April 2007
Doc Searls
I can’t think of anything that demonstrates the sovereign nature of the self better than a blog.
Stowe Boyd
Always beginning, never finished.
Joshua Porter
Less than a decade old, the iPod will endure as one of the best industrial designs ever. It is well-deserved. But as far as showing everyone else the way to design, it does more to blind us than help us see more clearly.
JP Rangaswami
If you want to kill a bureaucracy you must kill the diary and schedule first.
4 tags
A Wishlist: Blogtalkradio.com
The folks at Blogtalkradio.com are working overtime to make the software more usable, but I still find mysleft wanting new features.
One example: I am regularly having guests join the show, such as Ross Mayfield last week. I send these guests the same phone number to call in as regular callers to the show. But then I have to watch for them to call in, and I have to select them on my host ...
4 tags
/Talkshow: Thu 3 May - Tara Hunt and Chris Messina
Tara and Chris join me on /Talkshow this week to discuss community, co-working, and new modes of consulting. 10:30am PT. Dial (718) 508-9560 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (718) 508-9560 end_of_the_skype_highlighting if you’d like to join the show with questions.
Some people have mentioned problems with the streaming audio from the show. Installing Flip4Mac seems to...
5 tags
New Macbook, Verizon USB720 Issues = Useless...
I wasn’t even surprised when the answer to my support question sent to Verizon (Cingular) came bad with an answer that I had tried already, and just doesn’t work.
Thank you for contacting our Verizon Wireless website. I will be more than happy to assist you with installing your USB720 drivers on your Macbook.
I apologize you are experiencing difficulty installing our VZAccess ...
3 tags
/Talkshow Today: Ross Mayfield at 1:30pm
I am not rescheduling! Today’s /Talkshow is on as planned, with Ross Mayfield of Socialtext. Call in with your questions ((718) 508-9560 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (718) 508-9560 end_of_the_skype_highlighting), or you can IM me: stoweboyd @ skype, gtalk, and aim.
Ross and I will be talking about the Web 2.0 Expo, as well as other things that occur to us.
3 tags
Matt Biddulph Goes Full-time On Dopplr
Matt Biddulph is turning his part-time passion into full-time obsession:
[from hackdiary: Serendipity 2.0: going fulltime on Dopplr]
For the last couple of months I’ve been working on a new project in my spare time. Dopplr is a social network for frequent travellers, designed to increase the amount of serendipity in the world. It lets you share your travel plans with your trusted...
10 tags
Serendipity 2.0: going fulltime on Dopplr
The folks at Dopplr, who I have not spoken to directly, have apparently built the ‘ships passing in the night’ app that I have cried out for for years (see here, for example).
The premise is simple, plug in your travel schedule, and a bunch of traveling fools as your social network, and bingo: you will know who is going to be in some time (or your home town) when you are.
The...
4 tags
Tweaked on Twitter: I Am Barack Obamas Newest...
Hi, Stowe Boyd.
Barack Obama (BarackObama) added you as a friend!
Check out Barack Obama’s profile here:
http://twitter.com/BarackObama
Best, Twitter
Politicos can use worlds like Twitter appropriately, or in a completely messed-up way. We’ll see what happens with Obama’s handlers.
4 tags
Social Media: An Ecology Of Participation
Here’s the slides from my talk today at Clickability | VIP conference (click here 200704_version_2_social_media.pdf).
The final slide:
“A well-ordered humanism does not begin with itself, but puts things back in their place. It puts the world before life, life before man, and the respect of others before love of self.” - Claude Levi-Strauss
4 tags
Tweaked on Twitter: Ev Williams on David Sachs on...
David Sachs: web 2.0 = networkification vs. web 1.0 = electronification. that may be the bset [best] explanation I’ve heard.
3 tags
Tweaked on Twitter: Leisa Reichelt on...
just used SalesForce for the first time. Not very fun.
3 tags
President Bush Reaches Out To Nation's Fallen Bees
If I didn’t know better, I would have bet this was true:
[from President Bush Reaches Out To Nation’s Fallen Bees | Pluggd]
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/Talkshow: Yes I Am An Idiot
Luckily. someone from Clickability pointed out that I hava a conflict with the posted time for the next /Talkshow: I am doing a presentation at the Clickability VIP conference called “Social Media: The Ecology Of Participation,” at the same time.
Luckily, Ross Mayfield is flexible, so we are now doing the show Friday afternoon at 1:30pm, still on the same topic, observations...
6 tags
/Talkshow: Update On Streaming Audio For Macs
I have received clarification on the best approach for Mac users to access the streaming URL of Blogtalkradio.com’s shows. Users can download Flip4Mac for free — Windows Media components for Quicktime — and install, by clicking .
Requires Mac OS X version 10.3.9 or later, and QuickTime version 6.5 or later.
I have not tried this myself yet, but hope to do so before the show...
4 tags
/Talkshow Today: Deferred to Thursday, and Ross...
I am back from a trip to Switzerland, where I had great business meetings and a quick day in Zurich, but my sore throat got progressively worse. Today, on my return to the States, things seem to be improving, but I am still croaking and painful. So I have deferred the next /Talkshow to Thursday 26 April at 10:30am PT, which is the show’s regularly scheduled time.
Ross Mayfiled, my...
Catalan Saying
Do not speak Arabic in the house of the moor.
4 tags
/Talkshow: Rescheduled For Monday
The /Talkshow that I had scheduled for today has been rescheduled for Monday. I am too jetlagged, and my throat is ultra sore. The good news is that I interviewed Ross Mayfield of Socialtext while we were prepping for a session at the SIIA conference, across town from Web 2.0 Expo.
3 tags
Flow, Identity and the Enterprise
The Web 2.0 Expo workshop, Building Social Applications, went well, I think. Got a lot of positive reviews at the end.
The room was packed: must have been over 125 people, and folks sitting on the floor.
Here’s the presentation.
tags: web+2.0+expo, workshop, building+social+applications
Edward Tufte
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
2 tags
Gary Turner At Large
My pal, Gary Turner, is leaving (at long last) the dubious comforts of conventional software and looking for something new and different. Gary is based just outside of London in the UK, and looking for something awesome in the UK:
[from At Large]
I am available (or I will be from June), will work for for food, a free agent, I’m in that tricky ‘between jobs’ phase, open to (sensible) ...
2 tags
Testimonial: Euan Semple
Stowe Boyd is one of the sharpest thinkers on the web, both it’s strengths and its weaknesses. The best thing about him is he always says what he thinks - smart people hire him!
4 tags
Testimonial: Praveen Narra
Got an email today, following the Building Social Applications workshop I led at the Web 2.0 Expo:
[via email]
Hi Stowe,
I attended your session this morning. It was wonderful, and I really liked your “biased” recommendations. I actually call it “knowledgeable enough to have an opinion” recommendations.
Keep up the good work.
Best,
Praveen Narra, CEO
Indyzen Inc
...
9 tags
Stowe Boyd Takes on Andrew Keen: The New Naysayers
We have a new champion of the conventional wisdom about social media and the technological elite: Andrew Keen. A self-styled contrarian, his bio at the Britannica Blog reads like a slap in the face:
The San Francisco Chronicle recently wrote that “every good movement needs a contrarian. Web 2.0 has Andrew Keen.” Andrew is indeed the leading contemporary critic of citizen media. His...
2 tags
Sexual Orientation
Turns out that women are more ‘indiscriminate’ in what arouses them sexually:
[from Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes - New York Times by Nicholas Wade]
[…] Presumably the masculinization of the brain [in men] shapes some neural circuit that makes women desirable. If so, this circuitry is wired differently in gay men. In experiments in which subjects are...
3 tags
SHiFT06: We Shape Our Tools, And They Shape Us
Pedro Custodio just posted the video of my talk at SHiFT06, in Lisbon back in September. (Jeez, Pedro… what took you so long?).
The talk is about social tools, and how they are changing the way we work and play, and even the way we think. The video is here. Here’s the preso in PDF.
(Damn. I look fat. Glad I have started reducing.)
11 tags
/Work: The Open University's Open Universities...
Last week, I started work with the Open University in the UK on a new project. There is some bland, internal name for the project — ‘Phase 3 of Alternative Strategic Visions’ or some such — but the team relatively quickly started to call our effort “Open Universities”. This may sound like a manifesto for opening up existing universities, but in fact we...
8 tags
Technorati Acquires Personal Bee
Pete Cashmore doesn’t think much of the Technorati acquisition of Personal Bee [full disclosure — a former client of mine, but no longer]:
[from Confirmed: Technorati Acquires Personal Bee]
The plan, it seems, is to make Technorati more social, and allow people to be their own media curators. But in reality, that’s really a guise for a search traffic play: sites like Personal...
/Talkshow Tomorrow: Ted Rheingold of Dogster on...
Tomorrow, Thu 12 Apr 2007, at 10:30am - 11:00am PT I will debut my web talk radio show, called /Talkshow. My guest this week will be my old friend Ted Rheingold, founder and CEO of the award-winning Dogster. We will be discussing Online Community.
I am using Blogtalkradio’s talk radio platform, so we will be running the show live, and I will be taking calls for much of the show.
Click...
4 tags
Fred Stutzman's 12-Minute Definitive Guide to...
Fred does a good job of steering clear of politics and laying out the core proposition of Twitter in his 12-Minute Guide:
[from The 12-Minute Definitive Guide to Twitter]
[…] Developed last summer by folks from the Obvious Corporation (some of the folks that brought you applications such as Blogger.com and Odeo), Twitter has been labeled anything from a microblogging application to a ...
6 tags
Don Imus Picked The Wrong "Cleaning Lady" To Mess...
Gwen Ifil’s New York Times Op-Ed piece about Don Imus cuts like a razor through the fog around the radio talk show host’s racially and sexually charged comments about the Rutgers’ women’s basketball team, who had surprisingly fought their way into the NCAA finals:
[from Trash Talk Radio by Gwen Ifil]
For all their grit, hard work, and courage, the Rutgers girls got...
9 tags
Five ways mobile changes the world. Forever.
Brian Solis has a great wrap-up of a developing (and inevitable) collision between Twitter, the reigning social presence flow app, and Jaiku, it’s less well-known but worthy competititor. Leo Laporte’s now well-known defection to Jaiku from Twitter has led to a lot of folks checking Jaiku out for the first time. Solis characterizes the impact of that break this way:
[from ...