to capture verbatim Tim's presentation. I'll try and find the link to his slides.

Tim Bray – How a Good Blog is Like a Good Soup
What’s IN That Soup Pot
Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies, Sun Microsystems

I launched my blog on Feb 27 2003, few days of anniversary. Had a full head of hair and no gray in the beard. Watch out for this. This is not an ordinary conference, not a blogging conference. Audience participation is compulsory and arduous.

The title of this presentation suggests that this is about soup. Soup as a metaphor for blogs. Water/transparency, onion spice. Turnips and radishes and the metaphor becomes laborious. So we are going to abandon that tack. (Nice picture of soup).

That doesn’t work because blogging is way more complicated in soup. If we discuss how to blog, we start with why to blog, what we are trying to accomplish by blogging.

Soup making objective: design goals are pretty simple. Tasty, nutritious, attractive. That’s simple and easy to understand. There is a bit of a blogging metaphor. When I present on this stuff to non bloggers. Successful blogging is a three legged stool.]: having something interesting to write about, being an interesting person and being a good writer. Two out of the three will do. Blogging is more complicated than soup.

What would the objectives be for blogging: That’s not simple at all. Make money, read the right people, find love, make the top 100, change the world, create something of beauty and power, boosting career, if I don’t get this off my chest I’ll kill someone. Can’t not write. Blogging is a better way to go for that last one.

Now lets get interactive. Lets do a little bit of polling. Let’s assume that everyone reads blogs. Or are there anyone totally new here – 10-20 hands. Welcome, we are ok when you get to know us. How many of you have blogs? Multiple blogs? (many hands0.

How many of you are basically happy with the experience and are going to go on or how many find it is not working. Troubled. Few hands.

So to start with, I want to try and rank these a little bit. Lets see if I’ve missed any. Open the floor at this point. Would any would suggest any reasons that aren’t on this slide.

Sharing information

Creating relationships

Bragging

My friends are doing it

All my friends aren’t’ doing it

Dave Winer told me to

To understand the practice of blogging

Learning

Back up brand

Memory

Google finds me

(He puts them all on the slide. Sort of. He switches the screen around. Mutters to himself a bit.)

Here we have the .... (missed a bit of reference to how he works with one of his teams) ...Working on the ATOM protocol and they do not vote. On occasions there are two ways to do something and you need to find out what direction to go. Instead of voting they do a group hum, sort of like a group hug. You enumerate the alternatives and when comes by you hum. Humming is a bit anonymous. You judge by the volume. Run through these and see which stand out for this group on why folks want to blog. A person in the front with pencil and paper was designated as scorekeeper.

Trial calibration hum. You can do better than that. Shows the hum calibration slide. Look at this and then hum. (picture of cute baby). There is a picture associated with this picture that you can find on Google.

(Find love did not get much of a hum. Reach the right people got some, money less, top one hundred a few voice, change the world got a lot, as did back up brain. Boost sales went low. Build relationships got a hum. Bragging. No admitting. Learning got a longer hum.

The recorder will blog the results and Tim will point to it.

Put the baby picture back up. Hopefully that has established why we are doing this and what we are trying to get to.

Now some generic pieces of blogging advice. At one level that is sort of bogus because we added new goals. At another level I’m a newbie. But actually what I’m going to do here is go all corporate on here. The distillation of what we are doing at Sun. IN May of 2004 we opened the world and now 1000 people are blogging. We wrote a policy of do’s and don’t. Type Sun Policy into Google and is there. We’re had some triumphs, debacles and really worried lawyers. Pretty successful and a strong learning experience. So going to dive into some generic principles.

If anyone feels I’m out to lunch, say so. There’s going to be an opportunity to fill in any that I missed. Having said that, let’s launch into the advice.

Write what you know. This is the first thing tell you in writing school because it is right. If you are an expert on brass etching or buzz saws, if you write about that you have a really good chance of being interesting, worthwhile and correct, which is a really good thing to be. This one personally applies to me. When I write about Search technology everyone reads me and when I write about politics no one reads me. If you look at society, and in the long tail, people are complex things and there isn’t a person in the world who isn’t an expert on something. Everyone is erudite on some small number of subjects.

Listen. The mythology of blogging is that it is a way to talk to the world. En masse, it is also a really good way to listen to the world. It is hard to talk to a company, but you can send email to a blogger and get their attention. The most important advice to those at Sun, before you write an essay, listen first. You know what? As Bill Joy once said, wherever you are, you live, you work, the majority of smart people aren’t there. They are somewhere else. If you run out and say something to the world before you listen to the world, you can say something that has already been said or ludicrously wrong. You will do better if you read before you right.

Link often. The smart people are mostly where you aren’t they are somewhere else. If you fill your blog with links, you do your readers a service. You owe it to them to show them what other people in the world are righting about. You should also link for self interested reason. Then other people notice it and they link back to you. Doing lots of linking is probably the single best way to build your traffic. And finally if it doesn’t’ have links it isn’t a blog.

Post often. Maybe a bit more controversial. Probably the most basic one, for any human activity, one of the human universals. The way to become good at something is to practice it. Violin playing. There aren’t as of yet any blogging academic where you do fake blog posts graded by grad students for two years. So the only way to practice blogging is to blog. The more you practice, the better you will get at it. I think that people who are dong this should push themselves a little bit. In purely self interested terms, people who post more get read more. At one level that is tautological. 10 posts, 10 readers. But there are second order effects. IN prolific periods, I notice the number of unique readers curves up;. I don’t know why, but people post more get read more.

Correct yourself. This is one of the single most defining things of blogging over other publishing. You know in journalism, painful, when journalist is overworked and hurried, they don’t know your area. It is wrong, makes you look like an idiot. Once it is published, the damage is done. We are different. We can undo the damage. I do screw up. The great virtue of blogging is when a reader tell you, you turkey you screwed it up, I go back and correct it, make notice of it at the top of the post. You are a turkey if you don’t do this. When it becomes apparent when you talk to a blogger, it goes slightly wrong and you correct it, and you go to a journalism and the CAN’T correct it, people will be more inclined to talk to a blogger.

Generalize. This is a bit abstract and controversial. The best things I read tend tom move from the specific to the general. Things start with something. An event. I had lunch with Joe and we talked about… I went to a movie and… This gives what we do flavor. A specific event, grounded in someone live. The good ones tend to go on and make some generalized point. Lauren posted something about a WordPress problem, how she went to WordPress to get help to fix, then went on to talk about product management and how WP had done it just right. A lot of people who cared about PM pointed to that. To the extent that you generalize it will be more interesting, more long lived, longer run.

Flame judiciously. Lets get controversial. This is probably where Rob and I part ways. He says in a log you should not say nasty things. I think one of the defining characteristics is unvarnished exposure to someone’s soul. To the extent that they do that is interesting. When they don’t it isn’t. The Cluetrain guys pointed to the lifelessness of business/gov speak. One of the flavors is anger. I see no reason (equipment malfunction) why, well I can see some reasons, but no deep reason and principle if you are feeling anger you should fail to share that with your readership. Among the goals, and one that got hum was change the world. Reasonable people never change the world. They accommodate and go along. Unreasonable people don’t and they change the world. So it is logical that bloggers can be unreasonable. Some of the best speeches have been renunciation. The philippics of Demothenes. He made a series of speeches denouncing Phillip. A well crafted rant is a delight to the eye and the mind. Something we can do and the conventional media can’t do as well.

Spell-check. For gosh sakes do not write blogs with stupid spelling mistakes. Audience disagrees- it is a very human thing to misspell. My blogging tool does not have spell check (Marc Canter) I think quality matters. Quality OF discourse is strongly correlated with spelling and grammar. Worth taking the times to do it write. (Audience- as long as it is who you are. ) Mark Cuban, totally wonderful blogger, does these huge multi paragraph rants. No apostrophe’s . High velocity writing style. (Marc say, but I can’t misspell. Now I know).

Look good. Not your personal face, but how your blog looks. Perhaps more controversial. It is hard to have a good looking blog. A lot of good blogging tools have lots of lame templates. (Scoble says it hasn’t hurt his. Bray says that’s cause everyone reads you in RSS.) So, it’s hard to do. I strongly advise going and talking to a friend who is a design geek and ask if it could be better. Then make it better.

Balance hubris and humility. The act of blogging takes immense hubris. How many people where have told people what to do and how to do it. The fact of doing that takes immense gall. And so you more or less establish that you have nerve. Having done that, it is really important to remember most of the smart people where you are and many people are wrong and that happens to you. When someone says something unkind or attacks you, the smartest thing is to link ot it. Absolutely necessary to have a relationship to the world and arrogance stinks and drives people away.

Be brief. Everyone has heard the story of apologizing for writing a long letter because they didn’t have time to write a short letter. Everyone who has professionally published know the pain of dealing with editors who tell you to throw half of that out. This really hurts a writer. What hurts even more when you realize they are right and it got better. There are very few pieces of writing that cannot be improved by being shorter. I stand that I write too long and don’t always follow it myself. If you write something and it is not totally sensitive to today, go to bed, pick it up tomorrow and tighten it up. We are all busy. I don’t have time to read your damn blog. If you are the type who goes on at length, don’t or add headings. If you do a 800 word piece break it up with subject headings and if you can, put anchors on the headings for commentors. (Marc – or tag it) Or tag to the particular paragraph.

Be intense. I think that this, nobody’s talked about this, but one of the defining characteristics of what we do. A cool, dispassionate, measured tone almost never works in blogging. That’s not what it is about. If I look at the people I read there is always edgy stuff. Funny, colorful, less than discrete. If you see a movie, say Catwoman, you say that was a stinky turd and then blog it was not so great, write how you really talk. To the extent, most people how they talk in the conversational voice speak in a colorful way. Don’t loose that.

DON’TS

Don’t tell secrets. There are substantial number of people out there who haven’t quite realized when they write on a blog it is public. Daughters who say “never read my blog.” A blog is actually an incredibly effective device for improving your listening power. The blogosphere, the long tail, is not a crowd of a million voices but a crowd of a million years. A quantum leap for us as a society to listen to what is going on. If you publish something controversial or secret, the world will find out. Blogging is kind of like being in junior high school. If you tell someone no matter how many times they promised to keep it a secret, it will get out. In a business context people are paranoid about this. There are private blogs, LiveJournal. But I kind of suspect that even publishing to your private circle of friends, you’d want to think about. The internet is not only a powerful listening engine, it never forgets. Something you write about today can and will be dredged up in a potentially embarrassing way.

Don’t ruin your life. Yes boys and girls, you can ruin your life by blogging. People have done it. Just be careful. You are playing for keeps. There are a lot more ways to get in trouble than telling a secret. Saying things you will regret later. Having said that I want to call bullshit on this recent round of media stories on firing for blogging. Hype, and what about the number of folks fired for other reasons. We don not have a trend here. In most cases those where were fired did something that violated company practices or their boss was a moronic person. They would have been fired anyway. Why is the media writing about getting fired for blogging. Do you think they might be worried? Having said then, doing something stupid in your blog is just as stupid as saying something stupid in a meeting. I occasionally, I write lots of blog entries that I don’t publish and I think that is a good thing. I save it, I go to bed, and then most times I don’t publish it. Those few times I have I have often wish I hadn’t . A dangerous game

Don’t blog on command. This is a problem we are having at Sun, 1000+ plus bloggers. Now management has started leaning on people There are a lot of smart people who hate writing who aren’t good at it. There are also those who can’t not write. There are enough people around. You don’t need to push people to blog. If you are being pushed to blog maybe you shouldn’t unless it releases a simple inner tickle. It is ok to put pressure on groups (i.e. to listen to customers). Probably really bad for a manager to look around a group and say, you; blog! Has anyone gotten fired for not blogging. I get calls from people asking how can we get our president to blog. I ask, can he write? The other place this rules applies is when you have a blog, someone (friend, colleague) comes then and asks you to blog about something. Not saying you should always say no. But maintain the integrity of your platform.

Audience: How has blogging helped Sun. Having a 1000 bloggers has helped street cred. Jonathan has been helping get the message past the intermediaries. But most important is how it has increased our listening power. If Tim is blogging about something I care about I’ll email him in a flash. (Audience asked: I’m not familiar with your company) We make darned good expensive computers.

SO anything should be added to these do’s and don’ts?

Be sincere

Never lie

Write for pleasure

Hum test
Listen 2/3
Be brief – more
Link often – loud
Post often – a bit less
Be intense – some loud hums
Generalize – a bit less
Look good – less
Spell check – a bit more
Correct yourself – strong hum
Flame judiciously – varied hum
Don’t tell secrets – loud
Don’t ruin your life – loud
Don’t blog on command – a bit less
Balance hubris and humility – same
Sincere –
Never lie- a bit more
Write for pleasure – had a hum off



Northern Voice
Tim Bray