That got me thinking about bloggers, blogging and the associated technologies that have sprung up around them, and below is the outcome of a quite Saturday afternoon with just my TabletPC, me and few beers...

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Q: "Have you employeed a blogger?"

A: Yep

Q: "Does it have an impact on your hiring decision if one of the people you are interviewing maintains a blog and everyone else you interviewed doesn't?"

A: Yep

Q: "Why does it make a difference?"

A: Well...running the interactive / digital arm of one Australia's largest advertising / communications agencies, Singleton Ogilvy & Mather, its pretty important to me to know that the people i am hiring have a passion and a strong belief in the space we work in.

Q: "How does passion help someone do there job better?"

A: If a person is willing to stick their passion and belief's they have out for all to see, in this case using blogging as a personal communication medium...hey...its a great way to show to a potential employer that you can see past the "standard" uses for the medium, which in our case is the development of campaign driven web sites, email communications and banner ads. And blogging is as good a place anywhere to start. It also goes beyond that, it shows that they see the value in opening up the communication channels and starting conversations. Its hard to open yourself up to freely talking about your passions and its even harder to do that when you are giving your readers or customers a chance to talk back and ask questions.

I know its considered very dot-comy now, but a lot more people currently in or interested in getting into the advertising / marketing / PR / communications business should read the "Cluetrain Manifesto" book because it really sum's up for me where weblogging and other technologies like moblogs, audioblogs, videoblogs and WiKi's will take us in the future.

Q: "So do many of your staff have blogs?"

A: I've now got two staff out of eighteen that blog. One of them, Larissa, has quite a popular personal blog, but her blog only played a small part in her getting the job because at that time I think not only myself, but everyone else was still playing with the idea of exactly how powerful a tool blogging could be. Lets go forward nearly two years to Jason, who I just employeed this week...well...knowing that he blogged definitely played a big part in him receiving the job offer. Not one other person who's CV we received or that we interviewed, openly spoke about blogging or showed the level of passion and understanding in the space that Jason did. And that made a huge difference.

Its hard enough trying to get clients to understand the value of these emerging mediums, but its often harder getting traditional agency staff to understand it. Now, if I end up having employees who utilise these sort of mediums in their personal lives, and I make the effort to help them understand that its OK to talk about this sort of stuff to clients and other agency staff, it makes my job in getting these tools out there a lot easier.

Q: "So do you think that educating people about this new world is hard or is it just the perception of this stuff that is the biggest problem?"

A: In my opinion it’s the perception...people can always be educated slowly. Just take a look at what started to happen to the perception of Microsoft when staff like Robert Scoble took on the blogosphere and opened up the communication channels. With over 1000 Microsoft bloggers in one place now opening the channels, the view of Microsoft as this big baddie within the developer community (and slowly the press) has started to change. Now i don't think that anyone would argue with me that one of the big things that Linux delivered on was openness, and look at the community that grew around not only doing dev work with Linux, but also the amount of press coverage that Linux has got because of that openness.

The technology is enabling the everyday employee to easily communicate their thoughts to an open and interested audience. This can be a good thing or a bad thing...of course some people and companies will try to exploit it...get over it...its happened with every form of communication media ever invented...right down to the printing press and paper. What we need to be looking at and working on, is how to get more people in the traditional media agencies to understand what the impact will be of all this stuff. We also need to realise that for all the envagelism we can do, some people just don't get it...and never will. And thats fine. Not everyone gets this stuff.

Q: "So what value have you gotten out of blogging?"

A: Blogging has opened a whole new world for me. If i look back to late 2003, i had been running the current version of my blog for about a year, and my blogging was really just for me and a few close friends. In the leadup to going to the 2004 O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference in San Diego in February 2004, i had been reading Russell Beattie's blog and one of the things i picked up from Russels blog, was about this guy called Robert Scoble who had taken a job as an Evangelist at Microsoft and who also ran a blog. So naturally, being a bit of a pro-Linux geek from years ago who had started to notice interesting things going on in Microsoft that were changing my perception, i thought i would check out Scoble's blog and see what he was talking about. The way the Scobleizer ran his blog and the stuff he blogged about hit a nerve with me. I was fascinated by his posts and the way he was trying to start "conversations" so I organised to meet up with him at etech.

I had also been a long time reader of Joi Ito's blog as well as a participant in the Joi Ito IRC channel (#joiito) on the freenode server. So when i had confirmed that i would be attending ETech, i took the opportunity to utilise these mediums to develop a friendship with a number of the #joiito community who were going to etech so that i could get the full benefit of my trip and met some great and talented people face-to-face. The Joi Ito crowd (especially Joi himself) were fantastic. Imagine rocking up to a conference in another country and suddenly meeting 15-20 people who I felt like I had known for years. Obviously the IRC chat room was a big part of this, but don't dismiss the insights that people's blogs gave me into who they were and what sort of stuff they were interested in.

I think it was the second day of etech when Robert showed up and as soon as we saw each other with out Tablet PC's, we hit it off instantly. We kept the "conversation" going during etech and also while i was in San Francisco and he was back in Redmond the following week. The outcome of all this, was that Robert helped to organise a number of meetings for me for when i was on the Microsoft Redmond campus for the third week of my trip. Robert got me into meetings with the MSN, MapPoint, XBOX, SPOT (MSN DIRECT), the Longhorn and various MS Research teams. All of this because i had found his blog a few months earlier. Oh yeah...he also organised a geek dinner where i was the special guest. The outcome of that dinner, was my registering the geekdinner.com domain and...the months of work i still need to put into the site to launch it .

It doesn't stop there. Through Roberts blog, i started reading the blog of Frank Arrigo, an Australian Microsoft employee. After "communicating" with Frank on his blog for a month or two, we finally got to meet at the Australian Mobile Developers Conference. That was the start of another great friendship. Having got to know Frank, i decided that going to the Australian Tech.Ed conference was going to be extremely worth while. Tech.Ed, and Frank, introduced me to so many people I couldn't mention them all here. Frank also introduced me to Cameron Reilly, a recent ex-Microsoft employee who had been blogging for a while. Cameron and I get on really well as we see the value of a lot of the same sort of stuff, and we meet for coffee and the most amazing conversations every time my work takes me to Melbourne. Cameron has in turn put me in touch with a friend of his who works for Hutchinson (3G telco) in Sydney.

The story goes on and on. The amount of time and money on servers and software I have spent on blogging versus the value of the blogosphere to me is a no brainer...the networking that has been the result of blogging has opened up so many conversations and importantly new friendships that will out live my time in my current role in the advertising business...the value of this stuff is long term and will play a huge impact on what I do in the future.

Here's an example. Blogging has also introduced me to Charles Wright (journalist for The Age) and to Trevor Cook (an Australian PR guru). The reason I mention these guys, is that when I started playing with the idea of putting on an Australian Blogging Conference, the obvious people to turn to were Cameron, Trevor, Charles and Frank and to see if they were interested in helping....of course they were and it looks like Australia's first full blown (possibly two day) blog conference is going to happen (fingers crossed).

Q: "So the real value to you is...?"

A: Having meaningful conversation is the real value of blogging for me. The network that opens up for you after you start having conversations with people you would normally be unlikely to meet face-to-face is amazing. It’s a powerful medium and we haven't seen the end of it. Moblogs, audioblogs, videoblogs, podcasting...these are just the beginning and I think the real power will come from what syndication technologies like RSS and ATOM allow us to do.

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Hmmm...like i was saying...the power of passion and belief in this space can be pretty strong.

(Written by Mick Stanic and originally posted to SplaTT's Blog on 30th October 2004)