So I am here at the 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference listening to David Weinberger, co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto (also http://www.evident.com and http://www.johotheblog.com) and other important treatises on the modern world. First of all, this guy is a riot and one should see him speak. His message is familiar, yet worth considering again, because the ways of the internet require a different perspective in order to truly use it for influence.

Weinberger's main thesis: the internet is ours, meaning the general public. It is fundamentally different from the broadcast model in which we lived for many decades until the late 1990s. The old way was about central control of information and packaging it so it is digested in a prescribed way. The internet is about users creating their own views of what is important, interesting, and inter-related and sharing those views. Tools like tags, comments, and so wikis mean one cannot control information. And they shouldn't try.

Here is a great example Weinberger gave. Look at two similar services for allowing users to rate content, one from USAToday.com and One from Digg.com:

USA Today

Digg.com

USAToday presents only a thumbs-up - you can only say their piece is good, not that it is bad. Digg is built around people both submitting articles that they think are good and suggesting they are not good. Thus it presents a thumbs-down. Digg allows a more complete discussion around a piece of content, and thus it is more valuable.

Many groups trying to influence policy and change behavior still tend to live in the old model. They want to control the message or closely manage what users do to conform to their program. This is a flawed strategy online. As Weinberger notes, look at everyone's favorite example, Wikipedia. Unlike its centrally-controlled peers, Wikipedia present all the dialogue that went in to creating each article, including cases where content is in dispute. It is this willingness to tell how article may be wrong, however, that makes the site more credible. It embraces fallibility, and fallibility is human. To pretend content can't be wrong will actually lower a content owner's credibility. Online, organizations must set some ground rules but then trust their communities of supporters to do the right thing. In many cases the results will not be as planned, but they might be much more powerful in different ways than expected.

One other example Weinberger used was blogs. He pointed out how an example corporate blog was packaged and internally focused, antithetical to the typical true blog, which is largely driven by links out. Many organizations are still focused on keeping people on their sites. True blogs work because they trust that if they send users away to something useful, those same users will return later to see where else the blog will point them. Provide a valuable service, and users will return; try to control them, and they will quickly find another place where they have their newly expected freedom.

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