I came across an interesting  article in the New York Times called Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest by Douglas Quenqua. This article definitely touches on the other side of the blog coin, and that’s the number of blogs that go the way of the ghost ship. The ghost ship is a term that I first came across here, that could be defined as a site  that had been abandoned by their authors or Web masters, and left suspended in time. The article talks about how the price of admission is so low to become a blogger, that many try, but give up, because of either time, dedication, or the absence of other perceived rewards for doing the work.

This article presents a perspective that I’ve come up against personally and professionally, and it’s often the reality just beyond the hype. Blogs take a lot of work and dedication. I’ve started a half-dozen blogs, only to get bored, and have them turn into ghost ships, myself. In fact, I’ve had the idea for this blog for three or more years, but I knew I wasn’t ready so I waited. I’ve had clients, numerous clients, who’ve wanted blogs, and I inform them about what’s involved with doing a blog and getting it out there, but after a while, the inspiration dries up or the sense of urgency that created the blog dissipates — ghost ship.

I don’t think that this is a reflection of the medium. The blog is a very powerful thing. Not everyone is going to be a Seth Godin, or Michael Arrington. However, that shouldn’t deter anyone from giving it a shot. The beautiful thing about the Web is that we have this tool for communicating to everyone that’s open to everyone; that’s a profund reality! With the openess, though, there will be some (Read: many) who get involved and can’t keep it going. That’s Ok, give it a shot. The next hot blog could be anecdotes from a rural plumber who always wanted to be a writer and shares stories of his life’s experiences, or the rants of house wife driven insane by ordinary madness, and uses the blog as a way to vent, and tell amusing stories.

Therefore, a few tips for a successful blog (whether professional or personal) might be:

1. Express yourself.
2. Do it because you want to do it, not as a means to an end (i.e. a book deal, praise, because everyone else is, etc…)
3. Be genuine; people will see disengenuousness a mile away and never come back…
4. Do these things, do them fully, and don’t put a time line on it… the universe and the Web works on its own time. If you’re doing items #1-3, then just doing those will be enough, allowing for item #4 to unfold on it’s own…

Hopefully, these tips will help you avoid the ghost ship, and give you a better idea of what’s involved with a blog before you get started.

You can’t do much without a plan. It doesn’t have to be a super-detailed plan, because that kind of plan doesn’t allow for the organic expanding and contracting that comes with anything living. Yes, a plan is a living thing. Especially when people or an organization are living and breathing that plan every day. So you have to have a plan.

Without a plan there’s no strategy.
Without a plan there’s no way to calculate ROI.
Without a plan there’s a journey, but no destination.

Sometimes, it’s Ok to be on a journey without a destination, but other times it can lead to a feeling of purposeless meandering into infinity.

Even a very loose plan is better than being without any kind of plan whatsoever…

I found this article, How To Stand Out In A World Of Infinite Choice by Adam Singer on his FutureBuzz blog today when trying out some of the Twitter search functionality.

Adam says a lot of things in his post that I found hit home for me regarding the Web, openness and quality. I, especially, believe that if you’re open, honest, and deliver quality you’re going to be rewarded with interest. There’s no shortcut for this, and Adam’s perspective embraces this.

Here are a couple quotes from his post:

“Getting through the filters of the web (human or automated) successfully is a matter of standing out.

“In a low trust world, real honesty and transparency go a long way to set you apart.  You can’t fake this, eventually everyone’s true colors come out.  Use authenticity as a way to set you apart as a more positive choice.  The filter of the web is smart, and getting smarter each day – being inauthentic is not a sustainable strategy.”

I’ve added FutureBuzz to my reader, and I’m sure that there will be more responses to Adam’s posts.

I’ve only been subscribed to Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategist blog for a couple months, but I’ve found his perspective to be very thought provoking. Yesterday, he posted an article from 2007, as an aside to a more current post, and I have to say the title, Web Strategy: How To Evolve Your Irrelevant Corporate Website, caught my attention. While I don’t talk specifically about Jeremiah’s core ideas, his thoughts stimulated a different discussion for me regarding the future of the corporate Web site.

The idea that the corporate Web site might be outmoded is something that’s been on my mind over the last couple months. There are so many new tools, and in the current paradigm many companies see these as a fragmented communications approach that lacks focus. However, a new paradigm might categorize the various modes of electronic communications, RSS, micro-blogging, wikis, blogs, Facebook, and other tools as the full communicatons picture when done in concert together with the same emphasis that the company Web site gets, rather than pursuing these new modes as a secondary, not necessarily as pertinent communication mode, as many organizations do. It’s a bold idea.

However, this approach would have to be open, and open to all… and that’s a scary idea.

Jeremiah nails that here:

“Content will have both negative and positive views about your products
“This one is hard to swallow, but how do you build the most trust? By being open, authentic, and transparent to the marketplace.”

This is the beauty of the Web. This the power of the Web in its rawest, most unadulterated form, but you can’t control it, management can’t control it, and the board of directors can’t control it, it’s people driven, and while a scary prospect at first, it’s the people that we’ve taken the responsibility to serve. We should absolutely want an environment where we can know what the people want with perfect clarity, and then be prepared openly and honestly evaluate those requests.

This morning I was reading Seth Godin’s blog, catching up on items in my reader, and came across the post: “What kind of open are you looking for?” Basically, this is an explanation of some of the various flavors of what it means to be open. I refer to this a lot when talking about electronic communications and the Web, specifically open source technologies, or the LAMP flavor of Web, but also the broader context of egalitarian nature of the Web, so I thought it might be helpful to others to see some other examples of the open philosophy.

I’m actually writing this post out of sequence. I just composed a post based on an article I read at Seth Godin’s blog, here, but I intend to publish this one first, and then follow up with the initital post that I wrote. I’m doing this because writing the initial post, Open, et al… actually got me thinking about what it means to be open. I’ve referred to open source, or the open, egalitarian nature of the Web here, and elsewhere many times over the last decade (yikes, time flies!) and it’s always been a bit of an abstract concept. Tech and Web folks could get the gist of what it mean to use open source software, like Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) and others, but when referring to the philosophical nature of open on the Web, as a communications platform, many folks just kind of gave me a funny look. So I started to do some research on the philosophical foundation of open source, with the hope that I find some information that pointed to the open nature of the Web.

Most of the information that I found pointed to open source software, doing a search of open source philosophy on the Web via Google, this wasn’t surprising. However, after some digging, I found this page, Philosophical Tenets of Open Source, and close to the bottom of the page I found what I was looking for, I’ve taken this bit of text from the page:

Open Source Is a Gift Economy

To understand open source, it helps to make a distinction between a commodity economy, to which we are accustomed in a capitalist society, and a gift economy. In a gift economy, gifts are exchanged, forming a bond based on mutual obligation: In the simplest form of gift exchange, when one person gives a gift to another, the receiver becomes obligated to the giver, but not in a purely mercenary way–rather, the recipient becomes very much like a member of the giver’s family where mutual obligations are many, varied, and long lasting. A person may give a gift with the realistic expectation that someday a gift of equal or greater use value will be received or that the recipient will pass on a further gift. In an open-source project, the gift of source code is reciprocated by suggestions, bug reports, debugging, hard work, praise, and more source code.

The commodity economy depends on scarcity. Its most famous law is that
of “diminishing returns,” whose working requires a fixed supply. Scarcity of
material or scarcity of competitors creates high profit margins. It works through
competition.

The gift economy is an economy of abundance–the gifts exchanged are inexhaustible. Gift economies are embedded within noneconomic institutions such as kinship, marriage, hospitality, artistic patronage, and ritual friendship. A healthy Western family operates on a gift economy. In an open-source project, the status and reputation of individuals depend on the quality of the gifts they contribute.

The distinction really is that of the gift vs. commodity economy. It’s funny because as I write this I remember what it was that attracted me to the Web. I was a musician/composer, and I was working on a recording. After having played guitar for years, being in bands, playing shows, and trying to sell music at venues, I saw that the Web had the power to change everything for me as a working artist — the playing field had been leveled. On the Web, in 1999, Mp3.com had just launched, and it was skies the limit for artists to get out their, hang a virtual shingle, and let the world know about their work. However, it wasn’t about huckstering your product and bombarding folks with spam to inform them about your work (though there was some of that); rather there was an openness that permeated throughout this new platform. There were new channels for sharing what you were doing, as well as for folks, from all the over the world, to share with you. I’m sure at some point I’ll go into this story in greater detail, but for now, suffice it to say that the openness of the Web brought me in, and it was the openness and the economy of abundance on the Web that made me want to stick around, even forgoing my musical ambitions to see what a Web-centric world could look like. More to come, on what it mens to be open…

Just because you presented the better solution, doesn’t mean that the client will always take that route. Somehow, this defies good sense, but on the other hand, people are not always using good sense when they make decisions. There’s an emotional piece that equally defies good sense, and there’s nothing related to good sense as far as feelings are concerned, only what is and the hope that one will learn something from the experience of those emotions. Still, though, in the service of the client, you have to research and present the best option for them, and hope that there will be an intersection of what the client wants, what the client needs, and what the best solution is.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, as author Robert Pirsig put it, had little to do with Zen Buddhism, and in the early 1970s, when the book was published that might have been true. However, in the nearly four decades that have passed a new definition of Zen emerged. While Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a discussion of what quality means, the sub-text of the book pointed at a non-controlling, and mindful approach to life and the universe where things were allowed to unfold without resistance. This is what makes me think of the title for this post, Zen and the Art of Web Strategy.

In my mind, the egalitarian nature of the Web and Web strategy has always been closely linked to Zen. With the Web, like Zen, anybody can get started any time. The barriers, if any, are few, so everyone has an equal opportunity to become a Zen or Web master. The Web, like Zen, encourages openness, because sharing isn’t a means to an end, it is the end itself, and that’s what has always driven the Web. The Web, like Zen, is allusive; when you think you’ve got it, either the next great business idea or the riddle of the universe, that’s precisely the problem and serves to illustrate that you don’t.

This is an unorthodox perspective when viewed from the traditional business paradigm because it seems as though everything is out of control, and just out of reach. To some extent it is, but that’s what makes the strategy fun, challenging, and quite a bit like a Zen koan.

I’ll use the concept of viral marketing to illustrate this point. Viral marketing is a relatively new spin on a concept that’s surely as old as time itself. Marketing 101 would say that anything that gets passed on by word-of-mouth, through email forwarding, or other comparable means of person-to-person dissemination qualifies as having gone “viral”. Viral marketing, on the other hand, is the attempt by marketers to manufacture this kind of response through the use of a variety of media, media platforms and sometimes unethical means. Sometimes it works, but mostly it’s hard to replicate.

Case in point, with regard to the Grateful Dead; it was unprecedented, and nobody could have ever foreseen that thousands of people would be trading tapes of Grateful Dead shows. In the earliest of times, we’re talking about badly reproduced and noisy recordings that were nothing more than an allusion to the music being played; nevertheless, it took off. Eventually, many live shows were put up for sale and Grateful Dead tape traders have become Web file traders who use the Web rather than the outmoded media of tape, and surely that will evolve into something else, but nobody could have bet on that, nobody!

Another great example is YouTube. One of the things that has gotten YouTube off the ground is the proliferation of clumsy and silly videos, some well-intentioned, some not so much that have made their way around the Web. YouTube has created something special and greatly diminished the barriers for getting video (and yourself) on the Web. With the amount of video that has been posted to YouTube it makes sense that some of these have taken off and gone “viral”, whether it is because of foolishness, incredibility or just because of the hilarity factor; and with 10-65,000 videos per day being posted it only increases the likelihood that something is going to go “viral”. YouTube has grown because of these “viral” videos being passed around. However, YouTube’s growth (and probably existence) would have been doubtful if it wasn’t totally open; YouTube’s parent company, Google, really, really get this.

In the examples above neither could have happened if left to traditional business paradigm means. And, anybody who you have believed that they could would have been laughed out of the room. However, in an open environment that fosters quality, and is willing to be patient, and let things unfold, naturally, anything can happen… frequently nothing happens, but while nothing is happening something is growing out of the stillness… Truly, this is Zen and the art of Web strategy… I’ll be talking about this more…

The thing about consistency is that you can plan for it, you can intend to do it, you can even develop a strategy for being consistent; consistent in message, consistent in approach, consistent in action, whatever, but if you’re not consistent, it won’t matter. Consistency is tough because it takes presence and discipline; presences to be mindful of what is and discipline to face it even when it’s more comfortable to turn a blind eye… especially when it’s more comfortable to turn a blind eye.

Do you what needs to be done, and do that every time.

That’s what it means to be consistent.

Reading about the social Web, Twitter, Facebook, etc, today got me thinking about the problem of over-communicating, and then I remembered a nugget of wisdom that was handed down to me:

The surest way to not communicate with people is to try and communicate too much.

Somehow, it’s just that simple.