Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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Our Kids Are in Big Trouble

Bloggers as Gatekeepers and Citizens

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger - Nathan did the right thing for MSN Spaces.  Robert Scoble has a vision about blogging and what that provides for transparency and, more than that, what transparency provides for relationships among stakeholders in computing or other civil enterprise.  As a Microsoft Evangelist, it makes sense that he would bring that passion and commitment to his job.  More than that, although he speaks (mainly: blogs) about what the possibilities are, the biggest thing is that he conducts himself in a way that fulfills his vision and keeps it in the world.  That may sound funny, but it is hard to make words about someone who forwards a possibility by living it without sounding a little woo-woo.  Translated to commerce speak: Scoble walks the talk that he is the author of. I think he's learning what a high bar he's setting for himself.  It looks to me that he's up for it.

Scoble's perspective provided a blogosphere civics lesson on Friday, 2004-12-03.  The simple fact that Scoble publishes his cellular phone number and is resolved about it led to quick resolution of a security concern.

There's such a tremendous lesson here that I have been posting all of my contact information and ways to notify me about the status of my blogs and anything else that comes up around the sites that I operate.  I am about to begin an open-source project and an ODMA support refresh.  I see lessons to take into those activities too.  I want to support people who are in some sort of bind or have discovered something that they want to hand off as easily as possible and get back to their real jobs.  I don't know exactly what that will look like, but blogging may be a part of it.  As will continuing to publicize the email address of my cellular phone's small-message-service service.

The fascinating thing about the gatekeeping that Scoble does, and it is probably somewhere in the evangelism 100-level manual (or it should be), is that Scoble operates as a reflective gatekeeper (all puns intended). That is, he is our gatekeeper for looking inward to Microsoft and also as a reflector of other contacts out here in user space.  I don't know how that looks from the inside -- I bet he offers the same voice there, as well as great permeability -- but it works great out here.

I have some pent up backlog here about the emotional life of blogs, thanks to Julie Leung.  There are some other promises that I haven't kept here too.  So what you'll be seeing today are some entries that weave around the social power of blogs as it looks from where I sit.

posted by orcmid at 12/4/2004 10:17:36 AM