The launch date of the iPad is now behind us. It was more marketing hype; it was a societal event, just as the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone were when they launched.

Very few companies have managed this type of exploit so consistently over the last twenty-five years or so. The best PR machines rarely provoke repeat wonders. As extraterrestrial as Steve Jobs may be, comics or science-fiction series only succeed because of public buy-in. Not only that: while sequels are usually less successful than initial attempts, the history of Apple shows the opposite, with a growing retinue of followers each time. What makes Apple so addicting and so contagious?

We can list two sets of factors: 

- Graphical user interface, look and feel, and ease of use with a desktop metaphor that made the Mac so familiar: definitely, although they are not really that unique any longer. Design, style, elegance: definitely also, although one might argue that lots of vendors have produced extraordinary objects that only museums remember: the NeXt black cubes designed by Hartmut Esslinger are truly art pieces.

- In fact, when you look at the Apple flagship products, die-hard aficionados have consistently voiced their frustrations. Something big is always missing. Each product proved to be what Dave Winer said recently about the iPad, “a demo of something that could be very nice and useful at some point in the future.”

So where is the magic? What strikes me is that some of the major Apple products never came across as “computers.” Your friends have “a computer, “a PC.” You say I have “a Mac.” Not only that. You say “my Mac.” You say “my iPod” – because it’s not just any portable media player. You say “my iPhone” – because it’s not just any smartphone. You already say “my iPad” more lovingly than you ever spoke of any Kindle.

Apple fans entertain a personal relationship with their Mac, iPod, iPhone or iPad: what they are as objects is never obliterated or offset by their respective purposes. They are your property first, and what you use them for, second. For a major reason maybe: the relationship to these products is primarily tactile, no matter how beautiful they are for the eyes. The NeXt Computer was a computer and you had to carry it with your arms just as you carried an Apple II, an Apple III, or a Lisa. The first Mac changed all of that: you lifted it with my fingers and you used a mouse. The iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad respond to your fingers directly. You are continuously in control though the sense of touch, which gives you a continuous feel of intimacy and ownership: fingertips are unique to each individual and fingerprints were the people’s signatures in the most ancient civilizations.

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

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

One of the email addresses that intrigued me the most a while ago was the one I received from Whoisylvia@aol.com. I immediately thought of Schubert’s song based on Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (”Who is Silvia”) and this is the only reason why I opened the message. Good that my love for music saved me from discarding an email from somebody I only knew by her real name, Sylvia Paull. She is a “Silicon Valley Public Relations Icon,” as Alan Deutschman puts it in an article for Fast Company: “One of the most effective behind-the-scenes connectors in the Valley, Sylvia Paull, started out throwing some of the hottest parties at computer-industry conventions in the ’80s. Now she links the hard-core geeks, entrepreneurs, media insiders, and the political activists, too (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/115/open_features-innovation-scouts-who-is-sylvia.html). She landed “accidentally,” as she says, in the high-tech industry in 1986 at Software Ventures, the provider of MicroPhone, a best-selling telecom software for Macintosh, became their Marketing Director of Software, co-produced Science Editor, a CBS radio show about science, freelanced for Wired — until she started Berkeley Ventures in 1994, an umbrella company hosting the amazingly varied PR, party-organizing and connecting activities for which she had already become famous. She is, just by herself, a huge organization. She knows everybody in the high-tech industry and while, for most, PR is about skillful schmoozing and opportunistic networking, Sylvia genuinely loves people, remembers them with a stunning precision — and is equally excited whether she speaks of a still unknown entrepreneur (even Halsey Minor used to be one of them), a celebrity or a cause. Granted. She doesn’t like everybody — in fact, she dislikes impostors (and successfully avoids them).

Be honest with me, or I can’t be your representative to the media and the public… I had a ” catch up” lunch with Sylvia at Eccolo in Berkeley a few days ago. I hadn’t seen her for almost a year — suffice to say that it’s an eternity in her life. She quickly took a sip of sparkling water and started full speed on the Meridian International Sports Cafe’s next event, a big gathering on the 4th of July: “They have a great place with seven big screens. We’ll look at the 15km trial race of the Tour de France. Lance Amstrong is back in the Tour. He supports Levi Leipheimer, a Santa Rosa resident… The Tour starts from Monaco, goes through gorgeous places such as La Turbie or Roquebrune-Cap Martin to come back to Monaco. I have invited every single East Bay bicycle club to come, and then the Berkeley Fireworks starts at 9:30 P.M. It’s on the same street. So I am going to lead all the cyclists on a promenade down University to the Berkeley Marina where we are going to all watch the Fireworks. We want to make it an annual event.” Yes, Sylvia is “crazy about bicycling.” She even used to race competitively. “This year I did the PR for Bike to Work Day. Got big story about it in the East Bay Express. Any bicycling advocacy, I do for free.” And her son, Evan, currently working towards his Ph.D, in Bioinformatics is an experienced cyclist amateur bicycle racer for the Palo Alto/Webcor team too!

Fifteen years ago, she decided that she would have one major pro bono client. The reality is that, fortuitous serendipity, she often has more than one at a time — for they overlap. One day, Richard Stallman who had launched the GNU Project in 1983 and set up the Free Software Foundation two years later (http://www.fsf.org), walked in the Cybersalon that she started in 1994 and has since welcomed dozens of industry pioneers (Marc Pincus, Philip Rosedale, Garrett Gruener, Ray Ozzie, Rick Falkvinge, Esther Dyson to name a few). “I asked him: ‘Who are you?’ ‘How come you haven’t heard of me,’ he responded. I told him: ‘You need more publicity!” He hired me, but he didn’t pay me anything and I have been doing his PR on and off for over 10 years.”

Sylvia is as entrepreneurial as the entrepreneurs she represents and as dedicated and devoted to their mission as the entrepreneurs themselves. But if your company doesn’t know what it stands for, don’t expect her to act as an ersatz. Great PRs and communicators help companies stage their story, but won’t make it up — unless they have no credibility as PRs in the first place. “I often ask entrepreneurs why they think they need more money than they have right now. And most of the time, they don’t know. They just say ‘Oh well we need a few millions just in case, because, you know, if the product doesn’t work or doesn’t sell, we need a backup, we need a cushion.’ A cushion to do what? No one else thinks that way. It’s a strange mentality. So, I sort of have of preview of what VCs are going to see before agreeing to represent them. I challenge them. I ask ‘Why would any one care about your product, who would want it, who’s the competition. Why is it any different than what’s out there on the market’. Some people resent that. That’s good. My whole premise is that you have to be honest with me, or I can’t be your representative to the media and the public.”  You only get the PR you deserve and if you want Sylvia, get your act together: “I recently spoke to a freshman class at UC Berkeley entitled Entrepreneurship 101,” she wrote on her blog last April. “They all asked me questions in an attempt to figure out why some of my high-tech clients were successful, as if there were a magic formula they could follow. I told them basically what the Austrian author Robert Musil told all of us: check out what you really want to do and what you’re good at. That’s all you need to know, and the rest will follow. (http://whoisylvia.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/04/the-human-condition-parallax.html).

Navigate inside and through this zoomorama (you can zoom-in/out the pictures as well as see them in full screen). 

Sylvia’s Magic… There may not be a magic formula for success per se, yet, there is some magic somewhere, Sylvia’s magic. The unusual breath and depth of her culture enables her to understand an amazing range of domains, get into and to the mind of the most diverse set of people — and identify the real innovators, those who do not reinvent the wheel. Her personal style, a uncommon cocktail of baroque and minimalism, laid-back sophistication and go-getter DIY, as well as her down to Mars and down to earth traits, makes her feel comfortable anywhere she wants to be — and makes people around her feel comfortable. Plus, no matter how serious she has to be, her ability to laugh and her witty commonsense brighten up the most high-strung faces.

She is the ultimate Berkeleyan in two ways. She is hyperlocal; the Hillside Club (http://www.hillsideclub.org), founded by a group of Berkeley women at the end of the 19th century is where she hosts her Cybersalon; deeply involved in her community, she is a typical representative of the InBerkeley life (http://www.inberkeley.com), a site that that Lance Knobel and Dave Winer started a few weeks ago. Look at the title of her own blog: “Berkeley Blog, a sane place within an insane society.” She is hyperglobal too, as Berkeley has always been, thus attracting people whose heart can be anywhere in the world. Sylvia was the first US citizen born in a US Army hospital in Germany after WW II. Her father, Oliver Margolin, a Jew from Long Island who had graduated from Oberlin in viola and become a conductor, had joined the Army to make a living and was then Eisenhower’s band conductor (he met her mother, a German Jew born in Poland and a Holocaust survivor in Frankfurt). She fondly recounts the family’s trip with the band throughout Northern Europe when she was a child, before settling in Los Angeles and San Francisco, while the t-shirt she thought up, A Woman’s Place Is on Top, to help finance the first American all-women’s climb to Annapurna I, led by Arlene Blum, her roommate at Reed College, dangles in her memory — which leads her to tell me of another Berkeley event. She is still thrilled by the success of the first Multicultural Women’s Leadership Conference she helped publicize for EngageHer (http://engageher.org) last March, and for which they had legends of feminism such as Gloria Steinem and Dolores Huerta. Yes, no matter how ubiquitous the Web, Berkeley remains a place of choice for people with causes — and Sylvia, as she tells their story, becomes part of the story. She supported Move on (http://www.moveon.org), co-founded by Joan Blades, who also created MomsRising (http://www.momsrising.org ) in 2006; she founded Gracenet, a networking group for women in tech that launched the successful “disgraceful award in advertising” campaign to eliminate sexist advertising; she helped the Electronic Frontier Foundation (http://www.eff.org), co-founded by John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore and Mitch Kapor in the 90’s and living unabatedly with our time, she is hosting a Cybersalon on July 29th for Scott Rosenberg’s book, Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters, to be released on July 7.

Time goes so fast when you chat with Sylvia! Her reserve of enthusiasm seems infinite. As we were finishing our beignets with a chocolate sauce, she told me about the Big Ideas Fest that she helps organize for the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (http://www.iskme.org) in Half Moon Bay on December 6-8… and a few minutes later, I found out that her father, who after 20 years in the Army and after working toward a Ph.D. in musical education became a music therapist, and had one of the most remarkable violinists of the 20^th century as his client, Jascha Heifetz (1901-1987). I asked Sylvia if she had ever met him: “Of course!” she responded cheerfully. 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

For more information on Sylvia: http://www.sylviapaull.com

Ken Kaplan is the Broadband and New Media Manager in the Consumer and Social Media Team, which is part of the Global Communication Group of Intel. He embodies a new generation of PR: “Today, PR is not about messages, although they are in there. It’s about telling stories that connect to trends and that are helpful to people,” Ken says. “You tend to want a better laptop next time you want to buy one. At that point, we want to be there when you need it. We want to help you.” As I was listening to Ken telling me how passionately he loves his job during breakfast at Il Fornaio, I couldn’t help thinking that thanks to employees like him, Intel is more than “Intel inside,” it’s also “outside.” His charisma brings back the great words of one of the most amazing fathers of the Silicon Valley, Robert Noyce, who co-founded Intel in 1968 (after co-founding Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957): the focus of a great company is not “How do you relate to the rest of the world,” it is “How does the world relate to you.” How can you best do this? By having employees who are born media producers, of whatever kind this media may be – as is the case of Ken. 

“Follow your inner moonlight…” Ken majored in philosophy, “almost by accident,” he says. He accumulated classes until he realized that he had enough credits to graduate. But he took writing too, and journalism, and mythology, and basically followed his heart, until he settled for his one and only goal, living in San Francisco, or more precisely, in North Beach to get into the Beat Culture, in search of both lost time and novelty. He wrote for North Beach Magazine for free – “but I was getting free books about Beat poetry,” he remembers fondly, and interned in 1991 at KRON, then affiliated with NBC, for 5$ per day. He was to stay at KRON for nine years; in his second year, he became their first publicist. “The experience I got there is invaluable. I was exposed to local news, documentaries, cable channel and, later, to the newspaper’s online component. I got to see all of that grow and, after a few years being dismantled, and I grew a lot from seeing that. I was able to work inside the newsroom, inside the cable channel and go downstairs to sit with the Web folks. I got serious know-how, especially I learned how to edit video, story-telling, how to write succinctly and I also understood real teamwork by learning how to deal with many different editors on your work.” All of this ended the day he received a call from a former executive producer at KRON, Larry Bozman, who had moved to Intel.

2000: Ken’s leap year: Ken’s life changed completely – or rather, everything he liked was restaged with a wholly different backdrop. He joined Intel and got married (with a beautiful Italian, Gabriella Bruni, currently a Ph.D. student in Classics at Berkeley) and was soon to have two children (Damian and Selene). Ken was not into technology and Intel was not looking for yet another technologist, but the computer chip company was looking for somebody who had good communications and relationship building skills, somebody who knew how the media works from the inside. “This was an exhilarating time that is so close and yet seems so far away,” Ken reflects. “The heydays of technology on television. In the late 1990s, CNBC was all over in the Valley. Local affiliates were reporting on technology every day.  ZDTV had debuted in 1998 and became TechTV. In 2000, when I joined Intel, TechTV and CNET we’re covering technology as a lifestyle. We were very busy with broadcast media relaitons.  Everybody wanted to cover technology.” Then, the bubble deflated: “Technology became not as important and was no longer leading the news. The local guys weren’t coming and doing live shots a couple times a week like they had done for the years prior, but something else was happening at the same time and it was big!”

A glimpse at Ken’s worlds: you can navigate inside and through as well as zoom-in/out the pictures and videos – and also in full screen.

Video, audioblogging, all-out blogging… and the PR metamorphose: “Everything was moving online and the big thing was video. So we started to put our B roll online, and here again, my background served me well. It was a new opportunity for creativity.” Then, podcasting came around. Although he was not a technologist (and maybe because he was not a technologist), Ken was on the lookout for anything that would serve his passion for helping people to tell their story. He had never met Dave Winer, but he knew instantly what audioblogging would bring even before the term “podcasting” was officially coined. “I had been doing work with radio; trying to get folks on radio, you have to get a story and help them to be good at telling that story. Podcasting was taking us into another realm – almost like TiVo. You get it when you want to. You can save it. Now, we could create stories that weren’t just for today, or this week, but something more evergreen. So we started using podcasting to give life to interesting stories from inside Intel and sharing them. First, we would just turn on the mike and turn it off and then we really started real production, often editing and making these podcasts better for the audience.”

New media, and even more importantly, new delivery channels have changed the style and even the nature of PR. It’s not about shoving information into the head of journalists or people. “Of course, we still write press releases, but press releases have a simple core purpose: here is what happens, how it happens, here is where you get more information. PR becomes interesting for both PR people and its audience, when everybody can engage in the story. “Now, we all get the real voices. It’s awesome to hear the story from the person that experienced it. So if we have an engineer who was really key and instrumental in shrinking a transistor and all the challenges they went through – it’s geeky, but hearing it from the guy who really struggled and did it with hundreds of people around the world, that’s fascinating.”

Getting people to edge of the company: Since 2005, Ken has been an advocate for “getting people to the edge of the company,” to use an expression he first heard from his friend Jeremiah Owyang, who is now at Forrester. PR pros who are control freaks are becoming a thing of the past: “The old PR school was all about having only specific people on the edge. It wanted to control the message. In a world where everybody can get any information about virtually anything, what does “control” really mean? Nothing. Today, PR are not simply people whose job it is to regulate information. Our job is to evangelize our company as well as we can. The more well-informed experts we get to edge of the company, sharing their passion for Intel and real-life experiences, the better. Also, and as importantly, our job is to listen to people.  That’s why engaging with them is what we do. We are not working with IT experts or OEMs only, but also with everyday people who are using our technology. They can be a source of inspiration when they share interesting ways they’re using technology and even hearing what they’d like their computers to do better. Today’s social media is a two-way street. We all are participants.” Ken is well aware that corporate blogging has its challenges, that putting too many microphones out there can also generate some noise, but he is also confident that solutions can always be found when needed, especially when there is a culture of trust and openness inside a company. 

Contrary to common belief, many large corporations such as Intel, and through employees such as Ken, are extremely well versed in all media and social media and have embraced them wholeheartedly – and often more sincerely than multiple mid-sized companies or even start-ups. The reason for their ability to soak up innovation so quickly and so efficiently? The quality and the strength of their internal corporate culture enable them to trust their employees and leverage their skills, creativity, humor and their kindness.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis