Back To The Future

Reading this Reuters report on Bill Gates' public embrace of blogs as a business tool took me back down memory lane -- and into a few folders on my hard drive that I haven't visited for a while. Here's the first two paragraphs of the story:

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates often takes the stage to talk about the future of software technology, but on Thursday he also told top corporate executives that Weblogs and the way they are distributed can be used as business communication tools.

"What blogging and these notifications are about is that you make it very easy to communicate," Gates told executives gathered at Microsoft's headquarters for its annual CEO Summit.

This brought a smile to my face, because it reminded me of a few months that I spent -- along with a few fellow soldiers -- trying to make the case for this use of weblogs, back in early 2001 when I was still doing FEED and Plastic at our wonderful, but short-lived company Automatic Media. I haven't talked about this period much, partially because it's a bit of a blur: we were running out of money at a steady clip, and I was writing Emergence at night. But it's fun now to look back on it, given what's happened since.

Basically, we'd launched Plastic.com in January 2001 based on a mod of the Slashdot tools, and confronted an utterly dead advertising market, thus cutting off the one initial revenue stream we'd been hoping for. But we'd grown convinced that the group and solo weblog format was an incredibly powerful one, and one that could be used for more than just pop culture riffing, as we were doing on Plastic. (One of our board members who had also seen the light turned out to be Uber-Blogger Jeff Jarvis, who was back then merely a lowly President of an entire division of the Newhouse publishing empire.) So we decided to try to transform the company into a, gulp, enterprise software company, where we would go around and do custom builds of weblog tools for firms to better manage their internal information flow. Of course, 99.9% of these businesses had no idea what a weblog was, and we only had about two months of cash left to make the transition. But it was a valiant effort, if ultimately a futile one.

I went back and found one of the documents from that period. Here's the language we'd put together:

Enterprise clients using the Plastic platform can:

• Allow employees to efficiently manage, navigate and enhance the collective knowledge base of the company

• Organize the company's collective intelligence using the platform's intuitive, customizable information-architecture options

• Allow employees to rate content (industry news, sales strategies, etc.) according to relevance, ratings that are available to all employees

• Empower employees with a set of communication tools that facilitate ongoing discussion of the company's stored knowledge

It's nice to think that we were on the right track back then, even if we were about three years too early. But I have to say, part of me is glad we didn't get a chance to prove the model. It would have taken two years of hand-to-mouth financing before the business environment got ready to understand what we were saying, and I'm honestly not sure if I was cut out to be an enterprise software salesman. Much more fun to be hanging out in Brooklyn with my kids and writing books all day.

Comments

[Matt Haughey]

This sort of cracked me up, here's a SXSW panel (from March 2001) I setup (I didn't moderate because I had to leave early):

Weblogs: Business Applications
How weblog technology can be effectively utilized by the business world.

Steve Champeon, moderator
(Hesketh.com/inc)
Gael Fashingbauer Cooper
(Minneapolis Star Tribune)
Meg Hourihan
(megnut.com)
Mark Hurst
(Creative Good)
Matt Linderman
(37signals.com)

I recall that they spent almost all the time talking about hypothetical systems and how businesses could use them someday if they (gasp!) added weblogs to their corporate pages. Eventually people in the audience just wanted to talk about their personal blogs. I remember hearing part of it and figuring it must have been too far ahead of its time. I participating in a panel discussion in a couple months on the same subject, though this time I know the crowd will have lots of questions about how it has played out in the real world.

[Anon]

Somebody is posting some pretty bad stuff on your blog at http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/000156.html

At the bottom of the page is a bunch of stuff that will throw any parental software or search software that has filters on it into a frenzy.

I dont know if the site mods will read this; If you arent a site mod but know how to get in contact with them, please inform them that somebody is putting in phrases that would make the page get filtered.

[Gerard Van der Leun]

I really liked automatic. Too bad it came at just the wrong time.

[Morgan Daly]

In regards the post by Anon.

You might find this link very useful.

http://www.elise.com/mt/archives/000246concerning_spam.php

She lists all of these little things you can do to minimize your spam. And the rest of her site is a great resource.