As I mentioned in a posting here last week, the True Voice team (Greg Narain, Suw Charman, and I) are trying to boil down the core issues surrounding blogging into 20 questions. We will be asking our colleagues at Corante and elsewhere for their answers to those questions over the next few weeks, and we will distill the wisdom of the crowd (to borrow Suroweicki's phrase) as a key element of the True Voices seminars, the first of which is scheduled for 26 January in NYC.

I list the questions that we have come up with, as a first cut, below. If you are interested in answering the questions or in providing feedback on them, please go over to the 20 Questions blog I set up for that purpose. We will be filtering through the comments people make, and collating what we thing are helpful comments into the content for the True Voice seminars. We will cite all contributors whose material we use in the output of this project, which I think is likely to be bound into some "blog book" format. We will of course provide all contributors whose materials we use with a copy of the collated results. And we also plan to entice some of the contributors to record their contributions in video format for inclusion in the seminar, itself.

The first questions that everyone asks are these two:

• What's a blog (or, what's blogging), and why should I care?
• Who is writing them, and who is reading them, and why?

Here's a few of the questions that I am intensely interested in: the macro-economic and social impacts of blogging:

• How is blogging distinct from journalism, and how will it change traditional journalistic media?
• Blogging has been characterized as a 'social medium': what makes blogging social?
• Blogs are being adopted by social activists, in political and policy domains: will the rise of social media lead to a fundamental change in society, and if so, what sort of changes will they be?

I am also deeply interested in the business of blogging, especially the business of social media:

• Is it possible to make real money from blog-based advertising, and if so, what form will blog advertising take, since there seems to be such ambivalence and controversy in the blogosphere about advertising?
• Are their common characteristics of successful bloggers that can be adopted by others, and if so, what are they?
• What will successful social media companies look like, and in what ways will they be different from traditional media companies?

Suw offers these questions related to the micro-economic business level, where companies are working to leverage social media to better coordinate, collaborate, and communicate internally and with their partners and clients:

• How can business and employees who blog unofficially learn to peacefully co-exist?
• How do you get employees and managers to engage with and derive value from blogging projects?
• How do we successfully prevent public-facing blogs from being neutered, or turned into a broadcast, by the marketeers and lawyers?
• In what ways do we need to support staff bloggers in order to ensure that they can blog effectively?
• How can we use blogs to create a net freeing of time, instead of them turning into time-sinks?
• How do we communicate new, blog-related concepts and technologies in a way which is both comprehensible and comfortable for non-technical users without using new (and therefore potentially opaque) terminology?
• What are the most useful and beneficial applications for blogs in business?

Greg came up with some questions related to his interests on blog technologies, measurement, and analysis:

• What are the basic technical concepts necessary to understand about how blogs work?
• How do you decide what’s worth writing about, how you should write it, and when you should write it?
• What if you're not the world's best writer but you still want to blog: what are your options?
• Once your blog is up and running, how do you measure progress: like how many people are reading it?
• How can you find good blogs and how then to get them to link to your blog?