Cem Basman organises Europe’s first Microblogging Conference mbc09. It takes place on 23/24 January in Hamburg. I am looking forward to meet many of my virtual contacts from Twitter there for real for the first time

I will be there in my function as team member of Communote. We are going to hold a presentation about our enterprise microblogging tool.

Well, „What is microblogging?“. I heard it several times over the last days and always do people expect an answer as simple as their question. I did not have this answer. Of course I know what microblogging is. I wrote my thesis on this topic. But how could I make them understand it without experiencing themselves? I tried “SMS in the web” or “Public emailing” but I always looked into faces formed to questionnaires. Afterwards I tried telling larger stories. Did not work. And I even demonstrated Twitter to show what it is and Communote to point out what it could do for a company. But even this did not help. I guess that you have to try microblogging by yourself a longer time to feel its benefits.

A few days ago I had the chance to talk to Prof Martin Gaedke, pioneer of Web Engineering research. He told me something very interesting: What is the difference between subscribing to a newspaper but not reading it (who has time for this today?) or not having a newspaper in your letter-box at all? The saved money on your cash account? No! The loss of information.

Prof Gaedke told me that even if you take the newspaper out of the letter-box, carry it to your house and place it on the kitchen table just to throw it away 2 days later keeps you informed. Even if you do not read it you will at least see some of the headlines or pictures or just single words affecting you. And you always have the possibility to have a look inside if you want to read more.

So this is (enterprise) microblogging! It is a company’s newspaper written without editors. It is a newspaper in realtime. It updates itself after every single new posting in one of its categories. And it even extends the idea of categories towards the idea of tagging. In using this an “article” can be part of multiple categories which helps you to get exactly what you are looking for. And finally, microblogging is a newspaper in a format readable by digital agents (i.e. RSS reader). Imagine you could have your personal robot searching the 1000 pages of your daily newspaper for exactly the information you need. Imagine this information could tell you about your company, its projects and the feelings of your employees. Imagine you could drill down from the general overview to the single information. Imagine you could even write the newspaper’s content yourself. This is microblogging.