Several people have already mentioned the report by David Wyld on, The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0. This is a US-centric report that not only covers the public sector and elected officials but has a fairly comprehensive section on the history of blogging. For anyone not engaged and wanting to get up to speed, this report would be a good addition to the book Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers.
It’s too bad that Wyld’s report is only available as a 7.2 MB PDF, but it’s suitable for those who prefer to read from paper (maybe on an airplane). From the report is a quick review on why you should blog (something that is still asked a lot):
Yet, the most important part of blogging may not be obvious to the blogger himself, as the very exercise of writing the blog raises one’s self-awareness. And by virtue of its being in the public sphere, “these fragments, pieced together over months, can provide an unexpectedly intimate view of what it is to be a particular individual in a particular place at a particular time” (Blood, 2000, n.p.). According to a recent survey of bloggers, approximately half of them view their blogging activity as a form of therapy (eMarketer, 2005b). Indeed, writing has been shown to be an extremely powerful activity; the more one writes, the better one thinks (Manjoo, 2002b). This can be an important method of self-development for everyone. For executives or public officials, this means they can use the blog as a means of self-analysis; at the same time, the organization’s stakeholders can gain a better awareness of the individual in the office. In the view of Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, a blog can be looked upon as “the record of the exhaust of a person’s attention stream over time.” He continued, “You actually feel like you know the person. You see their style, the words they use, their kids, whatever there is” (quoted in Penenberg, 2005, n.p.).
I find the value of Dave’s report is in describing what is happening in a government that remains generally clueless on social media. In that light his report encourages me. It is fitting that it is best read as a print out, because that is how people in government read, for the most part.
As a follow up to Naked Conversations, I am hoping that my SAP Global Survey will be a fitting addendum. SAP has retained me investigate the status of social media in the varied cultures of the world, not just businesses, but with people in general. I have interviewed 40 people from 17 countries so far and posted the interviews on my blog, just like Scoble and I did with Naked Conversations. There’s more than 40,000 words so far. You can find it on my site under the category of SAP Research report.
I look forward to reading some of the findings, and I’ve finally subscribed to your blog.