Forward Foundation Blog

Title: Comparing Business Development Paradigms
Authors: Paul B. Hartzog, Sam Rose, Richard C. Adler
Web: The Forward Foundation http://www.forwardfound.org
License: Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike

Introduction

In a posting to http://localfoodsystems.org on Feb 04, 2010, Steve Bosserman introduced the idea of "Production Centered Local Economies", and "People Centered Local Economies". This article synthesizes Steve's coining of those terms, and uses concepts developed by Sam Rose, Paul Hartzog and Richard C Adler of Forward Foundation to further explain the differences between these economies, from a business development perspective.

This post is not just about "quantity does not equal quality". This is about volume of information and how it can affect decision quality. It's also about a more scaleable and sustainable ecology and economy for your activities online.

The technology of the weblog (and more recently the microblog) have led to the emergence of an *unsustainable* set of media ecology approaches. Your ability to track, read, digest and understand blog posts cannot match the exponential volume of blogs emerging on the internet every day (even just in the subject areas that you are interested in). The paradox is that the perceived model for "success" in blogging, online community building, and representing projects and businesses online is to "blog frequently". The idea is that you become an "information source" about particular topics. This is fine if you have a strategy for being a frequent source of information. However, if your intent is to be a source of re-usable knowledge, then focusing on frequency of posting, and statistics of people looking at your web or blogsite could become difficult to sustain.

The purpose of this blog post is to argue that blogging frequently is *not* as important as quality of the blog's content, if the blog seeks to be a re-usable knowledge source. A second purpose is to argue that if a blog's success in the digital medium hinges on the fleeting attention, focus and choice of other people using the internet, then it is using an unscalable and non-sustainable model for success.