BloggerCon IV

Jay Rosen did a typically excellent session on Citizen Journalism but insisted we move the conversation forward from past BloggerCons and asked how CJ can be used to tell us something we would not otherwise know. This gave me the opportunity to mention the CARR Training for bloggers we did at BlogNashville and at the National Press Club and a fascinating article by Eric Kavanagh sent to me by Mark Tapscott.

What this means for government is that every check the feds cut—with the exception of entitlement and top-secret programs—should be visible online, just as consumers can now see their own canceled checks via the Web...
...technology today is so advanced, computers so fast, software so powerful, methodologies so polished and practiced, that accomplishing this system could be done inside of two years. In fact, templates already exist throughout the chambers of corporate America, in large part due to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (developed in response to the shenanigans of Enron). And if public corporations must answer to the government, shouldn’t the government answer to the public?

Later, Chris Pirillo pushed the group to offer up “software bitches” and the group responded with an earful for the software developers in the room. Chris advocated the idea that bloggers should post their bitches on their blogs. Many felt that they would not be heard. Chris came back later in the day and announced that he checked Google and “tags” and found that the term “Freedbacking” (providing free feedback) was not in use. He coined the term as a tag that can be added to a blog post so that product companies can search for posts that use that tag and name their company or product. This is a great idea. At BloggerCon III it did not take much to see that podcasting was going to be the big thing coming out of BCIII. I sure hope that “Freedbacking” gains similar currency. I will go even further and say that this term and the idea of how to use it is a huge idea and is going to become one of the biggest things in the marketing world.

Dave Winer had the DLs and the Monitors for the two afternoon sessions on technology talk about the sessions over lunch. As I listened to Dave express his desire that developers do more to help users understand the software they build I couldn’t help but think about my days working in the bond market where we traders went to great lengths to speak in a language that would sound like gibberish to the uninitiated - value of a thirty-second, inverted yield curve, spread over the ten year. We had our own nomenclature and benefited from employing our own special language to shut out the customer as much as possible. The less our customers understood about what we were doing the greater “spread” (profit) we could build into the prices at which we sold out products.

I related this to my experience with my son’s doctors when he was born severely premature and required a massive amount of medical intervention over an extended period of time (about 2 years). The doctors would come to me with a consent form to sign expecting that after they spent about a minute telling me they were going to perform some procedure on my son that I’d sign and they could about doing whatever they were planning to do. With my son’s like on the line, that was not good enough. The doctors certainly knew a lot more about medicine than I did but they were not smarter than me (as smart, maybe). I insisted that the doctor provide me whatever medical textbook described whatever procedure they were planning so I could understand it and make an informed decision to their consent request. The first time this happened the doctor pulled a book off his shelf and handed it to me with a puzzled look on his face. I told him I’d read it that night and get back to him with an answer in the morning. Later, when I read his medical textbook I understood that in cases like my son there are three things that doctors will try to remedy his particular issue. I learned that the first one works in about 40% of the cases. If that fails they go to option two which works in about 30% of the cases and then option 3 which had a 20% efficacy. In the event that my son failed to respond to any of these options and he fell in that last 10% they would be dealing with the unknown. It did not make feel better to know that there was a 10% chance that there might be nothing they could do for more son but at least I understood each step they were taking, why and what the risks were.