But convention is that blogs are judged by the person writing them rather than those reading them- much the same as a speech is judged by the speaker as opposed to the audience they attract. We like to congregate on blogs that are busy, lively places and the hierarchy of blogs rests heavily on those which are most widely read. That’s odd. One of the key differences between a blog and a newspaper op-ed is the relationship between the writer and the audience. Blogs are meant to be more discursive, iterative spaces where the blogger listens and learns, not just informs and speaks.

On the biggest blogs, the author moderates comments in order (partly) to limit their potential legal liability. However, it is rare that they read all of the comments they receive. Robert Peston and Nick Robinson appear to have all but given up on engaging with the comments on their blogs. Iain Dale and Guido Fawkes do occasionally enter the fray but it’s not a guaranteed way of entering a dialogue with the author.

On these blogs the tone is often confrontational, aggressive, conspiratorial and strident. They are also off-topic and often uninformative – identifying the funny, informative comments is hard work. Is that because the commenters know that they are not being watched?

There’s no appetite for bloggers extensively moderating their comments. The internet is profoundly biased in favour of freedom of expression and any sign of censorship usually leads to a dramatic loss of audience. But does that mean that successful blogs have to put up with irrelevant, daft or unpleasant comments?

There are blogs where the comments are generally constructive and thoughtful. Whilst many of these have a small readership, they don’t all. Matthew Taylor’s blog, one of those I know best, has a readership approaching 10,000 a month and rarely attractives invective (and often only when people confuse him with being a Cornwall MP. Matthew doesn’t respond to every comment – and commenters more often engage with each other. But it’s a welcoming, open space.

If I invite you to attend a performance of my local drama club, I wouldn’t expect you to judge me by the audience. But if I invite you to my birthday party, I would expect some judgement on the company that I keep. And if you ask any teacher, leave a group to its own devices and it will set its own rules. But lead that group or community, and you can shape it and influence its norms.

Blogs are just a communications medium and bad practice should not weaken the very best blogs in the same way that Big Brother doesn’t tarnish my view of The Wire. But as the medium matures, perhaps we should refine the criteria by which we select where we want to hang out. We choose our local pubs more selectively than picking the one with the largest number of punters. And we pass judgement on people by the company they keep. Perhaps its time for a greater range of criteria by which readers choose their blogs – and in turn a greater responsibility placed on bloggers to take responsibility for the behaviour of their community.

Related posts:

1. 3 changes to the Bloggers Circle
2. Bloggers Circle: week one assessment
3. New members join the Bloggers Circle

There are four challenges facing organisations online and over the next few months, I’d like to dedicate some time to investigating how organisations are responding to these, share lessons between them and analyse best practice.

Each challenge has come about as the internet has evolved though some organisations are at different points in their own internet presence. They are challenges because of the equality of the internet. Fail to meet them, and someone else will fill the void.

The first challenge is getting your content online – and looking good. It was the first challenge of the internet, back in the day when copy had to be well written, graphics large and with plenty of routes back to your offline organisation.

At this stage, you promote your website through advertising. If you watch an old episode of Friends you will see that it concludes with a little strapline giving you the AOL keyword (which was, err, Friends). The challenge for getting your website right was similar to producing a good corporate brochure.

You’re getting lots of users because you are a big organisation, or a smaller number but it doesn’t matter because it’s in proportion with the number of phone calls you get.

A whole variety of organisations are here at the moment. From small charities such as the Social Market Foundation to FTSE100 companies like Amec. That’s not intended to be provocative or pejorative – there may be good strategic reasons for these organisations not doing more online.

The second challenge was getting your content profiled on search engines. Up until Google this didn’t really matter. But from 2000/01 onwards, top ranking on search engines was the critical success factor for an organisation’s website. The content may not change much, although copy could be written specifically for search.

At this point, an organisation starts to spend more money online. It might invest in some search engine optimisation advice or some search advertising. For the most experimental organisations, microsites and subdomains provide a route to improve SEO and rank more prominently on alternative (and competitive) search terms. Now your important audiences are in one place – and it’s Google’s top 10.

You start to get an audience larger than your offline reputation suggests. You can reach to a wider audience – though not necessarily a more useful one – but it reaches beyond your borders.

The Hackney Council is around here and corporates such as BP.

The third challenge is making your website interactive. Now the content really starts to change. It becomes multimedia, share-able, a set of questions and hypotheses with a comments box rather than a statement of fact set in stone.

The task of promoting the site is different because it’s spread over a number of sites – YouTube, Flickr and now Twitter. It’s about establishing your organisation’s footprint across the web and reaching out to users wherever they are. But your reaching an important audience and engaging with an influential community.

Meeting this challenge and larger amounts of money are being spent. Because despite all the free platforms available, the task of making sure your content is better than the lively amateur is tricky. And a larger investment is justifiable because more of your audience is online.

There are many more organisations here, and I’d include The Guardian parts of the RSA site and Liverpool FC.

The fourth challenge is turning volume into value. If you are LFC you may be able to fill a football stadium with your Twitter followers, but will they pay to watch your premium content? They may be Guardian readers who will re-tweet your articles, mash-up your data or help Jemima Kiss with an article. But how many of them will? And where’s the value for the publisher? And how can you get one million YouTube viewers of Susan Boyle into valuable eyeballs for ITV?

Some organisations are here by default, because they’ve chosen to follow a (controversial) paywall system. The FT for example. But many more are asking the question and struggling to find the answer.

These four challenges may be a little broad and they may flatten out some complex issues. But these are the challenges facing organisations online.

Internet advocates, such as Seth Godin and Clay Shirky, rightly praise the maginificent impact of the internet in empowering new communities. But it’s a different task entirely for traditional organisations. It can be done. But until there’s a greater focus on it, the election of Barack Obama will remain the outstanding case study for linking online activism with real lasting social change.

I want to dedicate a decent amount of time to exploring, investigating and sharing how organisations are confronting these challenges. Who’s with me?

Related posts:

1. Journalism matters but so do big news organisations
2. Activists to members to activists
3. Is Compass successful in engaging its members?

I went to write a new blog post last week (much delayed) only to find a message from a hacker. Someone had got into my blog and put a virus message in place of my posts.

I was gutted. Embarrassed. Upset.

The public embarrassment at giving people a virus. At losing people’s thoughtful comments. The upset as I realised I hadn’t backed up my posts. The sense of loss as I thought about all the link juice I was losing. The sense of loss at all the work I put in.

I vowed to my blog to look after it better. To tend it each day. To write it more rigorously.

I pressed delete and removed it all.

I’ve restored some of it thanks to Google’s cache. But the comments are now lost. If you’re a first time visitor, this blog was a good place for debate (now and again) and if you’re returning, it had a lot more comments than you remember!

I’ll do better next time. But it was a hard lesson to learn.

Related posts:

1. Would you join a blogging collective?
2. What responsibilities do bloggers have over their blogs?

But just occassionally though, they write something that they’ve put extra effort into, for which they’d like to get more attention. That’s why they’re a member of the blogging collective. The collective is made up of a number of people who’ve been invited to join because they write a good – and occassionally very good – blog but it’s only part of what they do; they’re not and won’t be in the league of Guido Fawkes or Iain Dale.

The blogging collective works like this:

• membership is by invitation-only, with recommendations from existing members
• if you are a member, you can alert the collective to your best blog posts twice a month
• a condition of membership is that you write about another blogpost at least twice a month
• anyone abusing the system will be thrown out
• I – and anyone else – can provide regular advice and ideas to members of the collective on how they can improve their work

It’s just an idea of been working on – and arose from a suggestion made by Matthew Taylor. All thoughts, criticisms and iterations gratefully appreciated.

Related posts:

1. Launching the Bloggers Circle
2. A blogging apology
3. New members join the Bloggers Circle