There's a cool discussion going on over at blogtank about, well, blogtank really - where 5 minutes ago I said :-
OK, look I know that's a cheap trick, recycling a post from another blog but I've just gotten back from a 5 hour drive from Scotland (again), and I'm running low on creativity right now. You'll get over it.
Seems to me that blogging is one manifestation of communicating in an authentic voice and this works well on an individual level since you only have yourself (or the voices in your head) to contend with when it comes to putting up content (sorry about that, I'm just back home after a 5 hour drive and can't think of a better or worse word to use), mostly you're comfortable with what you put up, sometimes you pull a post 5 minutes after you post it up, like your brain's legal department just got back from lunch and discovered your posting to their horror and immediately asked you to pull it down.
I guess it also works reasonably well in smallish group blogs, where there's not too much stuff to wade through or organise.
Does blogging work as well in large organisations? Will Accenture form a blog division and equip 250 managed conslutants (neat typo) with portable realtime blogging kit? Maybe they might, but I guess what I'm saying is that blogging seems to work really well as a way for individuals and small groups to communicate in their authentic voices but as blogtank has demonstrated does the technological form blogging takes get in the way of smooth running, efficient progress and should we be looking to work out a way round this problem (if it actually exisits) by resisting the pull towards obvious organisational structures like teams and teamwork (in its conventional and physical senses). Take 50 individual authentic voices, put them together and do you still get the same authenticity, is it magnified 50 times or is it diluted or does the authenticity (and more importantly its value) get lost because its too hard to understand the threads and real juice from all the background noise?
blogtank came about because I thought that it would be cool to aggregate together the skills of many different people (who happened to blog), with authentic voices and valid contributions to make into one big gosh darn conventional team of people unhindered by the physical and time constraints of the real world.
Perhaps that was a big mistake. Perhaps there needs to be another way of harnessing this power and then enabling large groups and organisations (like accenture, AOL, Homeland security) to operate and talk with authentic voices.
the idea of blogtank came before blogtank, maybe we need to reverse engineer it and harness the ideas another way. more thinking out of the box is needed.
IMHO
OK, look I know that's a cheap trick, recycling a post from another blog but I've just gotten back from a 5 hour drive from Scotland (again), and I'm running low on creativity right now. You'll get over it.