Ed Yourdon was very much in the audience the other day when I keynoted the Cutter Summit in Boston (see Web 2.0: A Social Revolution), and he does a great job of capturing what I said, including why I may not click with older IT types:
[from Cutter Summit: Stowe Boyd on Web 2.0]
Monday afternoon’s session at the Cutter Summit was devoted to Web 2.0, with Stowe Boyd providing the keynote address. I’ve known Stowe for several years, and subscribe to his blog, so I was interested to hear what he would have to say about Web 2.0 — and in particular, the impact of “social tools” on business, media, and society — to an audience largely composed of middle-aged IT professionals and managers from traditional companies in North America and Western Europe.
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I found it particularly interesting that Stowe said, fairly early in his talk, that the most important thing he has ever done in his career is blogging — that it trumps his Master’s Degree in Computer Science, and trumps everything else he has ever done — because it makes him part of a network of people, struggling to grope with large complicated problems. Blogging (and posting comments on other blogs or Web 2.0 apps/sites), he argues, is a fundamental aspect of all social networking applications; it involves connectedness, involvement, and being part of a group where what you say actually matters. As such, Web 2.0 is, to a great extent, the world that blogs built — and are continuing to build. There are now roughly 71 million blogs worldwide, and the blogosphere is still doubling every 5-6 months, with approximately 175,000 new blog-sites being created each day; it’s a worldwide phenomenon with hundreds of millions of blog postings. And while it’s convenient to think of it as nothing more than a social phenomenon (e.g., lonely teenagers talking to themselves), it also has a huge business impact: as Stowe put it, the combination of blogs and Craig’s List has been a “one-two punch” for traditional print media, driving several newspapers to the brink of financial ruin because of steep declines in classified advertising revenue.
As it turns out, I ended up spending most of today talking about various technology trends with a group of very savvy, up-to-date colleagues who also heard Stowe’s presentation — but who nevertheless felt very strongly that blogging is a largely narcissistic, unproductive, self-centered activity, and one that presents significant risks to companies. I’m beginning to think that all of this is somewhat of an existential thing: if you don’t blog on a fairly regular basis, you can’t imagine why anyone else would do so; and if you’re predisposed to think that blogging is just narcissistic chattering, then you’re not likely to spend very much time (if any at all) reading anyone else’s blog either. It may also be a generational thing: middle-aged and older people are less likely to read or write blogs, and younger people (and those who still feel young) are more likely to do so. This is not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, but it may be one more thing that separates the generations these days.
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But people like Stowe will be doing their best to explain and articulate what’s going on in the social networking corner of the Web 2.0 world; and I think it’s important for the rest of us to listen closely to what he has to say.
Presenting in the Cutter Summit context was fairly odd: overwhelmingly older IT professionals — folks in their 50s and 60s employed within large, old-school companies — who have been insulated from the revolution taking place in the Web 2.0 world. As a result, the questions raised in the talk and the panel that followed, were from a far-off place. Questions about the validity and accuracy of Wikipedia entries are more middle American than I expected. And it is a concern to me that these folks believe that blogging is ‘narcissistic’ — a growing schism between the young and the old regarding online involvement. (Personally, I believe that ‘relaxing’ by watching TV is the height of narcissism, but oldsters don’t even get it when I suggest turning off their TVs to make time for blogging, since they always ask “how will I make the time for blogging when I am so busy?”)
It felt like the American Marketing Association road show dedicated to social media that I was on a few years ago, a tour that I fired myself from, although I had very high marks from the attendees. I couldn’t handle the fact that the attendees — all over the country, in Chicago, Atlanta, Boston — were intent on figuring out how to do as little as necessary vis-a-vis blogging, instead of being motivated to see how far it could take them.
Maybe I am suffering from post-lecture circuit let down. Although, after leaving my Web 2.0 Expo workshop on Building Social Applications I felt very upbeat.
(Just in passing: In a way, I am not unhappy about yesterday’s discovery that I got the date wrong for a keynote I was supposed to give in a few weeks. I was asked to keynote the PR Online Convergence in LA. I had the date in my calendar as 16 May, and I made complex arrangements to fly on the night of the 16th to London, since I will be working starting on the 17th with clients there. Turns out my keynote is scheduled for 17 May, but I think it may all be for the best that someone else will have to go and be the raw meat for a room full of long-toothed PR professionals.)
The panel session that followed by Cutter keynote was a great experience, though. JP Rangaswami (the CIO of BT Global Services), Andrew McAfee (Harvard Business School), Sylvia Marino (Executive Director of CarSpace for Edmunds), and Ed Yourdon joined me for an open and rich discussion, led by Tom DeMarco. Occasionally members of the group disagreed — Andrew in particular does not believe that the enterprise will be adopting Web 2.0 technologies very quickly — but a surprising unanimity existed, and I was happy to be in such a group of revolutionary thinkers.
