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The Puget Sound Business Journal (August, 2005) makes a good introduction and business case for business blogging:

The Boeing Co.’s Randy Baseler writes a Web log called Randy’s Journal, which gives the aerospace firm’s view of the world. When officials at Microsoft Corp. last took count, some 1,500 employees were blogging about some aspect of the Redmond software giant.

In June, the national firm Pearson Educational Measurement launched TrueScores, a blog about educational testing, after the company’s Auburn, Wash.-based Marketing Vice President Frank Catalano suggested it would be a good way for its testing experts to share their knowledge.

Smaller businesses are getting into the blogging act, too. Mac Cutchins, chief executive officer of Bellevue-based Intek Integration Technologies Inc., for instance, plans to add a blog to the warehouse software maker’s Web site in a few months.

more, in printable format…

Thanks to Euan for pointing out Slacker Manager’s useful list of Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users. These might be just the tips I need to get over that initiation hurdle and make 2006 a del.icio.us year.

It’s encouraging to see this social bookmarking (sharing, sorting, tagging and tracking of links) tool being acquired by Yahoo. Would be even more encouraging if they’d make an easy way import my existing bookmarks.

I wrote a few days ago about the challenge of distinguishing between a leader’s desire for control and what might be a deeper desire, on the part of true partners and teachers, the desire to share and extend what we know about the work. So how to does a leader do that?

How about a Leadership Blog? Not the kind where the CEO blogs for the customers, or internally to pep up productivity. In a Leadership Blog, everybody posts. Everybody leads. A group blog, for issues and opportunities for moving a given project or initiative forward. Everybody is invited, encouraged, required to take responsibility for the issues that matter to them. The chief can comment, or not, as he or she chooses. But he or she does get to choose. Everybody gets to choose. Everybody leads.

What I’m suggesting (and testing now for myself) is a blog-based version of OpenSpaceTech. Anybody can post an issue. Anybody can attend the “breakout session” by reading and posting comments. I’ve made four categories: Open Issue (the default), Closed Issue, Announcements, and Technical Notes.

Everything that needs doing can be posted as an Open item. When it’s resolved, it can be Closed. In the meantime, meetings and conference calls can be announced. Research, observations, technical specs and other notes can be recorded.

Anybody else blogging like this? How does it work? What have you learned? I think this does much to address the challenges of leadership awareness, experience, sharing and control.

Searching, searching, searching… everybody’s searching for competitive advantage. And now Google’s found it. Of course. And the top-ranked factor? Well, it sure sounds like Open Space to me!

At google, we think business guru Peter Drucker well understood how to manage the new breed of ‘knowledge workers.’ After all, Drucker invented the term in 1959. He says knowledge workers believe they are paid to be effective, not to work 9 to 5, and that smart businesses will “strip away everything that gets in their knowledge workers’ way.” Those that succeed will attract the best performers, securing “the single biggest factor for competitive advantage in the next 25 years.”

MSNBC via Euan Semple, recognized recently as “info professional of the year” for the the cool stuff he’s doing at the BBC. Props and thanks, Euan!

Talked with organizer Matt Homann today, who tells me that he’s not heard a single negative comment about last weekend’s BlawgThink conference. Recall from previous postings here that we started with 2/3 of a day in traditional conference mode, then spent a full day in Open Space “unconference” mode. Here’s one of my favorite comments:

I just returned from the Blawgthink conference in Chicago. As the name suggests, this was a group interested in law blogging and law bloggers. You know, you’d think a room full of lawyers would be boring. You’d be wrong actually. This group was a blast.

Matt’s posted comments and more comments. Looking forward to more experimentation with the BlawgThink/LexThink gang.

Still here in the middle of BlawgThink2005, a blogging and tech conference with an Open Space unconference dropped into the middle of it.

The design we’re using here, 3/4 of a day in traditional “tracks” followed by a 4:15pm opening and a first breakout session from 5:30pm to 6:30pm, simply should not work. It should not be possible to have the energized conversations we did at 6:30pm last night. Nor should we have gotten away with a panel talk this morning, followed by three more sessions of Open Space.

There is something about blogging and technology that seems to have reshaped the minds of these folks, mine too. Might be changing what is possible in organization and community. When I look at blogging, wiki, Open Space, mapping and the like, I notice that they all have embedded in them some degree of watching and listening to what’s “outside” while simultaneously not “turning off” what is happening “inside” of me.

Embedded in all of these methods is an active practice and continual refinement of the pulsation between inside and outside, self and other, seeing and doing. I think this refinement of mind makes it easier to move between “traditional” hierarchy mode and the self-organizing Open Space mode. Then again, it might just be because we’re swimming in laptops here, with lots of pulsing between conference and other work.

Either way, I find the ease of meeting, facilitating, documenting and learning here encouraging. For the record, we’re 80-90 people here, posted 30 issues into 4 time slots, documenting everything in MindJet mapping software.

Reporting in from BlawgThink2005 today, where I’ll open a space this afternoon that will stretch on into tomorrow, an Open Space unconference inside of a more traditional conference.

Had a great conversation with Olivia Woodard of MindJet, a very cool bit of mapping software. In the old days we captured proceedings from Open Space meetings in MS-Word. Lately we’ve been using weblogs more and more, for the linking and ongoing support that sort of platform offers. I think MindJet must be the future of this documenting.

Consider that a large-ish group gets together, posts 50-80 issues, discusses and documents all of them, and all the proceedings are then loaded into a MindJet-type map. Over the next weeks or months, they continue to develop and refine their map. Next time they meet, they don’t start with a blank wall, they start with their map. They post new nodes and assign meeting times and spaces to the nodes. They meet, keep refining and expanding.

And when they’re done, they turn some of those nodes in to action items that can be aggregated and tracked using Gyronix’ ResultsManager. Ongoing Opening. Ongoing Vision. Ongoing Learning and Support Space. Ongoing Management, Results and Documentation. Ongoing Practice.

Looking forward to working on an invitation and open space for MindJet and Gyronix users, and seeing what they can map and make together.

Matt Homann and Dennis Kennedy have put together a great group of speakers AND had the — what should we call it, courage? vision? wisdom? — to let them say their piece and then sit down in self-organizing work groups, for some active conversation with conference attendees.

BlawgThink2005 is a two-day event offering three tracks of speakers and workshops for most of the first day, and then a wide-open second day in Open Space. The value of the first day is that we’ll cover a lot of core issues. The value of the second day is that we’ll get to do something with those issues.

In Open Space, we’ll name our own working sessions — repeats, sequels and spin-offs from the first day — and tap into the talent and experience of everyone, including the speakers, on the issues and opportunities that are most important to us. It’s not enough to just hear new stuff. We need some space and time to take it in, process, plan, and work together with others to apply it in our own situations.

The official focus is legal blogging, but anyone interested in more general business blogging will surely fit right in and find plenty of learning and application. I’m grateful to be along for the ride, as the facilitator of the Open Space portion of the program. There is much to be done — and gained — in connecting the practices of Open Space and Blogging!

Join us for BlawgThink on November 11th and 12th, at Catalyst Ranch in Chicago! Mailto:Matt@LexThink.com to register.

Quantity: Dave Sifry posts a semi-annual update on macro blogging economy as tracked by Technorati. One chart shows the number of blogs doubling every 5 months. This number includes a growing number of spam and fake blogs, but also likely misses many internal business blogs and blog-like publishing in places like Omidyar.net. Clearly, the conversation that is the blogosphere still growing fast. via Dave Pollard

Quality: Britt Blaser, via Euan, suggesting camp fire talk as an organizing aesthetic for corporate blogging:

Around the fire, after a day of grubbing for grubs or dancing between the legs of a woolly mammoth, our ancestors didn’t harangue cavemates about how their new improved spear thrower would jump-start their sex life. You can’t fool anyone around the fire, because you’ve all been doing the same thing all day, your frailties and strengths on display… During most of our history, there hasn’t been much conversation except camp fire talk… We all know what it is and, better, what it isn’t. Blogging is forcing us to remember how to do Camp Fire Talk.

The other guide that comes to mind is travel talk, the kind of information exchange that takes place on street corners, in train compartments, in hostels, at trailheads. Meeting places, chance encounters, open markets, recent past trading for possible futures.

Found this list of blogging policies in Rebecca’s Pocket, while cleaning out my blogroll this evening.