Blog Relations

On the train back to Marlylebone from WordCamp UK, I’m mulling over what I’ve learned. There was a lot of technical stuff, but the over-arching impression is that blogging, and WordPress in particular, is coming of age.

It’s not just Number 10 Downing Street that’s on WordPress but the Royal Navy,  tennis star   Andy Roddick. and the BBC’s Top Gear programme.

Developers are saying that they are getting calls from marketing agencies desperate for WordPress blogs. Some were actually talking about how to cope with demand.

The Free aspect of WordPress has always been a negative in the past for business. Corporations like to spend money to feel safe. But now times are getting harder economically, and more importantly, people are cottoning on to the fact that the internet is a live place, where fast and nimble reactions are all important. They want to take control of their websites. They don’t want to be in hock to the IT Department or super-agency. WordPress is a fast, flexible, and user-friendly solution. The user interface is greatly improved in recent releases. It’s extremely well supported on the technical side- you can Google a solution for anything WordPress. It’s clean and elegant. It’s day has come.

I’ve been having a quick play around with the new WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate.   It’s mainly if not all about the user-interface, which has long needed tarting up.  And it’s been worth the wait because it really is like having a new WordPress.  What I like best is the ability to toggle the Write Post window into full screen.   Suddenly WordPress feels like a proper word processor.  There’s also a wonderful media browser which enables you to quickly review your uploaded pictures etc and edit the titles and so forth.  There’s loads more  – but in general this is the upgrade that makes WordPress look and feel like an expensive piece of (free) software.

I the wake of the attempted mass murder by car-bomb in London yesterday, I thought I could drop a timely reminder that one of our clients is the international security expert (and author) Juval Aviv. Juval has been writing up some of his security tips for Summer Travel.

For what it’s worth, here are my own thoughts on the attack. Bombs aimed at nightclubs aren’t about foreign policy, but about attacking our way of life and “loose Western values”. You just have to look at the comments recorded by investigators who foiled the “fertalizer bomb plot” to attack another club, “The Ministry of Sound”. One of the plotters said: “No one can even turn around and say ‘Oh they were innocent, those slags dancing around.”

Recently so called “honor killings” in this country of young women who “go the wrong way” have been linked to Islamic groups waging war on Western values.

So this is the message from the terrorists: if you go out dancing, you aren’t innocent. It doesn’t have much to do with Iraq. It has everything to do with the clash of cultures.

Last week’s Russian media seminar at the University of Birmingham raised an interesting question: Why has the Russian Government left the blogosphere (more or less) free? It’s generally agreed that Russian TV is under total control of the Government, and newspapers are almost under the thumb – but the lively Russian blogosphere continues to be a big free-for-all of free expression.

The only cloud on the horizon seems to be the acquisition last year of the Russian licence for Live Journal from 6 Apart. It was bought by a Company known as Soup (Sup-Fabrik), owned by the Oligarch Alexander Mamut, a friend of Roman Abramovich, and some say, a friend of the Kremlin. It doesn’t really matter whose friend he is. In Russia, a rich person has a lot to lose, as the Kremlin has aptly demonstrated in the past. Therefore it is wise for a rich person to take a hint from on high.

But the Kremlin so far does not seem to have put any pressure of Live Journal or its users. Ivan Zassorsky of Moscow University – who worked as PR Man for Soup at the time of the sale of Live Journal, reflected on why this might be.

“When you build a central system of command and control, you have to have a feedback system to know what is going on,” he said. So the Russian blogosphere might be how the Government keeps its feel on the pulse of opinion.

Vlad Strukov of Leeds and London Universities pointed out that the Russian internet, though lively, is far from being a mass influencer of public opinion – so perhaps the Government can afford to ignore it. 10% of Russians have internet access, where the UK hit that figure in 1998. Still, you can see five people sitting around one terminal in an internet cafe, so it’s hard to measure the full reach of the internet: besides what do people do at work all day in offices the world over? Obviously they cruise the internet and write their blogs.

Oleg Kozlovskii Co-ordinator of the Oborona Youth Movement pointed out that the authorities are not unaware of the internet. He said that before the recent demonstrations in St. Petersburg, a number of sites belonging to NGOs mysteriously went down. He’s also noticed the pro-Kremlin youth movement, Nashi flooding the Russian blogosphere with similar postings on political tops.

For now, the Russian blogosphere appears to be a slightly wild place, but one that is pretty much free from political interference. It’s somewhat elitist, belonging to those few who have access to a good internet connection, but those who are in it have upwards of 1000 “friends” or online contacts. Stories can spread. One striking example the tale of a village priest and his family, murdered in an arsen attack on his house. It wasn’t until a blogger in the next village – the wife of another priest – blogged about it, that the story got around the blogosphere via “friends” and then into the traditional media.

Maybe the Kremlin doesn’t take the networking power of blogs seriously enough. If so, it wouldn’t be the first large organisation to have made that mistake.