Al Muniz has been doing some very good work on characterizing the communities that form around brands. Newton or old Saab owners for example. I like his work. He’s careful about definition of terms; like community. For example Al’s work is where I lifted the three element model of community: common cause, common rituals, common aid. The work of this kind is also interesting because it’s one of the few places where careful work is getting done on the muddy ground between private goods and public goods.

But today let me strongly urge that you go read this excellent posting over at Many-to-Many which
critiques the ethics of BzzAgents, I think it was written by Kevin Marks. BzzAgents sells the labor of brand community members to the firms that own the brand.

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There is a well-known phenomenon of cognitive dissonance in employment, where if you pay people less to do work, they are more committed to it, as they justify it to themselves in other terms. Many media companies run on young and hungry interns who do lots of work for free, while their managers are well-rewarded. The graduate student/professor relationship is often characterised in these terms too. Balter’s success in BzzAgent is in refining this model to the point where he gets paid well by corporations, and his agents are doing it for their own reasons

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Conversely, Bzzagents is effectively, if not always explicitly, encouraging people to play mind games with their social contacts, to serve a central agenda
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Welcome to the moral mazes which is work design.

Eve Maler brings our attention to Mark Liberman seeking a name for a particular class of communication …

where you say something not because you mean it, exactly, but because it gives you a chance to use a word or phrase you’ve been saving up

I thought the word for that was blogging. The stuff in our heads is always struggling to get out. It’s willing to escape using whatever media is available.

This morning’s New York Time’s article on blogging at Los Alamos marks an interesting exception to their usual coverage of blogging.

One arch-typical dialectic that get’s rolled out when discussing blogs is little guys v.s. big institutions (David and Gollith, Amatures v.s. Proffesionals, nutty cranks v.s. the competent). This article is no exception. The big guy is the boss at Los Alamos and the little guys are the staff .

The whole “are blogger’s journalists” thread is one varaition of this big/little dialectic. I find that question bizzare. It took me a long time to understand it’s roots. The real source of that question is the fear of the media proffesional. When they write on blogging, they have a strange tendency to volunteer to play the role of the giant in Jack and Beanstalk. Bloggers, of course, are cast in the role of Jack.

This article is an exception. It doesn’t take the bait. A step in the right direction. Though, if you ask me, the whole big/little dialectic is a bit of a rat hole. Who’s selling the beans? Who owns the beanstalk? Lots of other interesting questions.