Robert Paterson's Weblog

Convening Local Blog Space

Jake, as he does so often, finds a gem.

The BBC is experimenting with with Convening Space for Bloggers. Here is Jake's key summary of what the BBC are trying to do -

Robin Hamman, senior community producer for BBC English Regions New Media, explained the initiative in an interview with paidContent.org: “We aren’t sure if it’s aggregator, a citizen journalism project or a media literacy campaign - it probably cuts across all three.”

This is a three-month trial launched last week by BBC New Media Central and BBC Manchester:
- Between 10 and 20 volunteers are being recruited across the city.
- Through workshops, participants will be guided through the BBC’s editorial guidelines and production values and then referred to commercial blogging platforms to start their own sites.
- The BBC will monitor RSS feeds from these blogs and highlight the best content.
- Pre-existing local bloggers/Flickr contributors are also invited to submit work or tag content “bbcmanchesterblog” so it can be picked up.

…As for the workload, Hamman optimistically envisages this as a one or two hour job each day for BBC staff — skimming the RSS feeds and wrapping editorial around the best. The rest of the task is to promote the blog to BBC journalists as an efficient source of content about Manchester.

Is this not an important and easy way of expanding the space that Public Radio holds in America and maybe even in the world?

Ellen and the Gang are doing this already at NCPR. The rest of you have no excuse! Here are some pictures of their site

Note my friends on PEI that Alan McLeod in Kingston is a featured blogger showing how NCPR can start to move across the border into a community of 400,000 people that have poor coverage from the CBC. The CBC has no effective Kingston coverage and instead broadcasts from Montreal or Ottawa.

Imagine what could be done to build a great Canadian community of support in this way. Hello Vermont, WNED and Maine.....

Imagine if NPR had a National Blogging Forum that hosted some of the best bloggers and thinkers in America? What would this cost? What might be the effect? What would it be like to expand beyond the Beltway and tap into the goldmine that is thought and opinion in America and in the wider world.?

Imagine if NPR offered such a space to the African American Community or the Hispanic community? What could happen? What space would open up? What talent would be empowered?

What about Kids - Could a good set of hosts tap into MY Space? Hey what about getting behind the Ethiopian community in DC at WETA - every cab driver I know listens to WETA anyway. What about the Indian Diaspora?

Am I stupid or is this not easy and is it not inexpensive?

The New York Times - Convening Communities

The Times online is on a roll. Here is an excellent review on CNN Money by John Heilmann (Business 2.0 Magazine).

A lesson for us all - success on the web is about coming to grips with that the web is a social place. Community is not a feature of the new web. It is its heart. It is not important. It is central.

"Nisenholtz, 51, dates the turning point to early 2005, when, as he explains it,

"the executive committee of the company created a strategy that said we're in the business of convening communities here; we're not just in the business of pushing information at people."

Behind that strategy, Nisenholtz adds, was a recognition of "the importance of the social Web - that the center of the universe is moving to our users, and that our users want to remix and use the content that we have in ways that are suitable to them."

Thus began a dizzying flurry of Netcentric changes at the Times - some financial, some technological, some cultural: The purchase of About.com in March 2005 for approximately $410 million. The integration of the print and online newsrooms. The dabbling with blogs and podcasts.

The launch of premium service TimesSelect, which placed the work of columnists and various features, such as e-mail alerts and multimedia, behind a pay wall for users not subscribing to the paper. And, most recently, the top-to-bottom redesign of NYTimes.com, complete with an array of Web 2.0-fueled innovations.

On a strictly green-eyeshade basis, the two most significant items on this list are About.com and TimesSelect. The former, Nisenholtz notes, "is blowing the doors off the business," with second-quarter revenue rising to $19.4 million from $12 million last year-a 63 percent increase that puts About on track for an annual run rate of more than $80 million.

As for TimesSelect, the service had roughly 513,000 subscribers in June, 190,000 of whom were paying the Web-only rate of $49.95 a year, thus contributing about $9.5 million to the bottom line.

When I ask if TimesSelect has been successful enough to suggest that more material be placed behind the wall, Nisenholtz replies, "The strategy isn't to move more content from the free site to the pay site; we need inventory to sell to advertisers. The strategy is to create a more robust TimesSelect" by using revenue from the service to pay for more unique content. "We think we have the right formula going," he says. "We don't want to screw it up."

Nisenholtz is equally bullish about the Web 2.0-ification of NYTimes.com. "We've got some really interesting blogs, from basically a standing start only six months ago," he says. "We've got 10,000 topic pages on the Internet waiting to be populated."

Still, Nisenholtz admits that some of the site's more forward-leaning features have yet to take off. On the Most Popular page, while the Most E-Mailed feature is, as he puts it, "the big kahuna, a significant driver of interest," Most Blogged and Most Searched are catching on more slowly. Tagging hasn't caught on at all.

And even RSS newsfeeds, which the Times adopted early, are still "a niche," Nisenholtz says. (In June, RSS feeds generated 12.2 million pageviews for the site out of a U.S. total of nearly 295 million.) "RSS is still very techie," he says. "Most people outside the business are totally unaware of it."

Leadership in a Human Organization

What is leadership in a human organization?

As I deepen my conversation with Toke and Chris the idea of the warrior/midwife seems to grip me harder.

Warrior

Midwife

I think that this is the power of the film - The Mission - in that it shows the blend of the warrior and the midwife as a composite for leadership that enables people to become all that they can be.

I have to admit that at the moment I feel more like Mendoza the penitent as he drags his life behind him in a huge net waiting to be released or not by those that he has hurt the most.

Mendoza dragging his penance

The moment of redemption

The Human Workplace

Every sentient being appears to have a natural organization that suits its evolved purpose. Every entity in nature has also a natural maximum size. Have we used our reason to breach our organizational limits? Is this why work is so stressful? Is this why we find blending our work and our family so hard? is this why our kids are increasingly so lost? Is this why so many of us have chronic illness.

In this new series I will not answer these questions - I leave them open for a later series when I will apply as much science as I know to establish that our modern view of a mechanical organization is anti human and is in itself one of the most dangerous dogmas that our imagination has yet conceived.

What I intend to do now though is to establish that we as humans do have a natural organization and that human organizations have natural limits. I will do this in three ways - I will use make simple observations, I will draw on an emerging science of the limits of human relationships and I will tell you stories of people today, doing regular things, who are living and working in this most natural way for us.

First just a reminder that every species has a natural design for its society that enables them best to work, play, love and bring on the next generation.

These work/life organizations do not depend on the latest theory in the HBR. They need no consultant. There may be social stress but no work life imbalance. They raise the next generation especially well.

Neither do they scale infinitely. They have clear limits. They do have hierarchies They do have leaders. Rank is earned. Abuse is rejected.

We too grew up on the Savannah as these Bushmen still do and evolved a natural work/life organization that fits humans best. This way of relating to others is hardwired into our brains. Many call these relationships Magic Numbers.

They are

• 8 The circle of intimacy - often 8 adult men and 8 adult women in a tribe with 16 kids
• 16 team
• 30-40 The building block
• 150 - The maximum number that can self organize into a natural hierarchy
• 500 - the minimum needed to maintain a healthy gene pool

I intend to come back to the science underlying all of this after we have visited a number of organizations that live today - maybe unconsciously but in reality by the rules  set by our evolutionary programming.

My hope is to to offer hope. Hope that we can quite easily chose to return to our nature in a modern context. The paradox being that a new tool set of ours - the Internet - may be the supporting tool we need to make this return.

End of Homework

Chris has begun a useful plea to challenge the dogma of homework.

If you intuitively feel that a child's life should be a child's life and that family time at home is precious - you may find this book - The End of Homework -  interesting.

In the follow on I include an article from the columnist Dr Heller that goes deeply into the book and the context for many homes today.

Like dogma everywhere - the arguments for Homework have no substance - they firmly state that it is a "Good" thing and that it builds character and self sufficiency - yet they provide no data. Advocates also have this fantasy about what home life is like for many today - I sense a hope for the Cleaver household. Lastly the pro dogma has the deepest fantasy linked to it of all - the advocates imagine that children are only adults in a small size and miss completely that children are natural beings on a development track

Recalled to Life - Chapter 1 - Home

Some of you have enjoyed my occasional pieces on my early life where I explored my own experience of growing up in a "Trusted Space". In writing them, I have discovered many things about my past that I did not know. As I had my coffee this morning, I felt that I would like to be able to read them all in one place and see the pattern unfold.

So here, aggregated into one place, are the early parts of Chapter  1 "Home".

The next Chapter, "School" will be pieces that deal with my life at school. I, like many middle class boys went off to boarding school aged 8. In looking back it seems barbaric, but because everyone I knew did this, it seemed normal to me at the time. In fact I had a wonderful time at school. As home became ever darker and more dangerous, school became a haven of safety and community - but I get ahead of myself.

I hope you enjoy these early pieces when home was fun and safe.

Part 1 - The Magic Garden

Part 2 - English Food

Part 3 - Nannies & Love

Part 4 - TV in the 1950's

Part 5 - Called to Adventure

Part 6 - The Real Adventure Begins

Part 7 - Ghana

Human Workplace - Dog Policy

Scoble adds more comment on Printing for Less

I too came away with the same impression. This is — by far — the most impressive business I’ve been in. Not because it makes a ton of money (it only has $24 million in sales) but because of the approach it takes. I’ve spoken to executives at many of the world’s best or most respected companies like Target, Boeing, Nestle, Google, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, and fell in love with this little company. I hope to help make Podtech even 1/100th as fun a place. Also because it is being built in the absolute middle of nowhere without ANY geek infrastructure around it.

Andrew Field is my business hero.

He is also with me in being a dog person - "Oh, and I love their dog policy. At the end it simply says “no cats.”"

Human Workplace - Printing for Less

Nick Runyon just emailed me from Printing for Less in Montana to remind me that PFL has lots of work for those that seek to live in a great place and be with great people.

Here is their company info page

Sweet!

From Doc

The Paranoid Skies

Just pray you don't drop your iPod in the loo on a plane (Thanks Gabe)