I was sort of winging it during my wrap-up talk at The Blogging Enterprise earlier this week. I started to develop a thought as I was speaking and I never completely developed it.
But it goes something like this:
The blogosphere was founded by a bunch of developers, most of them laid off after the dot com boom and hanging out in coffee houses where the broadband was free. Simultaneously, big corporations like Enron, Tyco and so many more were being revealed to have stolen a great deal from publics who trusted them.
So, as the caffeinated geeks built out this technology miracle, they laid down an ethics set. They were vehement that this new way of communicating wuld not get tainted by marketing types who had corrupted the Internet, email and so many other communications media. They made strong requirements for ethical behavior, authenticity, transparency and open honest conversation.
The blogosphere continues to expand at an astounding rate. Technorati says it's doubling every five months. The developers who founded it and set these standards are expanding in their influence but not nearly as fast as the blogosphere is growing. Scoble, who remains religiously true to the ethics of the developers who preceded him, is known by more people than ever. But, as blogging expands, he is also NOT known to a larger percent of the blogosphere.
The enterprise is always late to the party,, as is the government. Historically, there joining the party is a wake up call that the innovators need to move on to something else. The enterprise changes things and they most certainly will change blogging--at least in certain sectors of the overall blogosphere. The founders of the Internet had preached Netiquette and they vowed that advertising should never be allowed on the Worldwide web. Heh.
The question is what happens now? My counsel to the audience at The Blogging Enterprise was to be true to the standards that exist today. To corrupt these standards will be damaging to the blogosphere. But it also will be damaging to the companies that game the system. They will not gain the powers conversing with people who impact their companies on an ongoing global basis.
The developers who started all this are our Founding Fathers. The wisdom of what they taught is likely to hold as firmlu as did the wisdon of America's Founding Fathers, who were a diverse and rebellious lot who had turned sour on the prevailing powers, in 1788 whe the US Constitution was ratified, just like blogging's Founding Fathers did in 2001-3.
I think Scoble actually articulated it best with his Corporate Weblog Manifesto, which he first wrote in 2003, then updated for our book in Chapter 12. Please scrill down until you see the subhead that gets you there.
I'm sure it will need to be amended from time-to-time as does the work of America's Founding Fathers. But the wisdom in the original document is, well, self-evident.
