Naked Conversations / by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel

Naked Conversations: How blogs are chaging the way businesses talk with each other / by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel

At the OCLC Members' Meeting in Ontario, CA, one of the speakers mentioned this book. Robert Scoble runs Microsoft's Channel 9 web site and his blog http://www.scobleizer.com had received recognition in Fortune, Fast Company, and The Economist. She Israel is a technology guru and has been involved in Powerpoint, Filemaker and Sun Microsystems workstations.

This book, although it has a corporate slant, has much to say to academic institutions that rings true. Notes to follow...

Excerpt from:
Bloggings's Six Pillars: There are six key differences between blogging and any other communications channel. You can find any of them elsewhere. These are the Six Pillars of Blogging:

1.Publishable.Anyone can publish a blog.You can do it cheaply and post often. Each posting is instantly available worldwide.

2.Findable. Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, by author, or both. The more you post, the more findable you become.

3.Social. The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site to site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build relationships unrestricted by geographic borders.

4.Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a newsservice. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.

5.Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free "home delivery" of RSS- enabled blogs into your e-mail software. RSS lets you know when a blog you subscribe to is updated, saving you search time. This process is considerably more efficient than the last- generation method of visiting one page of one web site at a time looking for changes.

6.Linkable. Because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to the tens of millions of people who visit the blogosphere every day.

You can find each of these elements elsewhere. None is, in itself, all that remarkable. But in final assembly, they are the benefits of the most powerful two-way Internet communications tool so far developed.