Now and then, we come across posts that have an authentic literary quality. For me, one of the most remarkable and consistent authors, year after year, is Dave Winer. Last November, as he was wishing “Happy Thanksgiving everybody!”, as most every year since 1994, he gave me the very single reason why I have always liked reading what he writes, almost regardless of his subject matter: “Me,” he says, “I’m a mystic about What It All Means.”

Dave Winer’s posts are always based on a personal experience (what he sees, what he programs, what he expects, etc.); however, and contrary to the self-centered manner of a number of tech gurus, his self-centricity is that of a cameraman providing the perspective from which he is reporting what he sees or feels, thus setting up the decor and lighting as he invites you to explore. Self-centricity is by no means egotism. Dave Winer has a sizeable ego, sure, but really no more than most good writers actually have. He stands his ground. He has opinions on things or people with which one may not necessarily agree. And so what? Do we agree with everything great artists do or say? When people focus on “what it all means,” they are unlikely to build unanimity, and the demystification process that governs the investigation of things around us can come across as either paranoid or enlightening depending on where you stand. This art-of-writing from a viewpoint is the essence of literature. Literature-grade blogging is no exception.

As Matt Mullenweg said in his selection of 10 blogs that make you think, Dave Winer’s writings make you “think.” What does this really mean? The best response comes from Winer himself in a remarkable note about Julia Child, whom he views as a “natural-born blogger,” even though she wrote before the blogging era: “A blogger isn’t just someone who uses blogging software, at least not to me. A blogger is someone who takes matters into his or her own hands. Someone who sees a problem that no one is trying to solve, one that desperately needs solving, that begs to be solved, and because the tools are so inexpensive that they no longer present a barrier, they are available to the heroic individual. As far as I can tell, Julia Child was just such a person. Blogging software didn’t exist when she was pioneering, but it seems that if it did she would have used it.”  In the same piece, he also mentions that “The story of the nobility of blogging largely remains, imho, untold,” a statement with which I also agree. I see two intertwined reasons to this: It is still a new genre and identifying the intrinsic characteristics of a new genre is always difficult.

People have started to write the history of blogging recently. One of the most detailed books may be Scott Rosenberg’s Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters. The book (which I discussed in an earlier post) reads like an epic about the blogosphere’s first protagonists. However, it is possible that the premium granted to early adopters may have hindered the actual positioning of blogging into a fully-fledged literary genre – and this for two main reasons:

-   First, because of an easy confusion between the means and the content. Lots of people were early adopters of typewriters and certainly gained temporary fame because of it. Obviously, very few, if any, delivered a text comparable to Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (the first typewritten manuscript according to historian Darryl Rehr).

-   Secondly, because of the customary association of any new genre with existing categories. Just as video initially came across of the poor relative of cinema, “blogging” has come to designate the act of writing virtually anything on the Web, and a substitute for or alternative to personal diaries, industry reporting, or news or opinion columns. If the “the story of the nobility of blogging remains largely untold,” it’s also because it’s rarely perceived as a fully-fledged genre, as an art form of its own. 

The story of the nobility of blogging will be hard to come by and may take some time. Just think how hard it is to write the story of the nobility of poetry, essay, or novel. But maybe it’s possible to start to create a blog anthology organized along two of the main characteristics, that, in my opinion, drive the intrinsic quality of a blog, regardless of the topic:

-   Authored by a real person. Blogs can be close to the diary genre, with clear differences, however. As in a diary entry, a post reflects the true feeling of a person, yet, and contrary to most diaries, the purpose of a blog may not be to simply vent one’s feelings, but rather to express a deep emotional engagement in experiences that are also of value to others. When blogs appeared in the mid-nineties, I had the distinct impression that blogging was a reincarnation of what the Beat generation had brought to the world, the pulse of a/the world through the mind of a writer. That’s why I like Dave Winer’s notion of a blogger as “heroic individual.”

-   A person in quest of his/her own authenticity and identity. Great bloggers have a recognizable style from a linguistic standpoint, some form of artistic idiosyncrasy, regardless of the topic, that is hard to isolate. It conveys the sense of uniqueness of a writer in the process of self-definition through his/her writing. Lots of people write interesting things, and write them well, but they do so as implicit or explicit spokespersons of a magazine, a company, or the brand that they represent (including their own brand). The vast majority of bloggers wants to or must be consistent with the image they project or want to project rather than with who they are as individuals, and are abstractions of themselves. Again, what they say may be remarkable, but they express themselves as expected by their public/audience. Louis L’Amour or Zane Grey may be extraordinary novelists in the Western fiction genre, but they do not necessarily incarnate the nobility of novel-writing as Steinbeck does.

Dave Winer has a unique place in the history of blogging, as both a major contributor to the most fundamental technologies for online publication and as a major writer himself (with close to a thousand contributions since 1994). The transparent interaction between the mind of the technologist and of the writer creating technology as part of his communication process (which, according to me, started as early as his days at LivingVideoText with its concept of idea processor) did shape the history of blogging, and made blogging the most pervasive literary genre in the history of the all means of expression. Dave Winer has accumulated all the possible kudos as “The father of modern-day content distribution,” blogging, podcasting and RSS. I would venture to say that he is also definitely a part of what is often called “experimental literature” in this country, i.e. when writers change given forms and invent a whole new style – think of Joyce, Borgès, Cortázar. 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

@mddelphis

For general information about Dave Winer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Winer

About 40 students of the INSEAD business school from both the Singapore and the Fontainebleau campuses spent the week in Silicon Valley and attended various presentations and lectures, all remarkably coordinated by Dominique Trempont (left on the picture with three students, Mauricio from Colombia, Fawad from Pakistan and Philipp from Germany). I already spoke about INSEAD a while ago in a conversation with Eric Benhamou. This week, I was able to take a closer look at the exceptional value of this 12-month intensive MBA program, as well as the quality of the human experience provided by this truly international business school. The students who chose the Silicon Valley program are a subset of the 2009 class (others selected different places). I was impressed by this group of brilliant and open-minded folks born in about 25 different countries — and I was ever more impressed to find out that not all of them intend to pursue a career in high-tech. I have no idea how the admission process at INSEAD works, yet it’s clear from the sample I saw that the school is very good at identifying authentically curious people, those who, as Mark Twain said, are able to “Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in [their] sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” 

I was one of the speakers invited by Dominique Trempont during the week. The theme of my lecture was “Starting a company: Thrills and Agonies.”

You can establish a list of reasons of why startups fail, and come up with 5, 10, 15, or 20 causes of failures depending on the angle you take. In the end, only one may be deadly: when a startup creates a product that nobody wants. In this presentation, I focused more specifically on one important factor that can improve the chances of succeeding: the depth and breadth of an entrepreneur’s commitment to his/her project, and subsequently, his/her ability to draw people to his/her cause.

Here below is the slideshow that I used and a short summary of the themes I discussed for 90 minutes. Over the next few weeks, I may discuss some of these slides more extensively.   

Given that Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us came out at the end of last year, the book has been reviewed extensively, and if you haven’t read it yet, I can only recommend that you do. I recently translated it into French and wrote a foreword for it — of which I made the English adaptation (three posts). 

Published in French by Diateino (http://www.diateino.com). Available for pre-order. Hardcover – Sept 1, 2009; eBook available at http://izibook.eyrolles.com (July 22, 2008).

Seth Godin’s Tribes has been an Amazon.com best-seller in the Leadership et Business & Investing categories since it came out (October 2008). This is not surprising. The book is short, easy to read and, like all of Seth Godin’s books, both entertaining and educational. 

A book that wakes you up… The book sounds like a motivational speech meant to shake up anyone who “would like” to start something – anything, a restaurant, a musical group, a company, a new product line, whatever – but who doesn’t feel up to the task, either afraid to jump in or terrorized at the idea of failing. Seth Godin passionately urges you to rid yourself of your fears and get going. To stimulate rather than reassure you (you are not allowed to do nothing), Godin slays a number of preconceived ideas regarding what constitutes an ideal leader. You don’t have to be a stud, a social butterfly, or a fashion plate. You can speak softly, even be somewhat reserved, like Meghan McDonald, a Team Rock coach in New Rochelle, NY; you can have a big ego like Steve Jobs if your creativity offsets its negative side effects; you can be low in a company’s totem pole, like Jim Deligatti, the third-tier McDonald franchisee who invented the Big Mac. Anybody can become a leader.

Leaders have no common traits, except for these: a constructive rejection of the status quo, the drive that enables them to change things, and optimism that provides a platform for people eager to go their way – to follow them. Because you won’t be a leader alone: you need a tribe, i.e. “a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.” So, create your tribe – or find a tribe that needs you. Opportunities are endless. Godin gives a multitude of examples as he writes, often randomly, in unstructured sections that flow in and out of each other. His message, however, remains unwavering: to stimulate his reader’s desire to get out of the business-as-usual mentality — when you pretend for days on end that everything is fine and dandy, yet are bored to tears.

You can read this book in several ways. At its simplest level, it sounds like an eloquent marketer’s declaration of faith sparklingly presenting the facets of two trendy words, “tribe” and “leadership.” Yet do not discount the value of the book by thinking “that’s sheer marketing” … or revise your opinions about marketing. If you have mixed feelings about public speakers paid to deliver motivational lectures, a pep talk of sorts, remember that the world that surrounds us is full of depressed masses who don’t know where to start to break free from the doldrums. So why not boost them a bit? “ Yes, you can,” was Obama’s slogan, sure, but also the 1972 rallying slogan popularized by César Chávez et Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers, a California farm workers union: “Sí, se puede”. After all, fervor is contagious before being pestilential! But there is more.

Tribes are more than a trendy phenomenon… More than a trendy phenomenon that can be grabbed to provide a book with a catchy title, tribes are a societal reality, most patently epitomized today by the popularity of social networks everywhere in the world, and of course, in France. Last February, a study performed by comScore, Inc. “showed that 22 million French Internet users visited at least one social networking site in December 2008, reaching 64 percent of the total French Internet audience.” This is up 45 percent from the previous year – even though the social media reach is still lower in France than in the UK (79.8 %) or Spain (74.6 %). Of all the social networks, Facebook is now the most visited, followed by Skyrock, and then Copains d’Avant, MySpace, FlickR, Trombi, hi5, Netlog, MySpace, Viadeo, and Badoo… to name a few.

Skyrock is a somewhat special case. Although apparently toppled from the top spot by Facebook as a social network, Skyrock is still ahead of Overblog and Blogger as a blog platform, not only in terms of unique visitors, but also because of the time spent by those visitors (54 minutes in average versus 10 minutes and 7 minutes for Overblog and Blogger respectively). Worth mentioning also is Skyrock’s unique position in the history of social networks in France. Created in 1986 by Pierre Bellanger (one of the most notorious contributors to the “free radio” movement who started Radio Paris 80, an early symbol of the media tribalism), Skyrock embraced the various forms on Urban Music in the 1990’s, then followed its audience to the Internet, created a blog platform in 2002, and positioned itself as a social network in 2007. In fact, Skyrock exemplary evolution illustrates both the diversity and the continuity of the notion of tribes since the 1980’s — that is, when the use of the word  “tribe” spread massively outside the sphere of anthropologists. 

Why, though, did people revive a word – or maybe a metaphor – that evokes a social connection predating the industrial era? Because it symbolizes a type of emotional, social bond that is smothered by abstract political institutions and national and international economic organizations that frame our daily lives. It expresses a need that Michel Maffesoli analyzed in a landmark book in 1988, The Time of the Tribes, The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society. At the time, Maffesoli described the emergence of what he called a “post-modern archaism,” showing how individuals were evolving from the position of being functional entities within contractual groups towards emotion-based communities, “affectual” tribes, where they could see themselves as persons with a meaningful, fundamental role. This trend was described by Maffesoli as a shift from a primarily mechanistic social order to a complex and predominantly organic structure, and was illustrated by a simple, yet forceful diagram:

What people are looking for is not participating in a democracy where they are asked to vote once in a while, but be part of an environment where they can have an active role as leaders or as followers, dynamically sharing goals and emotions with others.  As an alternative to an overly rationalized society, people are tempted to choose the empathic atmosphere of tribes.

            As Maffesoli noted in the very early 80’s, these micro-movements primarily started as urban tribes – and, since then, the notion has been discussed in a number of books, one of the most recent being Ethan Watters’ Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family, and Commitment (2003). While various factors have triggered the formation of these initial micro-movements, the influence of music has always been the most noteworthy. It’s no wonder, then, that Seth Godin mentions the Grateful Dead’s pioneering importance early in his book: “ Forty years ago, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead made some decisions that changed the music industry for ever. You might not be in the music business and you may never have been to a Dead concert, but the impact the Dead made affects almost every industry, including yours.” The Grateful Dead’s emblematic power encompasses multiple aspects. In the mid 60’s, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were dominating the airwaves. The Grateful Dead broke away from music styles for the masses supported by the media, but also from the cliquey structures of counter-cultural, underground, or bohemian circles – instead, they moved music into the street. Street parties and open-air park events enabled the Dead to connect with their fans as well as have their fans connect among themselves. They also removed the barriers between musical genres, and developed a composite style that associated psychedelic rock, progressive bluegrass, country, blues, classical music composition structures, traditional and electronic instrumentation, and improvisation. By the end of the 70’s, the Grateful Dead following had solidified as Deadheads, one of most loyal, yet most diverse, fan clubs that has ever existed on the musical scene. (Patrick Leahy, elected to the Senate at 34 in 1974, and the current Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee was, and remains, a Deadhead!)

            The picture is clear: tribes, big and small, are among us. Twenty years ago, Maffesoli had to overcome the skepticism of a significant number of established European scholars when discussing the decline of individualism. He therefore burdened his analysis with rhetorical schemes that no longer sound relevant. Today, the collapse of ideologies and corporate organizations primarily worries those who are paid to maintain them, those who live off the status quo that Seth Godin slams throughout his book. The postmodern tribes that Godin addresses do not generate chaos; instead, they express creativity and entrepreneurial drive. His message is simple: stop getting hankered down with a factory mentality, waiting for a manager (who isn’t any more motivated than you are, but is merely following the motions) to give you orders. Stop wearing yourself away in a bureaucratic world where you are only meant to follow abstract instructions. Become a leader and win the support of others by creating your tribe, or find the leader capable of rekindling your enthusiasm. Be ready to turn into a “heretic” or to follow one, to initiate change, break rules, and question conventional wisdom. Outside companies, but also within. Tribal entrepreneurship is both a haven and a springboard for innovation, and grassroots initiatives do fuel change: “In an era of grassroots change, the top of the pyramid is too far away from where the action is to make much of a difference. It takes too long and it lacks impact. The top isn’t the top anymore because the streets are where the action is.”

 However enthused he may be about the rejuvenating power of tribes, Godin still acknowledges the repressiveness of older tribes — tribes that have grown too big, become too bureaucratic, whose mission diluted over time. That’s what makes the difference, according to him, between the American Automobile Association (AAA), with its millions of members, and the much smaller National Rifle Association (NRA). The challenge for a tribe is to keep its focus, keep an active leadership capable of dynamically updating its purpose in a world that moves quickly –this differentiates the postmodern tribes that Godin describes from interest groups, feudalisms, cliques, and casts that mainly cater to maintaining their image or their statutory advantages. Yet, the latter are also tribes, like it or not. As true as it is that any tribe tries to foster a sense of brother/sisterhood, fraternity between tribes is a whole different story.

Part 2: Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena

Part 3: The Convergence of Tribes: The Obama Campaign

Over the last 25 years, digital technologies have empowered people a little bit more each time, but blogging has brought a new type empowerment, not simply the ability to do more things better and faster, but to say and share things differently. The three main sections of the book describe the progressive expansion of the art of blogging from pioneering individuals to the build-up of the massive blogosphere that has reshaped our connection to what’s happening around us and to the news media altogether. As noted by Rosenberg in his introduction, September 9/11 was a turning point in both the history and the meaning of blogs: “at that moment of crisis, many of us looked to the Web for a sense of connection an a dose of truth. The surrogate lamentations of the broadcast media’s talking heads sounded manufactured and inadequate. [...] Now for the first time, the nation and the world could talk with itself, doing what humans do when the innocent suffer, cry, comfort, inform, and most important, tell the story together.”

Pioneers: The book starts with the portraits of pioneers between 1994 and 1999: Justin Hall, Dave Winer, and many others such as Jorn Barger, Matt Drudge, Jesse Garrett, Rebecca Blood, to name a few. Although all very different people with very different agendas, they all speak their mind. Until 1994, the Web was primarily an information repository — a system of interlinked hypertext documents. Even though Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Caillau were changing the communication process between engineers at the CERN, the focus was on the documents exchanged, not on the actual messenger, the human voice behind the message (Berners-Lee started a blog only in 2005). Blogs brought that voice to the forefront.

Rosenberg’s first three chapters read like short stories: the Dada-style diary of Justin Hall in a Puritan world; the technology journey of Dave Winer (http://dave.scripting.com), who sent out a DaveNet essay titled “Billions of Websites” in 1995 and became the tribune defending the rights of all individuals by letting anyone start a weblog in Userland; the eccentric trip of Jorn Barger who published his first post using Winer’s Frontier NewsPage, ended up coining the term weblog for his Robot Wisdom Weblog that focused on links to articles that he found interesting, thus establishing “the idea,” Rosenberg says, “of the blogger as a human filter of the Web’s overwhelming bounty.” Incidentally, it’s by clicking on a link that Rebecca Blood (who wrote the first history of weblogs in 2000) met her husband, Jesse Garrett. The early days of blogging are complex, and identifying who was “first” is sometimes tricky, except for the technology side, but by 1998, it was already clear that traditional news media had lost their monopoly on the newness of news and their ability to control how long any event would stay in the spotlight: in 1998 the Matt Drudge site launched the Monica Lewinsky story.

Scaling up: The process started around 2000. The word “weblog” progressively became obsolete and the word “blog” picked up: “I’ve decided to pronounce the word ‘weblog’ as wee’–blog. Or ‘blog’ for short,” Peter Merholz posted on Peterme.com. As the word shortens, the numbers of blogs and the “blogosphere” (William Quick) increased dramatically. Numbers may vary, but here is a sample scale: “in 2003, Technorati reported tracking 100,000 blogs and by October 2006, the figure had leaped to 67 million.” New platforms and technologies had made it easier to blog. Here are a few reminders: Blogger (read the stormy life of Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan) was created in 2000, Typepad in 2002 (by Six Apart, founded in 2001), WordPress in 2003; in 2001 Movable Type (from Six Apart) made it easy to leave comments; in 2002, RSS 2.0 became a widely adopted standard supported by most blogging tools — and Rosenberg reminds us that while building out the infrastructure, Dave Winer also created what came to be known as a ping server at Weblogs.com. As the technologies for mass adoption got fine-tuned, the blogosphere turned into a vast jungle with a huge number of new actors and a lot at stake — so ideological debates and rivalries escalated: liberal and republican blogs tore each other to pieces, but both did shoot at the traditional news media. Monetization of the new “media” was now on the agenda. VCs got involved and “blogging for bucks” put in practice the 1999 The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual stating that “market are conversations:” Robert Scoble who had once worked for Dave Winer’s Userland and was famous for his own blog (http://scobleizer.com) gave Microsoft a humanized face between 2003 and 2006. Jason Calacanis and Nick Denton were to enter into their colorful business duel. Meanwhile, in addition to getting a Whuffie score (Cory Doctorow’s reputation-based currency), a new measure in the popularity contest had appeared: the anti-media medium now had the Technorati Top 100 (2002), a Nielsen rating of sorts. Controversies raged around the meaning of “unpublish” at Boing Boing, and Heather Armstrong experienced the torments to being “dooced,” which contributed to her success (http://www.dooce.com). This section of the book is as epic as the first one — and incidentally, you will find out that there may be lots of commonalities between the blogosphere and the micro-blogosphere.

What have blogs wrought: This last section is a three-part conclusion. Rosenberg summarizes the interminable debate “Journalists vs. Bloggers,” which unfolds throughout the book, and boils down to a desperate attempt by traditional media to rescue itself from the wreckage of print, as well as from the shortcomings of its self-professed objectivity and self-declared professionalism. The Ancient scribes, faithful servants of the pharaonic bureaucracy didn’t want anybody else to write. Guess what? They disappeared or jumped ship. The reality is that skepticism and righteousness have never stopped the course of history and blogging under one form or another will stay and prevail. “The anarchic, energetic Web I fell in love with fifteen years ago had indeed lasted,” Rosenberg concludes. “It continues to provide people of meager credentials and little means with a home for their idiosyncratic ideas and unlikely innovations. Their ideas will continue to flow in a profusion of unpredictable courses.” After all, the idealist, “Utopian fervor” of the pioneers may still be around — just kind of spruced up.

As I said in the beginning, this book is fantastic. It reads like a novel, and contrary to most “business” books, it is very well written. The only thing that’s missing may be a summary map of the technologies from which products and enabling platforms were derived and subsequently leveraged by bloggers. Yes, Dave Winer may very well illustrate ‘the unedited voice of a person,” in the end, though, his unique technology insight, influence and persistence also made him one of the most prominent crystallizers of just anybody’s voice.  

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis