Blogs allow everyone to have a public voice.  Most of us don’t have experience controlling that voice.  Over the years we have learned to moderate our email responses, to stop take a breath before shooting a harsh email to our boss, client or colleague.  I usually write the email immediately and save it as a draft and wait a day to send.  100% of the time I edit that email the next day.

The current issues at TechCrunch UK (assuming you know about that situation) could have been avoided if Sam simply wrote his post as a draft and waited a day, or simply clicked “Edit timestamp” to publish the next day in his WordPress CMS.  On Mike’s personal blog he even admits:

Sam and I exchanged words this morning and I said he basically fired himself with that second to last post promoting his events. But nothing had been publicized and we certainly could have discussed a work around, public apology, retraction, etc. But the next thing I knew he’d posted on the blog about his dismissal. Until that happened, everything was reversible. After he took that step, the situation was no longer able to be resolved.

Get it?  Sam could have likely resolved the situation had he simply waited a day before lashing out on his blog.  We all have disagreements.  We all get angry.  But at the end of the day cooler heads prevail and we figure out how to work together.  Bloggers should remember ~ social media is very powerful, far more powerful than one-to-one conversations such as email.  You have a responsibility to think about society before posting (not just your own immediate gut reaction).  Just my two cents…

The 2006 hurricane season started in June and we have been lucky this summer with only two named storms so far.  Last year we were not so lucky.  Brian pointed out in his photo blog on Flickr the work he did on the Slidell Hurricane Damage blog last year after Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and I thought it might be interesting to take a look back at our disaster blogging efforts.

Our effort began on August 27th with a post where I suggested, “Hurricane Katrina - Get Out!” Brian and his family were able to leave the small town of Slidell, just across the lake from New Orleans, and get to Dallas before the storm hit.  Next, NOAA started podcasting the Hurricane as reported here.  I wrote another post on August 30th describing the background behind the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog where I described the reasoning for the creation of the blog:

Everytime Brian and I would talk he was telling about the lack of news from the area.  He had little tidbits, but no one had the full story.  The picture to the right is the bridge to Slidell.  I suggested that he start a blog where he could share his feelings and information about Katarina and its wrath (this seemed obvious since he runs a blog consultancy).  Anyway, he had one of the techs set it up and within an hour he was posting.  Shortly thereafter a reporter from CNN IM’d him asking for information, next Brian’s high school buddies were calling him after they read the blog and all sorts of people who had little bits of information were contacting him.

Later that day I reported that our church was taking donations of money and food to help victims who fled to Baton Rouge.  By this time Business Week, CNN, Boing Boing, Instapundit, Doc Searls, NevOn, PRspeak, Fred Wilson, Robert Scoble, Ochman, Tyler, Windley, David Parmet and countless others had promoted the site sending thousands of visitors to our posts over the course of the day.  We raised over $100,000 in donations that we could confirm, and perhaps thousands more that we never were able to track from these visitors.

Tragically, both this blog and the Slidell Blog attracted thousands of comments from people searching for their friends and family on the Gulf Coast.  The comments, like this one, were heart breaking:

Mac Pearce wrote:  Desparately seeking info on safety of 82 yr old uncle that refused to leave Slidell. He is ALONE at following address : 750 Teal Dr. off Pontchartrain & Kostmayer adjacent to Abney Elementary (white Jeep in driveway). We evacuated to Mobile and cannot make it back. If possible, PLEASE make attempt personally or by notifying Police Dept. that Mr. Billy Dubourg at above address may be desparately seeking assistance. ANYONE that can respond to me by E-mail ( tmpearce@——–.net ) would be GREATLY appreciated !! Thank you, Mac Pearce

By September 5th I reported in a post titled, “Weblogs Work for Small Towns” that the Slidell blog had attracted more visitors than lived in the entire town.  The totals were as follows: 316,533 hits, 47,201 vistors, 258 posts and 2,000+ comments.  By the end of the blogging effort over 410 posts were made on the blog and over 91,000 comments (some of those are obviously comment spam).

Brian wrote about the lessons we learned in a post titled, “For Recovery 2.0: Disaster Blog Lessons Learned.“  I think he summed up the net-net result of the blog when he explained,

So, we started the Slidell Hurricane Damage Blog to make the information come to us and to make all damage information on Slidell easily available.

The information truly flowed TO us - we did not create anything - simply create an outlet for consumer generated news from the area.  It was amazing.  Brian created some bullets for future disaster bloggers to think about:

• Information is a necessity.  Speed matters.  As the sign says, neighbors need info as well as the other supplies.

• Make it simple.  Then simpler still.  Unlike Weblogs Work visitors, we were trying to provide info to folks with very little blog experience.  The IE crowd.  The word blog put them off.  They didn’t know how to comment, etc.  We have no time for learning curves in such situations.
• Be ready for complexity.  The butterfly wing effect in full effect.  So much more is broken than our houses.  The disaster response, including that which is swarmed on by the Web, has to keep going deep.  Business continuation issues.  Psychological impacts.  I really don’t know what will happen to our town, but I know our recovery efforts are going to have to keep changing as the needs change.
• Check your politics.  We need all allies, all hands on deck.  Even as the news & blog postings around the storm started to take on a political charge, I very consciously avoided that for the Slidell blog.  I wanted all readers, all info sources, the full network.  There will be plenty of time later for meta discussions.
• The problem you think is the problem might not be the problem.  I didn’t intend on the site becoming a clearinghouse for missing persons.  Open systems let folks use the resources to solve their own problems.  We need to be pliable in how we design these things.
• Cast your net wide.  As I said, I tapped everyone I knew.  Fred Wilson in NYC helped flow traffic and technical help my way.  David Parmet got us visibility.  Paying attention to the right Technorati tags helped us grab all the interest in Slidell during those days.  It’s crazy the connections that lead back.  My best & earliest on-the-ground informant, Derek Babcock, came to me when his uncle in Miami read the blog and let me know he was there.  My friend Alex Muse posted about Slidell and what people could do to help on three different blogs and commented on Mark Cuban’s blog, raising well over $100,000 in donations from across the country.  A high school friend in Denmark emailed updates about her parents’ house. Others have written to me to donate money specifically for Slidell help, and we’re setting up a fund for that.  We have no idea where the connections will lead us, so cast the bread on the waters and see what happens.
• Rumors are rampant.  I worked hard to ferret out rumors, and yet still propagated a few.  The water tower had fallen.  Florida Avenue Elementary was destroyed, etc.  I never did publish all the gruesome body count rumors I heard.  There is a whole study to be done on the spread of disaster rumors.  We’ll do that in another post.

Obviously the Slidell blog has outlived its usefulness as a resource, but remembering how it served Brian, his community and our lives continues to provide a useful lesson.  We are proud to have been a part of the effort!

Randall Stross from the New York Times asks, “All the Internet’s a Stage. Why Don’t C.E.O.s Use It?” He continues by suggesting that, “CHIEF executives are inclined to avoid activities generally deemed to be high-risk: Sky diving. Cliff jumping. Motorcycle racing. And blogging.” From our own experience it is rare that a busy CEO can be ‘THE’ voice of a company. Steve Rubel suggest that a CEO should only be one of the many voices heard from within a company. Scott Ryan, the CEO of one of our sister companies has a blog where you will rarely hear his voice. Why? He is busy talking to clients, prospects, managing people, holding meetings and so on. He clearly understands the value proposition, but he lacks the time to determine what to write about, much less the time to actually write. I think the main reason CEOs don’t blog is easy to figure out: CEOs ARE REALLY BUSY.

(While gloating over the Argentina win.)

Who needs a study?  Here’s what you do:

• Read good blogs.
• Blog.
• Rinse, repeat.

While you could always read Peterme, JJG, Monstro, Odannyboy or other blogs by the wunderkinder @ Adaptive Path, now they have a new group blog. Can you say subscribed? Oh. Yeah. Baby.