Sarah Davies

1. Find your evangelist
Is there someone in your organization who can’t stop talking about the great work you do? Bring everyone in your organization to mind. Have a Cinderella moment, and grab even those folks who scrub the kitchen floor and crawl around connecting cables. This person could be anywhere in your organization.

2. Give your evangelist time
Find someone else who can do what they do for five hours a week. Really. Offer to scrub the kitchen floor for them. Have them go around your office and ask everyone what they are doing. “What’s the most interesting thing you did this week?” “what’s coming down the pipe?” “what are you thinking about doing in the future?” Have them make a list of 10 interesting stories per week. Per week! They can do it. Have them record or write down direct quotes from your employees. Your organization has a lot more news than you think it does. It just takes a passionate person to go around and collect it.

3. Find your writer
You need a great writer. I can’t emphasize this enough. You need to hire a freelance writer who is looking for a little extra income while they finish their next novel. He or she needs to be funny. He or she needs to be charming. He or she needs to be a digital native so they know how to write for the web. If your organization is comfortable with it, I’d say find someone who is a little incendiary. Give them the by-line so they get professional cred for their work.

4. Pay your writer
Pay them $5 to write a sample blog post for you. If you like it, negotiate a rate that’s manageable for you. The very best professional bloggers make about $12 per post. Hire them to write 10 posts per week. (OMG! That’s expensive! Yes! How much do you spend on publishing and mailing the newsletter that no one reads? More than $480 a month? Hire a blogger.) Have them pick five of the evangelist’s ten weekly stories and write them up. (Yes, you are throwing away five stories! Chaff/wheat. Think about it.) Post one every weekday. Also have them find one news story or post from another blog every weekday that has to do with your organization, and post an excerpt from it and a linkback to it. Pay them the same rate to do this, even though it’s less writing. It’s important to have continuity of authorship, and other blogs will notice you faster if you link back to them. So, that makes two posts every weekday.

And that’s it. The technical aspects of setting up a blog are easy. If you don’t have a tech team who can install blogging software for you, just go to wordpress.com, buy the premium account ($15/year) so you can use your own domain name, and pick a theme. It’s that easy.

[Edited to add: Disclosure is hugely important to regular blog readers. A disclosure page, like this one or this one helps build trust with your readers. Tell them outright that your blogger is a paid contractor, not a volunteer supporter. Always make a note in your post if the author or the organization has personal or financial connections to the subject of the blog post. Hat tip to Jesse's comment below for the suggestion.]

Read the latest Paul Coelho book cover to cover on the way to Austin. It was sappy histronic bullshit. Picked up some suitably sardonic Sedaris for the plane ride back.

Presenters:

Ben Huh – I Can Has Cheezburger?
Christian Lander – Stuff White People Like
Kerry Miller – passiveaggressivenotes.com
Heather Armstrong (Dooce) – Blurbodoocery Inc
Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette) – Air America

Takeaways from the internet famous bloggers panel:

1. Get yourself a good therapist.

2. Start a blog because you have something interesting and funny to say, not because you want to become famous, people can see the sparkle of authenticity dust.

3. Don’t write a book. It’s like running a marathon. Blogging is like sprinting. It’s over faster and you can go back to your normal life. And blogging makes more money.

4. When you do fold and write a book, stick to your guns and don’t let them change your writing and what you think is important.

5. The biggest drawback to professional blogging is that you can never take a break. Your fans demand content constantly.

6. If you keep sacred blogging boundaries about things you won’t blog about, then keep them invisible to your readers. They should be under the impression that you are putting all of yourself out there.

7. Never keep track of the most active commenters in the sidebar. You will invite trolls. Instead, select the most insightful or funny comments and feature them in your sidebar. It’s very rewarding for the commenters, and gives new people an idea of what good comments look like. If you need to, start an “off-topic forum” to act as a padded room for the really crazy commenters.

8. You will get death threats and possibly suspicious packages, but just ignore it. None of them have died.

9. Although the blogging business model sometimes is discouraging, it’s way more stable than publishing or the recording industry. Have faith and keep a savings account for times when the advertising runs a little dry.

My takeaways from Tim Hwang‘s sxsw panel:

The internet has its own self-referential universe of memes. Lolcats is one of the most virulent memes that has ever existed. It has a computer code, it has a wiki-translation of the bible, and it has become it’s own language that has spread throughout nearly every other meme online. What aspects of memes cause them to spread or die?

Recessions are great for internet culture. Lots more people are able to consume and create memes when they are unemployed. Twitter, Etsy, and Vimeo have all had hugely increased traffic since the recession started in October.

Can you hack internet culture? Are there reliable tactics to become “internet famous”? Can we have a “social net neutrality” that ensures that memes organically spread rather than being pushed by a small group of people who know how to hack the system?

Deborah Schultz on publishing: Codification of knowledge into books lost the aspect of conversation and interactivity that we had in oral traditions. Are there any example of a combination of those to things? The Talmud may have been the first group blog, but it was still a discreet artifact. How can we make the artifact of the book more participatory?

Clay Shirky says that the internet is the largest group of people who care about reading and writing ever assembled in history. We are here to talk about the lateral transfer from what people are thinking and writing to what people are thinking and making of that material. He didn’t really want to write a book. He merely wanted to produce long-form writing and have people read it. We understand that videos are produced by a large group of people, but we have this flawed conception that books are produced by one person. Getting something on the order of 45 people to look at the item before it’s produced changes the production.

Long form writing can’t be about right now, because it takes time to consume. There’s no point in trying to chase the real time web. Try to make it a piece of writing that will last, regardless of the medium you produce it in. If long form writing can’t be about “now”, then it can’t be first on google searches. People have to spread it manually. One of the greatest exercises you can do with a book is to ask “who is going to hate this?” and then don’t write for them.

audience input after the jump
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Jonathan Coulton left his day-job to become a musician. he put out a new song for free every friday. Eventually, a few of them got picked up and passed around. Make it as easy as possible for people to consume what you are putting out. Put up the easiest file format to share, and put it out whether you think it’s good or not. The internet is really good at causing the good stuff to float to the top.

Natasha Wescoat recommends putting yourself on every website you can, because that is what generates traffic. Don’t force people to come to your site.

Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos) claims he wasn’t the best or most original writer in his field. He stood out in two ways. He had a very narrow niche that no one else was hitting – at the time it was polls and the war in Iraq. He served in the war, so he had first hand experience. He also had good branding – orange became the color of his site and represented him and his brand. People confuse you with other sites if you are using a generic blogspot background. Use colors that no one else is using. Use iconic icons! They will remember and build associations with your writing. He was a comments nazi, banning comments from right wingers, which created a “safe haven” for progressives to chat in the comments.

Burnie Burns (Red vs Blue) was a professional film maker, and after a year of shopping films to film distributors, made a hobby video and put it up online. It got great distribution, and they realized they didn’t need someone else to be a distributor for them. They keep up with current events (holidays and news), which encourages people to spread the videos quickly and keeps things fresh. Being linked from Fark was key, so they started advertising on Fark for $25.

Brett Gaylor (RiP: A Remix Manifesto) gave his users challenges to remix and cut up different pieces of video with the goal of putting together activist videos. He recommends including the community you are targeting in your work. He included Cory Doctorow in his video, and got a link from Boing Boing.

More detail on the panel after the jump!
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Lawrence Lessig is trying to rebuild trust in congress. Wikipedia and Lonely Planet don’t accept advertising money because it would breed mistrust. Parents don’t trust the health system that tells them to vaccinate their children because the health system has conflicts of interest, with many of their directors receiving yearly payments from drug companies. Think about the phrase “classic tobacco science” – corrupted science.

The point isn’t that money is evil or politicians are corrupt, the point is that dependence on money breeds mistrust.

So what if politicians and scientists argue that even though it might breed mistrust, it really doesn’t change the way they behave? Well, congress has had common sense public policy questions that they just get wrong. Think copyright, think recommended sugar intake, think global warming. Are they idiots? Or are they guided by dependency on money?

Bribery wasn’t even a crime in congress until 1853. Is today the same? We do have a corruption today, but it’s a corruption of a different kind. We have legislators of integrity. Their actions are legal and do not constitute ethics violations. But the consequence of being dependent on money from the institutions you regulate breeds mistrust. It breeds the common view that money buys results in congress. Congress members become addicts. They are always thinking about how to get more contributions. The lobbyists are the pushers, and they are increasingly productive at buying results.

The problem is not big government or regulation. The problem is mistrust. There were probably more people who believed in the British crown during the revolution than believe in congress now, but congress continually claims that it’s not because of the money.

We must have citizen funded elections. Lessig started Change Congress and called for a strike for change. They asked for people to pledge to stop contributing to congressional candidates who are not committed to citizen funded elections.

We must not only have good behavior in our daily lives, we must be good citizens and demand good behavior from our government. We have lost faith in congress. We have lost trust in congress. We have a democracy crisis. It’s not that this is the most important problem, it’s that this is the root of the most important problems we have. We must solve this problem first.

How can we survive the near term influence of K Street? Obama says you can’t work for his administration and then go work for the people you were regulating during his administration, but you can as soon as he leaves office. Our ethics aren’t strong enough.

Baratunde Thurston is asking about Conyers. The numbers could be interpreted a different way. Lessig says he is a supporter of Conyers. There are two kinds of problems out there. There is actual corruption, which does not apply to Conyers. Then there is the good souls problem. There is the problem that the money he accepted breeds doubt and mistrust. Lessig holds Conyers to a very high standard, and because of his respect for the man, he holds him to a higher standard that gets rid of doubt, that doesn’t create the skepticism.

What is the difference between the amount corporations give and the amount people give? Even if everyone went on strike, would we make a difference? Yes, we will make a difference, because the republican party is in trouble, and the democrats know that, and the 2010 elections will be a fierce battle for cash.

Could it be that the solution to corruption is civil disobedience? The only way this happens is if non-politicians are behind us. The only way we can reform this is from the outside. We want to inspire hackers to help us, to build the pressure we need to change it.

The ethos that made the internet so wildly successful is not the ethos of a majority of its members at this point. Any ISP has the ability to “unroute” traffic by claiming to be a site it doesn’t own, and flushing all the packets it receives. We are relying on the neighborly nature of lots of ISPs working together, and that’s certainly not the way most people are. Wikipedia depends on passionate volunteers who keep out the spammers. Wikipedia is only 45 minutes from utter chaos if all those volunteers, who are in no way contractually obligated to stay, leave. The internet’s siblings to those wikipedia volunteers are called NANOG, they are the passionate volunteers who fix the “map” of the internet whenever someone attempts to alter it maliciously. What happens if those, again, not contractually obligated volunteers, leave?

Originally, personal computers merely ran any executable code that you asked them to run. What would have happened if someone had distributed bad code? They could have taken down several computers, but for 20 years, no one did. Today’s pcs have huge stacks of software running at any given time, and their users don’t know which ones are good and which ones are bad. Since computers are increasingly networked, and we’ve legislated to allow ecommerce, we now have a huge motivation to distribute bad code – money.

Steve Jobs has said that the beauty of the iPhone is that Apple can control it, meaning it’s nothing like the pc because no one can send you bad code. Even after the app store launched, Apple approves all apps available in the app store to protect its users. But that gives apple the power to deny any app at any time. Apple can pull the plug on any app you use without explanation. In fact, Apple has denied apps merely because they seem to be pointless and they might offend part of the user base (case in point: a Bush presidency countdown clock that was denied). What would Wikipedia be now if they had denied everything that might be offensive or pointless? The same thing is happening with Facebook apps.

Our devices are now “updating” themselves to be things quite different from what we bought. What if your toaster got an upgrade and suddenly started making orange juice? We are no longer purchasing devices we control (like the pc), we are merely paying to enter into enigmatic breakfast-oriented relationships.

Contractually, Apple could reprogram all iphones over the air to turn on their mics and send the ambient noises back to Apple. They wouldn’t even have to tell users that they did this. We would only know that our batteries aren’t lasting as long as they used to.

What do we do? We can all report to each other what software we are running and what software our “experts” are running, so that when someone tells your computer to run code, you have some idea of whether that code is new or old or common or rare. That would be a good start.

My takeaways from Dave Olson‘s sxsw panel:

The internet allows us to ensure a redundancy of information that the physical world can never have. We tear down our modern-day pyramids, but our blogs are duplicated and recorded and archived. We are passing our every word down to future generations. What are we passing down? How much intent and integrity and heart do we put into our digital productions?

Our past heroes have put their entire lives into their work. Has anyone done that online? Is there a digital Thoreau? Will we discover a currently neglected philosophy blogger in a hundred years and suddenly realize that we ignored someone whose ideas would come to change the world?

Embark on personal archeology. What projects have you completed in the past that have no digital presence? Put them online. Share them. Pass them on to your peers and future generations. As a world, we will rarely discover our geniuses unless they share their work with the world.

I’m at a web design panel at sxsw. The presenter, Dan Willis, is making the interesting point that a vast majority of what we put up online is merely print in disguise. It’s certainly common in transitions to new media that we (humans) initially treat it just like the old media. When we first got television, we just filmed people reading radio scripts. Are we making that faux pas with the web?

There is an unfortunate disconnect between artists and techies. The nature of technology exploits a flaw in the human mind – we are divided into analytical folks and emotional folks, and there are few precious minds that can bridge that gap. Things can’t get onto the web without going through a techie. Techies can put things online without artists, but artists can’t put things online without techies. As a result, the web is focused much more on taxonomy and categorizations and text, and lots of things that we’ve had in libraries and newspapers for generations already. The web lacks emotion and art.

How do we bridge this gap? I think the techies can make themselves obsolete. You don’t need a techie to start a wordpress blog, or put a video on YouTube. The mission of techies should not be to put up information, the mission of techies should be to get out of the way of the artists, to give them increasingly powerful platforms (think sketchup) with which to populate the web.