I have no pity whatsoever for Gerry Harvey. In my view he’s arrogant and out of touch.

It’s a view I formed in about 2000. At the time I was studying an Internet unit at Curtin for my MBA. Our assessment was a presentation about Gerry Harvey’s stand on the Internet. We played a clip of him being interviewed on a current affairs TV shows. His attitude was that the net wasn’t going to amount to a hill of beans. No, I’m not going to rush out and build an online retailing presence, he said. In fact I’m going to leave that to one of our franchisees. Then he went on to say that he’d keep an eye on it but he didn’t expect that he’d need to do anything.

Gerry moved too late. Way too late.

But it seems that he still doesn’t get it. He told The Age that the abuse had been particularly nasty on social media sites and blogs.

You might have got a nasty phone call or a letter back in the old days but now anything slightly controversial, these people, whoever they might be, they go for you zealously and with hatred all over Twitter, he said.

If you are a CEO of a company and you speak out and then the board gets involved… it is suicidal. Because of my profile, I then get all these threats and people home in on me.”

What he appears not to realise is that “these people, whoever they might be” are Australians just like me. “They” include me. “They” are his country mates. “They” think, have opinions and know how to write.

Perhaps it’s time for Gerry to stop being so arrogant. Perhaps it’s time for him to listen to what people are saying. For “they” aren’t expressing hate but rather a frustration that big business simply isn’t listening.

The tables have turned Gerry.

If a funeral home can write a blog it should be a snap for a real estate agent. It seems, though, it’s not.

Even with their “local knowledge” agents still find it hard to put pen to paper.

Why?

Quite simply they try to say too much.

Do I write about the market? About interest rates? About property prices? How about rental values, rental returns or rental inspections? There are just too many options.

The trick is to narrow the options and tighten the focus.

That’s the appeal of the ‘365 Things to do in [insert suburb name]‘ blogs. They give the writer focus, something to lock onto, the freedom to discard material. Without distractions, writing is easy.

One of my clients is writing a Did You Know? series. Did you know there are 127 houses in Smith Street? 36 have No Junk Mail stickers on the letterbox.  Did kou know that the most common front fence colour in Jones Street is beige? Add a picture or two, bang, you’re done! Blog post written.

At first, the idea sounds whacky. But it’s not.

It provides a fresh, new perspective on a suburb. It tells a story that only a local can tell.

It’s brilliant!

The market commentary blog is dying. It’s dying from terminal boredom.

Boring blogs have no local nuance. They say little that’s fresh and new.

Already there’s a funeral home writing their epitaph.[tweetmeme]

Photo credit: mlinksva on Flickr

The ’08 Campaign – Sea Change for Politics as We Know It – NYTimes.com: “It has rewritten the rules on how to reach voters, raise money, organize supporters, manage the news media, track and mold public opinion, and wage — and withstand — political attacks, including many carried by blogs that did not exist four years ago. It has challenged the consensus view of the American electoral battleground, suggesting that Democrats can at a minimum be competitive in states and regions that had long been Republican strongholds.”

It isn’t just workers who get fired for blog posts. Students are also coming under fire for their contributions to MySpace reports Associated Press. The battle for control over blogs as public spaces is not simply limited to arrangements that have a commercial nature. The article suggests that schools are seeking the power to control students’ activities to ensure continued control over the school environment.

Such extensions of control will be useful to examine in the context of my research thesis. Beyond school yards government instrumentalities may want control over what people have to say in order to reduce the spread of terrorism. Whilst these may be interesting extensions to the central point of my thesis I think I’ll probably leave them out in the interests of clarity and available space.

http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/stefanone.html

Rebecca Blood :: Weblogs: A History And Perspective: “Blogger, Pitas, and all the rest have given people with little or no knowledge of HTML the ability to publish on the web: to pontificate, remember, dream, and argue in public, as easily as they send an instant message.”