In the path I’ve taken as blogger, more and more my role is one of listener. More and more I see that bloggers want to be listened to, that they blog to be heard.

Yet, I’m sure that we’re fully aware of who’s listening.

Nielsen Buzz Metrics –We help promote and protect brands by measuring CGM and listening attentively to the pulse in online “buzz.” CGM encompasses the influential insights and opinions found in online discussions, opinions, experiences, recommendations and word of mouth.

How do they do that? They do that by monitoring blogs and blog comments on topics and key words their client companies identify for them.

Talk Digger — has complete evolved from a link recording source to a conversation monitor

Find Web Conversations and discover interesting stuff example

Find web sites linking to another web site.

See the relationship between conversations of the Web.

Browse the Web by browsing its conversations.

Discover interesting stuff by browsing effortlessly between conversations.

Blog Pulse and others –Challengers to Technorati not only index, but offer this service as well.

When a blogger publishes a post and other bloggers link to it, the original post ( or “seed”) becomes part of a conversation. What happens next is fascinating. From those seeds sprout other links, and so and and so on, until it creates an entire conversation. The nodes of the graph are posts and the arcs of the graph are permalink citations from post to post.

BlogPulse Conversation Tracker provides a missing element to the blog world: a tool for assembling snapshots of weblog “conversations.” How? It creates a threaded view of the conversation by performing a depth-first traversal of the conversation graph, starting from the seed post and visiting each node only once.

Check your stats and you might be surprised to find who’s listening in on what you have to say.

Liz Strauss

Now imagine that the entry-level employee, who developed those internal relationships I required before working with customers.

What would the enterprise have? Incredible value in the form of a human being. This person would know

• the organization and how it functioned.
• the people to go to fix a problem.
• the business the company was in and what drives it.
• how to answer questions about the basics of the business.

.

• the value of the people who work inside the building.
• how to talk to people at every level of the organization.
• HOW TO TALK TO PEOPLE AND HOW TO LISTEN.

Unfortunately, relationship-building and process are still not taught well in business schools. Yet organizations sorely need them. Customers won’t stand for being treated poorly any longer.

How will they find out?

Liz Strauss

It’s always been the Generation Gap. Young lion needs to fight old lion and leave the pride to find a life. Young has his faith in himself and his idealism. Old lion has his practical wisdom. There was no bridge to cross that cavern.

Yesterday I walked up to a new chasm that has no bridge across it — the New Media Gap.

The New Media Gap Isn’t a Gap at All

The New Media Gap is disconcerting because it’s not naturally occurring. It crosses generations, educational backgrounds, and economic levels. It’s heart is totally experiential. The communication from one side to the other cannot be fixed by a simple bridge because the New Media Gap is, in fact, not a gap, but a wall.

Any blogger has met the New Media Gap (NMG) in trying to explain just what a blog is. I suppose I always was working on a hidden assumption that the problem was a lack of information. Yesterday, however, two things happened.

• I met with my neurologist and in conversation we discussed blogging and the Internet. I quickly came to the conclusion that, I didn’t have time to explain what it was about. As I left this intelligent, soft-spoken man said, “Beware of the Internet Pirates.” All I could say was, “I’m past that. They need to beware of me now.” It didn’t say nearly what I wanted it to, but how do you explain when the filtered view is out of whack?
• Later that night I read piece in print about blogging. It was well written and thoroughy researched. I’ll paraphrase here a passage within it that still haunts me,. Corporations are conservative, they don’t like to upset customers, and to think that something like blogging might have an impact is naive. The article went on to quote a corporate exec as saying something to the effect of why would I want many comments on my website saying my product stinks? and why would I want to deal with them? How do I, as a customer and a product developer, accept those statements as anything but arrogant?

I sit this morning in amazement. I know the first man to be a thorough and deep thinker and yet on this particular topic, he speaks as the ancients spoke of the constellations.

I think of the corporate exec in the second example, and I wonder would people be writing that his product stinks if it didn’t? Shouldn’t he want to know if it does? Can he hear himself use the words why would I want — to deal — with them? He uses the words of distaste and distance.

The corporate exec is right he shouldn’t be blogging. If his product does stink, he won’t have customers much longer either.

Concern on the one hand, conceit on the other.

Neither man could listen.

Walls are great insulators. They are like fences, however. They keep things in and protect them, but fences and walls also are indiscriminate about what the things that they keep out.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Schools, families and friends ought to take a look at the launch of VOX by SixApart, the makers of Typepad, Moveable Type, and LiveJournal. At the preview I attended last night at Chicago’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Mena Trotter described it as “putting the fun back into blogging for those folks who want to blog without all of the people.”

The ease of use and the ability to integrate sound, video and pictures make this an ideal way for families and friends to keep in touch across long distances. The interface takes away the need to know HTML to get your pictures where you want them and adds in a layer of privacy that can be split for different elements of the same post — you can let everyone read about your vacation, but only certain readers see the pictures of you in that swimsuit you bought.

VOX truly is a unique addition to the blogging marketplace. SixApart has carved out a specific personal blogging niche and made a product just for that group. That’s what Web 2.0 is all about. Currently VOX is by invitation only.Email me if you want an invitation or know someone who does.

Liz Strauss

Creative Weblogging launched Bootstrap Me, a blog for startups without traditional funding. The opening posts are filled with financial and administrative advice. [via Blog Network Watch]

This is just one more sign of a growing population that is finding an Internet niche for marketing targeted content to entrepreneurs. Blogs for folks who

• work at home,
• work in real estate,
• work in finance,
• work in recruiting,
• work in all forms of freelance work and consulting

are easy to find, and in each case, communities for strategically linking bloggers together have formed and also are growing.

Some of us are moving from our 3-D communities into the community of the world without leaving our computers. We’re having conversations and collaborating in ways that some people in 3-D buildings could not even imagine occurring.

Liz Strauss

A living example of intervention by a blog that wouldn’t happen as fast or as publicly any other way.

From FeedDemon’s Blog to Microsoft

Nick Bradbury is the founder of the company that created FeedDemon an RSS feeder that aggregates and carries blog content to blog readers. He knows his stuff. This is from his blog Friday.

Friday, June 09, 2006
Microsoft, Please Fix this WinINet Bug!
Recently a few FeedDemon users reported CPU spiking when updating their feeds. After finding a feed which triggered the problem, I debugged my code and discovered that the CPU spike was actually happening in Microsoft’s WinINet.dll (a Windows library which provides Internet-related functions). Specifically, the CPU load was jumping during a call to InternetReadFile – and the load never decreased the whole time FeedDemon was running. Not good. . . .

But I am going to criticize them for how long this bug has remained unfixed. The KB article is dated October 2, 2003, so they’ve officially known about this bug for almost three years. This is a serious bug – it causes applications to stop responding or over-utilize the CPU, leading to crashes or decreased performance. In other words, this bug makes Windows developers look bad.

Microsoft, please fix this bug. You ship WinINet.dll with Internet Explorer, so you could include the fix with IE7. Windows developers need to know that they can rely on your APIs, and long-standing critical bugs in your APIs make us leery of relying on you.

Update: I just confirmed that this bug still exists in Windows Vista Beta 2.

Just one day later, yesterday. The problem has been responded to and a major customer has new feeling about Microsoft. Here is Nick’s post.

Saturday, June 10, 2006
Thanks, Microsoft
Yesterday I got cranky with Microsoft about a long-standing bug in a Microsoft library that was causing problems for some FeedDemon customers. As you can imagine, I was frustrated that my work was being compromised by a known bug in code I had no control over, so I was feeling a little punchy when I posted yesterday.

Of course, I hoped that posting about the bug would get it the attention it deserved (which it did, btw). But I didn’t think about how my cranky post would affect the Microsoft devs responsible for tackling the bug (yes, folks, they are human!). I know it’s no fun to wake up and find some blogger just made your day harder.

As you can see from the comments to my post, Microsoft is on the ball – they jumped in, asked for more information, and reactivated the bug after being able to reproduce it. I have to agree with Andy Herron that Microsoft’s reaction was impressive. So, thanks for taking my criticism in the way it was intended and for taking the time to look into the problem. I look forward to seeing this bug fixed

Is the problem solved? Not yet. But the customer relationship is back on track. What was a customer wondering how a company could leave a bug unattended for so long is now a customer who feels attended to in record time.

That is the power of the blog.

You’ll notice that Nick didn’t go to Microsoft. They came to Nick’s blog. The world is changing. Customers are talking whether we care to listen is our call.

Liz Strauss

Saturday, June 10, 2006
Thanks, Microsoft

Monday I wrote a post on Net Neutrality for Successful Blog as I have every day for a while. On that post I linked to a blog and a post written by a student at Purdue University.

Tuesday, he sent an email to thank me for the link.

Today I went over to check in on his blog and found this post on the Harlem Children’s Zone. Have you heard of the HCZ? I had not.

The Harlem Children’s Zone was started in 1970. It’s a non-profit, community-based organization that serves over 12,000 adults and children in one of the most devastated parts of New York City.

The Harlem Children’s Zone has been profiled on 60 minutes. [excerpt link via Harlem Children’s Zone] US News and World Report named HCZ CEO Geoffrey Canada to the list of “America’s Best Leaders.” The HCZ food program has been written up in the New York Times.

The mass media coverage never reached me.

The story of this place in New York City got to me via a blog by a student named Alexander . . . who goes to school at Purdue University . . . in Indiana.

That’s the magic of blogs and the Internet.

Liz Strauss

We used to say it when we were kids, “He did it first!”

Well they did. The kids are way ahead of us. At least the folks who know about kids are.

Enter the International Children’s Digital Library, a website partially designed by kids. They state their mission loud and clearly.

Our Mission
We are a library that provides free access to children’s books from around the world. By ensuring access to books from many cultures and in diverse languages, we foster a love of reading, a readiness to learn, and a response to the challenges of world illiteracy.

So Many Ways to Search

In the International Children’s Digital Library, I can search the way a kid would. Big round buttons let me choose from so many options.

• three buttons are about what age the book is for
• two are for make-believe or true books
• six buttons let me choose by the color of the cover
• three buttons are about the kinds of characters
• two more are picture books and chapter books
• three buttons are for short, medium, and long books
• two mark fairy tales/folk tales and award winners

That is so cool. Libraries can be overwhelming with choices. It’s nice to have some paths carved out for me. It’s especially nice when I might not know how to search, or I don’t know how to spell the word I need to find the book I want to read. I can also use a kid-inspired viewer and keep a personalized bookshelf of favorite titles.

Read All About It

Stefanie Olsen, staff writer at CNETnews.com, describes the site and the phenomenon in her article, The ‘millennials’ usher in a new era.

It’s hardly a sophisticated algorithmic index, but it makes perfect sense to children who may not know how to search like an adult or spell a keyword. That is precisely why the University of Maryland, which built the site, continues to invite children to test its software and suggest new designs.

“If there’s only one way to find or read a book, to a child it doesn’t make any sense,” said Allison Druin, associate professor of the university’s College of Information Studies and director of its book project, which was started in November 2002. “Our traditional educational tools limit how children access information to learn or fit us into one way of learning things.”

The library offers an important view into the minds of what some sociologists are calling “the millennials”–a generation of children and teenagers who came of age at the dawn of the millennium.

It’s not when, or why, or how kids will get to the Internet. They’re already there and adding to it. They’re making music videos, building blogs, and teaching their teachers about Internet technology. Consider “Ryan,” who hacked his school’s Internet filter with a Web Proxy to reach a banned website through his home computer while “doing his homework in the school computer lab.”

These are the customers who will be buying our products. They’ll be in the prime 18-24 demographic in less than five years. They won’t be looking in brick and mortar stores. They’ve moved from the malls to the Internet. They don’t read newspapers. They read blogs.

Liz Strauss

Every day I get catalogues in the mail. I get junk mail. I get the odd indefinable direct mail piece. I open a magazine and glue-in cards prevent me from turning pages easily, while blow-in cards fall on the floor. I go to trade shows. I more of the same kind of things shoved at me. All of them qualify as marketing talk. Most of them talk AT me.

Few of the marketing pieces that make into my hands show any sign of anyone having taken the time to find out who I am. There is no hint that anyone cares about whether I want what they are pitching to me. I am a demographic to them.

I like to buy things from human beings. I like to talk about what I will buy to make sure that it suit me, fits me, is appropriate to my lifestyle. Sometimes I just like to have a connection with another person on the other side of a transaction — at the very least, I want to feel that a letter, a catalogue, a direct mail piece is talking TO me, not AT me. That requires understanding the smallest bit about me beyond my demographics. It require understanding that I have humanity.

Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice. — The Cluetrain Manifesto

A direct mail piece that authentically talks to me with a human voice gets my attention. It happens so rarely.

That’s why I’d rather read your blog than your catalogue.

Liz Strauss

The usual debate within a company about whether to start a blog is how to handle negative comments. It’s true there will be some. Free speech and negative people seem to go together. Some complaints and criticism on blogs are valid and respectfully said. Others, well, they just are not.

I guess it all comes down to whether we fear our customers more than we want to get to know them.

The Rutland Herald has an excellent article, Blogs increase business branding, on company blogs. Despite the title, their coverage shows both the pros and cons. Here’s a snip from the center.

Blog proponents have a favorite word: conversation.

It’s the way they sum up their arguments for why businesses should take a serious look at blogging. The blog, they say, is a way for you or your company to talk to customers, fans, supporters and, yes, even critics.

“Companies are starting to realize there are conversations taking place online that they can be a part of,” said Josh Hallett, a Winter Haven, Fla.-based blog consultant, whose customers include the Orlando Sentinel. “Those conversations are going on right now, whether you like it or not.”

Still, the free-flowing nature of blogging can be tough for some companies and organizations to stomach, said Hallett, whose own blog is at hyku.com/blog.

After all, do you really want to provide your critics with a platform from which to smack you in the mouth?

Last summer, MetroPlan Orlando, the transportation planning agency for much of Central Florida, started a blog with the idea of encouraging the public to get involved in transportation debates.

The experiment lasted about two months. The agency pulled the plug after tiring of critical comments posted by anti-tax and anti-toll activists.

Then there’s Microsoft and employee Robert Scoble. The so-called technical evangelist writes on his Scobleizer blog (scobleizer.wordpress.com) about a wide range of tech issues, and is not shy about criticizing the software giant.

It’s that willingness by Microsoft to allow itself to be lambasted by its own employee — as well as the people who post comments on the blog — that gains the company respect on the Internet, said Matt Certo, president of WebSolvers Inc., a Web site developer in Winter Park.

[This article via The Blogging Times]

I think it’s reasonable that some company cultures and maybe some industries are not conducive to the conversation that is a blog. However, as I write this, I can’t seem to think of an example . . . the industries that come to mind are already blogging in some way. What could be more fraught with trolls, critics, and folks who want to make negative statements about the competition than politics? Four of the Top Ten Blogs in the 37 Million on the Technorati Index and Search Engine of Blogs are Political Blogs.

Liz Strauss