He said, she said...

We like conformity. Sadly, sometimes we confuse it with teamwork. Or much worse, we assume noncomformity to be anti-team and disloyal. The Road to Ruin. This, despite all superficial commitments to the valiant efforts of the Myerses and Briggses and Belbins of this world telling us that diverse balanced teams are good.

In something approaching real tragedy, many organisations go through a painful process of attracting and hiring people with a difference to make a difference; then spend forever driving the difference out of the person. Immensely frustrating for all concerned. Blogs can help prevent this.

We should stop thinking of blogs as just individual soapboxes, it may be the way we learnt about them, but it’s not the way we’re going to learn from them.

They’re very powerful conversation enablers; they help people express care and concern and dissent in non-threatening ways; they help avoid mutual-admiration-society selection bias; they build trust amongst teams; they exposes heresies and cancers; they prevent me (and people like me) from believing in our own propaganda.

Blogs are but one tool in helping us with those selections.

One tool. An important tool. One we did not have before.

Cass R. Sunstein in Why Societies Need Dissent

via JP

We have to recognize the role of the consumer as creator. That’s the first time this has happened in history.

-Ajaz Ahmed, AKQA, Red Herring article

First recognise that they are not ‘consumers’! 

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As creative as your organization may be, the community at large will always be more creative.
- RedMonk analyst Stephen O’Grady in From Web page to Web platform

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Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn’t realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools. We need to have conversations about the explicit goals of what it is that we’re supporting and what we are trying to do, because that conversation matters. Because we have short-term goals and the cliff-face of annoyance comes in quickly when we let users talk to each other. But we also need to get it right in the long term because society needs us to get it right. I think having the language to talk about this is the right place to start.
- Nat’s notes on Tim O’Reily’s blog on Clay Shirky’s talk at ETech.

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If Shakespeare had been a weblogger, Romeo would find Juliet after she took poison and would have been so overcome with emotion he would have blogged about finding Juliet dead and would have taken so long that Juliet would have awoken and Romeo wouldn’t have killed himself, and they would have married and had kids and his and her weblogs… and everything.
-Shelley Powers quoted in the Carnival of Capitalists (for the week of December 26, 2005)

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It’s increasingly difficult to play the stealth game. Too many consumers and bloggers have high-tech surveillance tools at their disposal to out folks that try to trick the system. You can only run away from your reputation for so long in the age of bloggers.
Pete Blackshaw in Blogger Thwarts PriceRitePhoto ID Change

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We don’t know who your editors are. All our lives we read stuff written by people we don’t know that’s edited by people we don’t know, who might have an agenda.
- Yahoo COO, Dan Rosensweig, addressing the traditional media, quoted in All the news that’s fit to blog

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Calling blogs consumer-generated media is like calling sex the “clothless generation of heat, musk and mucus.” The essential excitement and motivation just doesn’t come through, does it?
- Henry Copeland in Consumer-Generated Media is an Oxymoron

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... advertising in general is designed to get people to pay attention to things that they might not otherwise notice. Sometimes ads are effective, and sometimes they aren’t. But we have to recognize that most forms of advertising, and not just this one, almost always detract from the user experience. But they are accepted by most people as a necessary evil because most of us recognize that developing content costs money, and we accept advertising in exchange for free content.
- Search Engine Spam on O’Reilly’s Radar

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From its beginning the Web has looked to many marketers like an opportunity to address micro markets through “personalization” (in quotes because marketing’s idea of personalization is the anti-Christ of real personalization), one-to-one marketing, addressing a market of one, etc. Yes, a car company can build a web page unique to my interests and preferences. Oh goody. But the real difference is that before I get to that page, I’ve talked with my friends and with smart, informed, funny, passionate strangers about the car. The most important characteristic of this new market of “ones” is that we’re talking with one another, and we’re telling one another the truth about your products. Marketing is much less interesting than these conversations.
- Dave Weinberger in Fast Company’s blog 3Qs

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It’s natural enough to think of the growth of the blogosphere as a merely technical phenomenon. But it’s also a profoundly human phenomenon, a way of expanding and, in some sense, reifying the ephemeral daily conversation that humans engage in. Every day the blogosphere captures a little more of the strange immediacy of the life that is passing before us. Think of it as the global thought bubble of a single voluble species.
- Measuring the Blogosphere, New York Times editorial

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But if the Web itself isn’t being remade, it’s certainly remaking us in fascinating ways.
- Scott Kirsner, a contributing editor at Fast Company in an article for Boston Globe

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Podcast unto others as you would have them podcast unto you.

- David Tebbutt, with apologies to Luke 6:31. 

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He [Bob Garfield] was talking, of course, about our industry’s acne that is pop-ups, our bad hair that is sketchy content, and our halitosis that’s spam. He didn’t even really focus on our stigmata of Spyware, which has probably gone farther than any of our industry’s other ills to erode consumer trust.
- Mark Naples, onlineSpin

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What is it with these people who stick these dreadful flash things on their sites? My first impulse is rage, immediately followed by “where the hell is the ‘skip’ button”? What is this, a sort of corporate mid-life crisis playing out in abuse of technology?
- Amy Alkon in Jack & Hill beauty blog’s comments section.