Friday morning at the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference (10NTC) lifted off with an irreplaceable plenary talk by Andrew Sullivan, who, as one of the first political journalists in the United States to start a personal blog (The Daily Dish) is considered a pioneer in political weblog journalism. Andrew wrote his blog for a year at Time Magazine, shifting on February 1, 2007 to The Atlantic, where it received approximately 40 million page views in the first year. He is the former editor of The New Republic and the author of five books. (You can read more about Andrew on Wikipedia or The Atlantic.)
Sullivan's talk was absolutely brilliant, hysterical and enlightening. Here are some of the highlights:
- Blogging is a rapid fire, intense environment, "like a bad zombie movie where at first they come at you very slow but suddenly they're coming at you really fast."
- A blog or online page is not a publication, it is a broadcast. It's not a static book or magazine that has a clear, stable position. It's something that has to move ad change or it will die -- it has to move. "And this is where the obsessive-compulsive, co-dependent relationship of the blogger emerges," he said.
- He said this medium is not about writing nor is it about a website. The key to blogging success, he emphasized, is that it constantly moves, engages and distracts.
- Sometimes we need to think more deeply about the barrier to entry of each page on a website. The accessibility is seamless regardless of the publication or website. This, he believes, is a remarkable democratization of information. Almost any website page has as much entry access as the New York Times, and any website has the potential to be huge, he said, disparagingly citing the example of Matt Drudge.
- In blogging there is a direct interpersonal relationship with your readers, yet the real time aspect of posting and editing makes it even more immediate, personal and interactive, or, perhaps, intimate.
- He recalled the astonishment he felt when he posted his first post and received an immediate response from a reader. "The more I did it, the more instantaneous was the feedback loop, until it really started intimidating me. It was throwing yourself into this mosh pit of universal dyspepsia... you find that the people you write for are not passive consumers, they respond to content. We've found a medium in which writing can have the same quality as broadcasting." He then made a rather humorous analogy to himself and "that Verizon guy with bloody millions of people following him around."
- In the context of the nonprofit realm, where people are strategizing and plotting out web content and architecture, the potential for this interactivity needs to be paramount in one's conscience.
- A great quote that stood out: "If blogging is fatal, I'll be the first to find out."
- But then he arrived at a more substantial question: Where is the truth and accuracy in this medium? After all, by many standards, it really isn't journalism. However the irony is that you cannot make an error on a popular blog, because it will be immediately corrected. If a blogger has a powerful following, it will consist of very knowledgeable and critical readers.
- The process of "manning up, admitting and correcting" is a very valuable educational experience. "The facts you are trying to express are more rooted in reality if they are open to criticism and the market of ideas," he said.
- When Sullivan turned against the Iraq war, he lost over a third of his readership. So his response was to start including the critical emails he received into his blog posts, and then he asked his readers to send in a "view from your window" photo, which has since become a consistent weekly phenomenon for over four years.
- Admittedly, the lack of control over information in the blogosphere is "terrifying." Everyone has doubts, errors and revelations that they don't want in the public. It raises the question of how you put limits on what people can and cannot see. "My view is that this problem is not easily solved, but transparency is ultimately a good thing," he said, explaining that the historic lack of transparency in our culture has only led to falsehood and additional error and corruption.
- As a blogger thinks about restricting information from the public, it forces them to think about why they are doing it. The internet only accelerates this process of arriving at honesty. A moment of wisdom arrives when you learn how to let go.
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