John Patrick on Blogs

John Patrick on Weblogs
Contagious Media
By Marcia Stepanek, CIO Insight
November 25, 2003 in eWeek

Blogs in business.

"John Patrick is president of Attitude LLC and former vice president of Internet technology at IBM, where he worked for 34 years. During his IBM career, Patrick helped start IBM's leasing business at IBM Credit Corporation, and was senior marketing executive during the launch of the IBM ThinkPad. Starting in the early 1990s, Patrick dedicated his time to fostering Internet technologies. One of the leading Internet visionaries, Patrick is quoted frequently in the global media and speaks at dozens of conferences around the world."

Credible guy. Probably more credible than you, dear reader.

"Knowledge management wasn't overhyped," says Patrick, in an interview with CIO Insight Executive Editor Marcia Stepanek. "It was underdelivered. Blogs can potentially deliver the grassroots discussions and knowledge-sharing that top-down, corporate-sponsored efforts never could."

So true. KM is like some cat-Lazarus who keeps arising from the dead over and over...

John Patrick: I think this blog phenomenon is one of those things that comes along every decade or so and gets completely underestimated by just about everybody. It's very much like what's going on with Wi-Fi now, and very much what happened with the Web ten years ago. Blogs are a whole new Internet channel, yet another example of how the Internet has made it possible for new ideas to come along and change the status quo. I think a lot of times people see something come along and they say, "What's the big deal? We had that in 1972,"—like knowledge management or artificial intelligence. When instant messaging started, a lot of people said, "oh, this is no biggie. We had this on the mainframe in the 1960s." It's true—we did. But what makes IM different is that now we have the Internet—the widespread sharing of information. That allows for collaboration, it allows for a global effort. So it spawns many more ideas, it allows a new thought to take off like wildfire.

Why is this a big deal for business?

There is no question in my mind that blogging is already beginning to reshape how information is created, published and shared. Blogs have the power to introduce new voices into the mix, which will enrich the quality of information available. Voices not necessarily heard before, thanks to limitations of money, access or hierarchy—you're not the CEO, you're just a guy with a big idea—now you can bridge those gaps.

I've been pushing the concept of blogging for almost as long as blogging has been around. My track-record at identifying the next big thing but failing to make a dime off of it goes back twenty years. I've been a raving champion of personal computing, online community, the net, the web, AOL before it was AOL, Cisco when you could count the staff on your toes, eCommerce, instant messaging in corporations, web cams, and more recently informal learning, workflow learning, contextual collaboration, and blogging.

It will morph into different formats and smart syndication will become prevalent, but trust me on this: blogs are going to be a driving force in business.

Posted by Jay Cross at November 28, 2003 07:50 PM | TrackBack