Conversion experience

Another short note: while poking around trying to find a link to Jonathan Grudin's blog for use in the previous post (I never did find it), I found this post in another Microsoft researcher's blog entitled Lili's Weblog. It had this quote from Jonathan Grudin about his conversion experience with blogging:

"I don't see any disagreement about the data around today's overall use pattern. [e.g., mostly email-DH] The issue is what will be the situation in ten years, when the millions of bloggers aged 18-22 are in the workforce. No way of knowing. We could get a hint by looking at their current communication patterns, or by continuing to look at the adoption trends inside and outside corporations. " My conversion occurred when a grad student in the midwest who I didn't really know invited me to look at her blog a year ago and I came in early one morning and did so, spending about two hours going down her blog, reading comments, leaping from those to examine the blogs of the commenters, looking at the comments on their blogs, looking at the use of graphics on the blogs, following links to web pages they thought were cool, and so on. After two hours I thought I had incredible insight into this whole dense network of people that spread across the country. "

This is so well put. The issue for IT strategists concerned about computer-supported cooperative work over the next decade is not what we are using now, it is what the world will be like ten years from now. Too many CIOs believe they are planning long-term when they are actually thinking short-term. Technologies in use now will evolve dramatically over the next decade. It is clear that social networking technologies like blogging are going to be key components of work in the next decade or so. They are disruptive technologies that are part of a paradigm shift of the sort I described in my Rogue Wave scenarios back in 2002.

Another point from that post:

"The underestimated strength of blogs is the chronological ordering. The single voice, the public visibility that leads to more care in most blog construction, the feedback are all significant too, but they are remarked upon. Human beings have a tremendous ability to reason instantly and unconsciously about information organized chronologically."

This resonates with the thinking of David Gelernter of Yale, who proposed replacing the current desktop/file cabinet GUI metaphor with a chronologically based approach. I'm still trying to figure out the implications of such an approach.