Kottke laments the loss of individual voices and innovations to corporations.
Consider Six Apart as an example of what I’m talking about. 6A is like a black hole for creative people. Folks who, a year or two ago, were among the leading voices in the discussion of how weblogs were changing our culture, were coding all sorts of useful plug-ins for Movable Type, or were pushing the edges of web design are now focused on making software that generates revenue and aren’t saying a whole lot about it. (Sort of ironic that working for 6A kills the weblogs of their employees, isn’t it?) That’s great for them, for Six Apart, their customers, and their partners, but it kinda sucks for the community as a whole.
And Mena Trott of Six Apart responds with a 2,000+ word rant arguing about everything from the scope of the community to the semantics of the word few.
I’m not sure if it’s ironic or tragic. Over the past few years, weblogs have helped create a personal voice for industry behemoths such as Sun and Microsoft. Very small companies have benefitted as well — look at Joel Spolsky and Fog Creek Software. Meanwhile, weblog industry leader Six Apart has completely lost their personal voice — or at best, exiled it to tradeshow duty.
Clearly, Kottke stuck a nerve with Mena. Let’s hope that Six Apart isn’t the only company to react, and that the responses move beyond arguments and excuses…
Update: My tone was rather harsh, and Mena most certainly did not go postal. Great feedback from Anil Dash in the comments.
Obviously, I’m biased, but I’d debate your point. When you say “Meanwhile, weblog industry leader Six Apart has completely lost their personal voice — or at best, exiled it to tradeshow duty.” — who would you suggest is doing a better job of this right now? I’d like to understand more about your perspective.
I’m a little less biased, since I don’t work for the company, but I do take issue with the title of this post, Bryce. Mena did not “go postal” as you suggest–her response is measured and rational–and Jason has not “struck a nerve” as you suggest. He did get Mena to respond on a public website (hence her “I take the bait” title), but nowhere do I read anger in what she writes. The response beat what I would have expected in terms of response time, but it met any expectations I may have had of her to respond honestly about criticisms of her or the company.
It was early. My apologies to Mena.
I thought that Sun, Microsoft, and Fog Creek Software were good examples. You couldn’t throw a rock at a crowd of bloggers without hitting a Microsoftie these days.
Groove Networks would be an excellent counter-example. For a while Ray Ozzie and many other employees were actively blogging, a community of outside bloggers coalesced around them. One day the Groovers stopped blogging, the community died, and all we know about the past couple of years is that they picked up a DHS contract and sold out to Microsoft.
But let’s talk about 6A. I appreciate what you’ve done with the Professional Network weblog. It’s not much of a personal voice, but it delivers what is expected and has done so for many months.
I wanted to rip into Mena’s Corner for failing to deliver that “personal voice” we expected when she started, but that’s no more correct than my saying she went postal. Mena’s Corner is very personal, just not particularly vocal. She started 13 months ago. In no month were there more than three posts, four months have zero.
Mena says that she’s speaking at non-geeky conferences, trying to expand weblogs to new communities. That sounds great — why isn’t she blogging about those events, the people she’s interacting with, and what 6A learns from them?
And seriously, where are the other Six Apart bloggers? 6A should find it highly disturbing that every time they hire someone a weblog dies. Everyone at 6A should have an active, public weblog. Set aside 15 minutes every day for everyone to blog about anything they’d like that doesn’t violate NDAs or expose trade secrets.
Lead by example.
<cite>Mena says that she’s speaking at non-geeky conferences, trying to expand weblogs to new communities. That sounds great — why isn’t she blogging about those events, the people she’s interacting with, and what 6A learns from them?
And seriously, where are the other Six Apart bloggers? 6A should find it highly disturbing that every time they hire someone a weblog dies. Everyone at 6A should have an active, public weblog. Set aside 15 minutes every day for everyone to blog about anything they’d like that doesn’t violate NDAs or expose trade secrets.
Lead by example.</cite>
You’re absolutely right. We’ve been having the same conversation internally all day today (and in general) and I think we’ve come to the same conclusions you have.