What Are Blogs
Naked Conversations explores why blogs exist, namely, to help people, many of whom own or work for a business, to talk, to learn from each other, and to connect for mutual advantage. Like the ancient white oak, we are all connected. Some are in the roots, others in the branches, and others in the leaves. I am a poet and I like metaphors.
For me, the blog is the trunk that allows those who are leaves to connect to those in the roots and branches who would never have known of each other in the past...and to grow together by that knowing.
In the Philadelphia neighborhood where I grew up, there was one mother who connected everyone and who knew how to connect you with anyone.
The guy who owned the corner grocery or hardware store
or the postmaster at the post office performed a similar role. They were the people who took the time and learned the skills to keep everyone connected. That world is gone, but blogs can do the same on a scale unimaginable just a few years ago. And for business, your blog (or lack of one) can determine if you succeed or fail.
naked conversations willgive you the blog tools to connect your product or service to people who will then connect you to more people than you can ever reach through traditn't like the tree metaphor you have to concede the point: blogs allow a kind of communication ional marketing, sales, advertising. Even if you dothat is fun, gile, intellectually stimulating, and rewarding...if done correctly and successfully.
For a company, you can add thaat blogs can add to your profits if they are done honestly and capably. As well, they can result in a severe loss of profits if they are done dishonestly, incompetently, or poorly.
This is one of those rare manuals...a clear, concise, consistent and lucid manual....a "how to create a useful blog" manual that is beautifully written, easy to understand, intelligent, and well organized...the handbook that will give home office and corporate office workers the tools to create, communicate and illucidate.naked conversations contains a cornacopia of suggestions for how to do it right and many examples of how to do it wrong. 
They skip the "Theory of Operation" by referring you to the Cluetrain Manefesto and customers, it's sellers and buyers, to the people inside and outside...quickly deliver the meat and potatoes of how a business can talk with its employees efficiently, through a blog. What a newspaper, telephone, TV and the old media did in centuries past, the blog is doing now...but with many more digital hyperspace features in nanotime and with you doing the talking rather than being talked at.
Chapters
Chapters and subjects covered in naked conversations include:
Forward by Tom Peters
Introduction: Of Bloggers and Blacksmiths
What's Happening
Souls of the Borg
Everything Never Changes
Word of Mouth on Steroids
Direct Access
Little Companies, Long Reach
Consultants Who Get It
Survival of the PublicistsBlogs and National Cultures
Thorns in the Roses
Blogging Wrong & Right
Doing It Wrong
Doing It Right
How to Not Get Dooced
Blogging in a Crisis
The Big Picture
Emerging Technology
The Conversational Era
Acknowledgements [very useful...many cutting edge blogs listed...innovative]
Name Index [crisp and lean]
Subject Index [brief and clean]
The AuthorsShel Isreal has developed launch strategies for Sound Blaster PowerPoint, FileMaker, dBase, Paradox, Mapinfo and counseled HP, MCI, Price Waterhouse. Robert Scobel helps run Microsoft's Channel 9, which is worth a visit. It is one of the few places you can get an inside view of how programmers, developers designers, geeks...and others who must work together in a corporate world to create a brave, new world and for insights for why and how they create it.
[When I worked on a very complex semiconductor manufacturing clean-room plasma tool, I suggested that we video the development process for the service technicians to help them service and maintain the tool. The idea never got past the director because he was not a fan of knowledge sharing with others, even the engineers on his staff.
My hat is off to Microsoft for creating this tool for their workers and for the wider world.]
Shel Isreal and Robert Scobel have illuminated many of the mysteries and the promise of blogs in naked conversatations. Take it out to your front porch, sit a spell, take a few hours and just read for the pure joy of reading a well-written book. This is a book to enjoy with a pen to mark up what you will need to remember and refer to again and again as you work on your own blog. 
If I had this book when I started this blog...only two months ago...I would have used it as a primer and made fewer false starts and pages I later eliminated.
You may not think blogs matter.
Many more think poetry does not matter.
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood said T.S. Eliot, Dante, 1920.
So, too, blogs.
Blogs are On-Line Meetings 24/7
Let Isreal and Scobel show you how with this very readable guidebook. Blogs are the riparian area between the river and the land where you can plant a few trees and watch them grow over the years. They are growing and meeting all day and all night, like trees.
Meeting
Here, ideas float mid-air
as open targets of word,
Cryptic and terse, that fire
machine-gun rapid
To take them out...one...
two...three...four...
Until at 5, an idea stays,
deflects all shots,
Floats higher and higher
and settles back
Approved, accepted, accurate
and written down
By consensus and commitment
and nods of heads
As certain as a hundred
thousand years ago
The light of electricity replaces
the light of the sun.
Remember: the idea for fire
started as humbly.
Wikiopedia's Blogosphere Defined
Wikiopedia defines the term Blogosphere as: The notion of a blogosphere is an important concept for understanding blogs. Blogs themselves are just instances of a particular formatting choice, whereas the blogosphere is a social phenomenon. What differentiates blogs from webpages or forums is that blogs can be part of a shifting Internet-wide social network formed by two-way links between different blogs. You link to my articles and I'll link to your articles, and we will both seem to be more interesting.The Subject Index
Shifts Happen and a Story
Be prepared for some blog links moving on to another server, being abandonded, or not available when you look for them.
Shifts happen...and so your the blog listed in the book may not display. Page 74 states "...Target the number-two retail chain..." and on page 133 "When Scoble spoke with Target executives, they told him that blogging was unlikely to start up inside America's fourth [-] largest retailer..." This was the only inconsistency I could find in the book (and who knows and who really cares if Target's is two or four). Point is, with such attention to detail, they did an exceptional job of creating a work that will help create a blogging civilization.
After finding this one minor inconsistency in their work, and given the cogent analysis, cherry picking of useful blogs, definitions of blog policies, plans, procedures and practices, I think Scoble and Israel well demonstrate in their tome the very requirements they list as required of a good blog: authenticity, usefulness, integrity, connectivity to other blogs, passion, authority,simplicity, focus, accessibility, storytelling, link...link...link, reflect the real world and maintain a referrers log.
In essence, they followed their own advice about how to create blogs when creating this book, and the work is easier to use and use again because of that. It will be assigned reading in business courses by next semester...see The Applied Blogging Workshop for how this is already happening.When they guy took the time to walk me to where the book was in the business section, selected it, and handed it to me, besides being impressed that he demonstrated the rare courtesy of customer service, I knew in a few seconds this was the definitive book on blogs I had been searching for.
If you want to know what blogs are and how to create one, may you discover this paper blog book that will enrich your digital blog experience.
Reading this work was like the experience I had when a Lockheed Martin Vice President of Corporate Communications in Bethesda, MD in 1997 was too busy to review a software disc a new company called Netscape sent him and tossed it to me (a temp) to analyze. I spent three days jumping from website to website without having to type in five lines of very dense code as with the Sailor system I was using then to get to the Internet.
I can still remember how I received a graduate-school level introduction to the possibilities of the Internet in those three days. It felt good to finally get the first clear understanding of what this internet buzz was all about.
Unfortunately, I could not get the stock end of what Netscape washttps://inside.com/campaigns/inside-security-2017-06-08-2176https://inside.com/campaigns/inside-security-2017-06-08-2176 all about because, as the Brown & Co. investment banker who was one of those selling the initial public offering told me curtly, I was not a "serious" investor because I could not raise at least $50,000 in five minutes in order to bid on the stock.
My thanks to Scoble and Isreal for providing the wellspring for future blogs.
Common Sense Corporate Business Blogging Policy
Here is a sample:
Guidelines for IBM Bloggers: Executive Summary
1. Know and follow IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines.
2. Blogs, wikis and other forms of online discourse are individual interactions, not corporate communications. IBMers are personally responsible for their posts. Be mindful that what you write will be public for a long time protect your privacy.
3. Identify yourself name and, when relevant, role at IBM when you blog about IBM or IBM-related matters. And write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of IBM.
4. If you publish a blog or post to a blog and it has something to do with work you do or subjects associated with IBM, use a disclaimer such as this: The postings on this site are my own and dont necessarily represent IBMs positions, strategies or opinions.
5. Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
6. Don't provide IBMs or another's confidential or other proprietary information.
7. Don't cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their approval.8. Respect your audience. Don't use ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, etc., and show proper consideration for others' privacy and for topics that may be considered objectionable or inflammatory such as politics and religion.
9. Find out who else is blogging on the topic, and cite them.
10. Don't pick fights, be the first to correct your own mistakes, and don't alter previous posts without indicating that you have done so.
11. Try to add value. Provide worthwhile information and perspective.
Shel Israel's Reply to an e-mail I sent him: February 17, 2006 The Poet Understands what Our Book is About
Bruce Curley, a senior technical writer, has reviewed our book on his blog, poetslife. It's favorable but that is not why I'm writing about him. He sent me an email yesterday that moved me. It read in part:
Just yesterday, my wife sent me for paint swatch samples to the new Benjamin Moore paint store in Mt. Airy, MD where I live. I told the owner about your book, my review, and how her business might benefit if she read about the englishcut blog you describe. She said she was going to read my review and look up the book. I also told a tailor at English-American in Westminster, MD where they still make suits by hand, about englishcut.
I relay this brief story to say your book spreads by wordofmouthosphere as well as by the blogosphere, proving one of the main points you make in naked conversations.
Robert and I wrote Naked Conversations with that paint store in mind, as well as that international corporations. We get a steady flow of bloggers telling us that the stories we covered are, for the most part, old hat to them.
Of course, they are. We see blogging veterans as our collaborators, not our target audience.
We hope that we have given blogging enthusiasts everywhere a tool to spread the word.
We hope you bloggers serve as word-of-mouth champions to those businesses who don't yet understand the power of social media.
Bruce, yesterday was a tough day for me for a lot of reasons.
Thanks. You made it a lot better.
And yours mine, Shel. Thanks for all the hard work.
This red-tailed hawk was doing circles out out in my yard as I finished this blog book review...a good sign. As the French poet Valery reminded us, "A poem is never completed...it is only abandoned."
So, too, with this naked conversations book and blog. It continues in other blogs, on iPods, in foreign lands. But the majesty of that bird is so incredible it becomes this blogs watermark...as this work takes flight to create good blogs and blogging relationships.
