Month: May 2006

I think there are different ways of looking at blogs. I look at the ones I subscribe to into these:

• Breadth Blogs
• Depth Blogs
• T-shaped Blogs

Breadth Blogs

Breadth blogs cover a wide variety of topics. A good example is Boing Boing. The title – A Directory of Wonderful Things, says it all. Breadth bloggers are comitted Infovores. I heard the term Infovore, almost four years ago when I was reading this blog.

I consume, digest, and excrete information for a living. Whether I'm writing science fiction, editorials, columns, or tech books, whether I'm speaking from a podium or yammering down the phone at some poor reporter, my success depends on my ability to cite and connect disparate factoids at just the right moment.

As a committed infovore, I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web, RSS feeds, email, chance, and serendipity. I used to bookmark this stuff, but I just ended up with a million bookmarks that I never revisited and could never find anything in.

Breadth blogs make it to the top of charts. Boing Boing is somewhere in the top 10 spots most of the time, probably top 5.

Depth Blogs

Depth Blogs go deep into a specific subject area. For example, problogger is all about blogging and covers the eco-system surrounding development, use and making money from blogs. Lorelle covers blogs and WordPress. Most of the product people from Microsoft, Sun Microsystem and other tech companies belong to the depth category. Depth bloggers are BlogMentors for lot of other people. Depth bloggers dominate Topic Blog charts. These are industry experts, you want to go to, when you want to stay in touch in a specific area.

T-Shaped Blogs

When you combine breadth with depth, you get T-shaped blogs. I think most of the depth bloggers are also T-shaped to some extent. Most of my favorite bloggers are T-shaped. some are small 't's (more depth than breadth). Others are big "T"s (a balance of breadth and depth).

This entry from Pro-Blogger, got me started on this post. I do not have a lot of blogging experience. I have been seriously blogging only for the last 5 months (some sporadic blogging before that). Most of the traits I listed below are based on a few observations of my favorite bloggers.

1. They share their Learning

Most of my favorite bloggers are people, who are learning constantly. They share their learning through writing. In the days before it was called blogging, people used to write articles and columns. But now, they can just write a few paragraphs and teach you something new.

2. They share information and knowledge

Knowledge sharing is one of the most important aspects of the blogosphere. It could be how to apply some technology or a few tips on using products. It may be a new way of looking at things, a new use of an old technique. It could be a radically innovative idea or a critical look at some new fad. This is authentic stuff coming out of a blogger, based on what they know. Jon Udell is one of my favorites. I get so much out of his blog, I almost think of him as my Web Mentor.

3. They are idea generators

Effective bloggers are great thinkers. They generate ideas based on other ideas – their own and others. The cross pollinate ideas. They are constantly learning and thinking and sharing.

4. They are explorers and discoverers

Exploring/discovering are regular habits of many bloggers. They read other blogs. And they constantly dig for more information. Once they discover something, they are happy to share it. They bring us products that may happen in future or provide a new perspective on something that already exists.

5. Effective Bloggers are transparent

You know who they are. You know what they represent. You almost know their blog personality. I owe this insight to Robert Scoble. He was the one who told us that transparency is one of the most important traits of a credible blogger.

6. They generate conversations

Effective Bloggers are successful because they generate great conversations, like Darren did with this one. Don Box once wrote a blog on teaching kids to program. He was looking for a language to teach kids, how to program. I learnt more about different languages for kids, reading the comments on his blog than reading any single book on programming languages.

7. They are T-Shaped

I picked up this term from reading “The Ten Faces of Innovation” and was inspired enough to blog about it here. You can find a discussion about it in this interview of Tom Kelley by Tom Peters.

We are talking about someone who has an area of deep interest or expertise, which is the vertical part of the T, but then he is multi-disciplinary in that he has knowledge of or empathy for other disciplines.

There are probably hundreds of other traits – good writing skills, self-deprecating humor, a novel outlook on life and others.

P.S:

This post used to be called Seven Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers. After seeing several entries with the same name in Pro Blogger, I decided to make a change to the title.

 

What happens when you want some Innovative extensions for your product? It is easy. Create a contest, offer some great incentives (like money and fame). Two of the most popular shows on TV, "The American Idol" and "The American Inventor" do it already. Software companies like Google have used this to attract and recruit smart people.

While looking at my InfoMinder alerts, I found this post, which led me to an innovative contest from Microsoft.

Microsoft is challenging developers worldwide to create conversational robots, or BOTs, for MSN® Messenger and Windows Live™ Messenger. The most original, useful robots collect $40,000 in total prizes. Find out more>

The cost to Microsoft, of course is more than the $40,000 they pay in prices. It is also the cost of sifting through various implementations and ranking them. They can probably find an innovative way of recruiting several IM users to judge. I would love to participate.

I hope they make all the ideas and implementations public so that people can try them out. We use IM a lot for developing products. For example this is one usage pattern.

• During our product development process, we tag portions of text as we chat
• A program, written by one of our developers, parses the chat text and identifies action items, open questions, feature/design decisions.
• The program then emails this list to to all the chat participants.

I am sure that there are lots of clever ways people use chats. I would love to collect these in a blog.

How does the company (in this case Microsoft) benefit from these contests?

1. They get an outside view of various possible extensions to IM.
2. They encourage experimenting with Innovative Development Tools (for building product extensions)
3. They get several ideas on their product usage patterns
4. They discover some cool developers (and companies) with innovative ideas and the capability to implement them.
5. They get tons of free publicity

In the long term, I think that open contests is one of the best ways of triggering innovation. I already got something out of this contest. Now I know a few development tools for extending Microsoft IM.

Who are they?

Inquisitive people willing to try new things.

I heard the term from a friend of mine (a Prof in IIT, Delhi, India) last May. I read about it this morning in "The Ten Faces Of Innovation". I was Googling for "T-Shaped People". I came across this presentation.

I found more than what I wanted. A few perls from this presentation:

Design Is Never done

My Subject Isn't my Object

Insights come from observing the Market

Map Interactions to discover new Innovations

Find Patterns that yield Ideas