David Wyld, a professor at Southeastern Louisiana University’s Department of Management, has written a report for IBM’s Center for The Business of Government titled, The Blogging Revolution: Government in the Age of Web 2.0.

The entire report is available via PDF as well as an executive summary, but the hardbound 100-page version can be ordered for free and it arrives within 10 days or so… a nice gesture on the part of IBM.

There’s also a news release on the report posted on the Southeastern Louisiana’s website titled Southeastern’s David Wyld documents blogging revolution among elected officials, public agencies.

The Good
It’s a very thorough overview of govenment-related (federal, state and local) blogging. Most of my government blogging clients are listed/named in the report (Eden Prairie Fire Chief George Esbensen is the only one singled out for a large graphic), but there a large number of government officials blogging who were completely new to me. He’s also included many stories that really help to illustrate the range of gov’t bloggers, as well as the potential and pitfalls of blogging. He understands the technology — one of the few to write about blogging who understands the power of both the permalink and RSS — but he wisely avoids listing blogging tools and services. The report is well-organized and illustrated, and Wyld writes in a style that I found readable, a nice touch for a research report.

The Bad
Wyld misses the leadership blogging boat, never once using the term and only in a few instances, citing those blogging-related activities (eg, affirming people) that distinguish a leadership blog from the usual government official blog. It’s odd because he does distinguish between a campaign blog and a blog that’s used once elected; between a blog that’s authentically authored vs. one written by staffers. And he does list my Guide to Civic Leadership Blogging in his references. But it’s a major oversight to include nothing about the importance of using a blog to leverage one’s leadership interactions that otherwise disappear. He’s evidently thrown off course by the ability of a blog to have comments, which he mistakenly thinks are required for a blog to be considered a blog. It’s also a major oversight to say nothing about the importance of strategic storytelling in his ‘how to blog’ section.

I can only surmise that Wyld misses the boat in part because evidently he doesn’t blog himself, didn’t keep a project blog while working on his report, and doesn’t provide a web-based area for feedback on the report now that it’s been published. The report is not likely to be discussed much in the blogosphere because its sections aren’t able to be linked to — only the entire report. Maybe Wyld doesn’t really understand the power of the permalink like I thought. He certainly isn’t walking the Web 2.0 talk. Wyld asks rhetorically and presumably with a degree of implied criticism, “Yet, to date, why has the Web 2.0 revolution not carried over to government to any great extent?” The same could be asked of university professors who write research reports about the Web 2.0 revolution.

The Ugly
There’s nothing too ugly about the report, other than a few typographical errors and at least one misspelling, “Define yourself and your prupose” in the tips box on P. 7 of the print version, fixed in the PDF. I cite the latter because I disagree with Wyld’s emphasis on the importance of spelling in a blog, and thus the irony:

This almost goes without saying, but it is surprising how many blog posts have spelling and/or grammatical errors. When spotted, such mistakes can generate satirical comments, spawn bad publicity in traditional and non-traditional media, and detract from your message. As the saying goes, “That’s why God made a spell-checker!”

In sum: get this report if you’re a government leader. But don’t assume that this is all there’s to it.

I have about a dozen or so word or phrases that Google Alerts looks for and one of them is the phrase “leadership blogging.” Today I got one alerting me to a ZDNet blog post by Phil Windley titled Blogs and the flu: eGovernment in action:

Last week, Mike Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services, penned the final post on the Pandemic Flu Leadership Blog (PFL blog)-a blog sponsored by HHS. The blog consisted of over 100 posts from contributors in the healthcare, faith-based, business and community sectors. The blog is a great resource for current thinking on how the US can respond to the threat of pandemic flu. The blog is not ongoing, but rather was active for five weeks (May 22 – June 27, 2007). Each week featured a theme and half way through there was a leadership forum with people live blogging the event…

I think the blog is a noteworthy example of how blogs can be used as a tool in eGovernment to raise awareness, start conversations, and encourage public participation. The blog is well done and deftly avoids the pitfalls of official government blogs. Hats off to HHS.

I’ve not read it all but what appears to be missing is A) participation by the leaders in the comment threads attached to their own blog posts; and B) blog posts by leaders in which they indicate that they’ve read the comment threads and better yet, agree/disagree with or learned something in those conversations. Again, I could be wrong about this, as I’ve not read everything.

But I’m impressed with this effort for the same reasons Windley noted. I’ve done time-limited web forums involving leaders in Northfield since the mid-90s. I’ve also worked with some clients in which we’ve used a project blog in conjunction with a time-limited web forum. This stellar effort by HHS gives me more ideas about how my efforts could be improved upon, whether the forum portion of it is F2F or web-based.