Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

The latest asinine idea for organizing blogolism

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Huffington Post Chicago blogger Mike Doyle goes to desperate journalism conferences and sneers at all the flaccid ideas put forth. Which would be fine, if he didn't feel the constructive need to offer any half-baked ideas of his own. But he does.

here's what I think this town needs: a blogosphere roundtable: We local bloggers ought to get together for a strategy charrette
one weekend afternoon in a modestly-sized group in a shabby conference
hall surrounded by pizza, beer and a phalanx of flip charts and have a
frank discussion amongst ourselves about where we want our sites to go,
how we're trying to get there—and most importantly, how we can work
cooperatively to make sustainability happen. Then we should take we we've learned from each other, package it into a
manifesto and vet it at a community-wide conference. Now that would be
a conference I'd want to attend.

Let's count the silly assumptions, Mike:

• We disparate, self-interested pricks and prickettes won't "get together," for "strategy sharrettes."

• Even if we did: We don't like flip charts, especially when they're organized in a phalanx.

• The last thing we're going to do is have frank discussions with each other about where we want our sites to go. Why? Because whenever we're with other bloggers, we devote all our energies to trying to convince them our site is the bee's knees, and that they should be so lucky to get where we've got.

• A communitywide conference devoted to vetting a bloggers' manifesto on sustainability? That's where you want to go? Come on, Mike, it's summertime. Get a sense of humor. A return to common sense is sure to follow.

What's my idea to solving the crisis in journalism? I'm waiting for a vulgar Ted Turner type to swoop in, this decade or next, and show us all how to make money again. Maybe that's dumb, but it's three times as likely as your bloggers' pizza party—and in the meantime, summers off!

Twitter destroys innocent man’s Sunday

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I've known Sean Williams for about a decade. He is a straight-laced corporate communicator from Cleveland. He has worked for Goodyear and National City Bank, and is now starting his own consultancy.

He's a fine writer, he understands communication theory, he believes in measuring outcomes, and somehow he also has a sense of humor.

In short, he's true blue and blue chip.

And this morning, he is a victim—a decidedly innocent victim of a vicious and utterly unfair attack, by none other than PR villain Amanda Chapel.

You'll read Williams' account if you give a rat's ass about Twitter and the dangers of the anonymity the Internet affords would-be character assassins, or wonder how you'd behave if you felt, as Williams told me this morning, "the sense of helplessness" that comes from "sticking your toe into the waters of social media and getting a bite out of your leg."