August 2008
SocialU: It's All About You, If You're A Virtually...
SocialU is a new lifestreamingish social application, that goes to enormous lengths to create a cheesy social environment centered on fungible social gestures, like giving a contact an electronic package of french fries. To ‘buy’ the fries, users can apply their initial stake of $500,000 social dollars or earn more cash by doing various social things: adding friends, making...
Seth's Blog: The first law of mass media
[from Seth’s Blog: The first law of mass media by Seth Godin]
Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter.
Massification = de-personalization.
[via @davidcushman]
Going Solo: Leeds Event Cancelled
I spoke with Stephanie Booth, yesterday, the organizer of the Going Solo conferences, and she has determined to cancel the upcoming event in Leeds, planned for 12 September 2008:
[from Going Solo » Not Enough Attendees For Going Solo Leeds]
Yesterday mid-afternoon, I had to take the difficult decision to cancel Going Solo Leeds. The reason for this is that a bit over two weeks before...
Office 2.0 Conference: That Which Does Not Kill...
Saw some big news from Ismael Ghalimi about the upcoming Office 2.0 conference, to be held 3-5 September in San Francisco. First of all, Ismael always challenges gravity by concentrating his execution of the conference into a two month period, which is astonishing, considering the professionalism of the event. But this time, some last minute jitters led to a major sponsor dropping out. But...
Disqus Gone Haywire
[Update: 4:30pm ET 25 Aug 2008: The nice support folks at Disqus have moved the comments so that this post is now moot.]
I apologize to those that posted comments here in the past week or so, since I set up Disqus on /Message. I broke the templates that I worked on for so long (see ), and managed to link /Message comments to the /Mind blog: a cut and paste error.
If you’d like,...
Mark Pesce Respins John Gilmore
Mark uses the pre-web language, a la reengineering and knowledge management, to recast Gilmore’s aphorism. Gilmore said,
The net regards censorship as a failure, and routes around it.
Mark Pesce tries a new spin, in a very interesting (and too long to provide a precis for here, especially on my vacation) post:
[from Mob Rules (The Law of Fives) | the human network]
The net...
*Personality Not Included
I’ve just finished reading *Personality Not Included by social marketing guru Rohit Bhargava. I don’t know a lot about marketing, but I know what works and doesn’t work when companies try it on me, and I’m increasingly interested in the crossover between social media and marketing.
Bhargava examines the concept of personality as it applies to organizations: why...
What Do You Use Search Engines For?
guest post by David Cushman
Chatting with colleague Dan Thornton I said outloud something that’s been festering at the back of my mind. And I want to share it with you.
“I only use search to find people and companies. For everything else I follow what other people point me at.”
And to be honest, I follow links for much of the people and company checking out, too.
And it...
The Great Comment Switch: Disqus
I have been using Disqus on a number of the new blogs here at /Edgewards, so I decided that it might be time to step up to the new comment system for /Message.
Knowing that I would have to convert the Typepad templates to ‘advanced’ — which means that Typepad’s WYSIWYG system for managing the look and feel of blogs would not longer work — I put off the switch...
Announcing /Edgewards
Despite all the recent discussion about failing blog networks and the resulting handwringing about the presumably negative climate for blogging, I am moving to launch a new project that I have been working on in the background for a few months. /Edgewards is a new media collective that I am heading up, one that will involve a variety of new blogs launching here at www.stoweboyd.com, as well...
Matt Balara Interviews Me
Back in Copenhagen at Reboot, Matt Balara (now a contributor here at /Message) pulled me into his series “What’s Design Mean To You?”, and he posted the video today at his mattbalara.com blog. I think I do a fairly good job describing the remedial sort of (re)design that I do a lot of the time. People generally get the basic ‘clean piece of paper’ sort of design...
Social Media is a Sound Salvation
I came across this tweet in Gerd Leonhard’s Daily Wisdoms
“Bloggers are now like DJs: They pick bands to play and talk about, and become powerful super-nodes (me;) http://tinyurl.com/5zf2td”
Gerd thinks about the future of music a lot (and like many of us who think about the future of anything), discovers convergence at every turn.
I like the image. As a start point.
But we are not...
Giving up on Work e-mail - Status Report on Week...
Luis writes in the NY Times about his experiment in zero email:
[from Preoccupations - I Freed Myself From E-Mail’s Grip - NYTimes.com.
You can do something as simple as calling people instead of e-mailing them. If you work on the same floor, you can even walk over to their desks and talk to them!
You may have some other tools that could host some of those conversations. Mainly, it is...
Gregor Hochmuth Misses The Mark With The 'Power Of...
Gregor has attempted to analyze the success of Twitter using old media imaginings, and largely fails to capture what is happening:
[from Why Twitter Hasn’t Failed: The Power Of Audience]
[…]
The answer lies in understanding Audience.
Twitter has a simple premise: You tweet & the message is pushed to your friends. The actual mechanics are slightly different (messages go to...
Mozilla's Future Of The Browser Project
My pal, Jamais Cascio, asked me to drop in on a series of meetings earlier in the year, something to do with Mozilla and the future of the browser. I was able to work with Jamais again — we met in some of the earliest work with the Open University’s Social:Learn project — as well as getting the opportunity to work with Jesse James Garrett and Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path...
Boxee: UI Nightmare, But Worth It?
My pal, Ian Forrester invited me to the alpha of a new media sharing app called Boxee. Yikes. I was baffled by the experience at first because the app doesn’t support the use of a cursor, you have to use keys to mouse around. I can’t remember the last time I fooled with a tool that doesn’t allow mousing.
Boxee, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
It would take a handful of...
Google's 5% Stake In AOL Isn't Worth $1B Anymore
No surprise that Google has assessed it’s $1B acquisition of 5% of AOL and decided that it looks like a bad deal, now:
[from Wired News - AP News by Michael Liedtke]
[…]
Google acknowledged for the first time that it might have to recognize a loss on its 5 percent stake in AOL, whose struggles have made it a financial albatross for its owner, Time Warner Inc.
[…]
...
Jeff Jarvis on The Google Age
[from The myth of the creative class]
When we talk about the Google age, then, we do talk about a new society and the rules I explore in my book are the rules of that society, built on connections, links, transparency, openness, publicness, listening, trust, wisdom, generosity, efficiency, markets, niches, platforms, networks, speed, and abundance.
Communications Nerdvana: Next Year, Maybe
I have been smacked in the face with a battery of new flow apps. There are so many popping up I can’t even adequately fool with them.
David Chartier turned me on to Mozilla’s Snowl, and sets context pretty well:
[from Mozilla’s “Snowl” hunts Twitter, RSS, and (soon) e-mail]
The web is an increasingly chatty place. Between following comment threads, checking ...
No Time For Newsprint
The folks at The We Campaign have already demonstrated that they aren’t wise to the web (see Getting Sociality Wrong: We), so it comes as no great surprise that I got an email ‘from’ Cathy Zoi at The We Campaign suggesting that I write a letter to the editor of my local newspaper about Congress and the stupidity surrounding the nation’s elected officials’...
Tweet Pro: No Way, Unless You Are Planning To Spam
I stumbled across Cesar Serna’s Tweet Pro, thanks to Rhea Drysdale, and even before I read her insightful review I clicked over to the website and saw this:
Tweet Pro for Twitter - Find Follow and Add Friends on Twitter, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Hmmm. Cash up front, $9.95 for one day access? Multiple Twitter accounts? Obviously for spammers.
I saw that it is Windows only...
AOL Is A Dog With Fleas
The implosion at AOL is accelerating:
[from Bewkes confirms AOL split | News - Digital Media - CNET News.com by Caroline McCarthy]
It’s the first time the executive [Jeff Bewkes] has confirmed that the split [between the Access and Media sides of AOL] will take place soon, though it’s been widely talked about for months since the chief mentioned it speculatively earlier this...
Can Co-Owned Comments Improve Online...
Duncan Riley is promulgating ‘Blogging 2.0’ to represent what I consider the erosion of social media by their historic communities under the inexorable rise of flow applications, like Twitter, Friendfeed, Socialmedian, and Feedly (to name only a few).
I think his description of what is happening is overly simplistic, and the appropriation of the term ‘Blogging 2.0’ is...
More Support For The iPhone Nano? Or Mac Netbook?
July’s quarterly financial results call from Apple had the CFO Peter Oppenheimer warning of a drop in gross margins before the end of September due to a new unamed product:
[from AppleInsider | Apple plans mystery “product transition” before September’s end by Aidan Malley]
During his quarterly financial results call, Apple’s chief financial officer Peter...
More Support For The iPhone Nano? Or Mac Netbook?
July’s quarterly financial results call from Apple had the CFO Peter Oppenheimer warning of a drop in gross margins before the end of September due to a new unamed product:
[from AppleInsider | Apple plans mystery “product transition” before September’s end by Aidan Malley]
During his quarterly financial results call, Apple’s chief financial officer Peter...
Friendster: New Money Following Bad?
Has anyone ever climbed back from a plunge like the Friendster nosedive? I don’t think so. But big money thinks so, with IDG Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Benchmark throwing $20M into the kitty.
[from Friendster Lives: New Cash, New Boss and a New Strategy? - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog by Brad Stone]
It says it has more than 75 million users, though many who signed up...
Apple Rumor Day
A day with a barrage of Apple rumors, including one that I am happy to start.
Based on a few paragraphs in the UK scandal sheet, The Daily Mail, people are now salivating for a iPhone nano by Christmas, although Apple has announced no such plans, and some suggest that they would be cannibalizing the market for their newest iPhone. (Personally, I am holding out for one with a better ...
The Future of Blogging Revealed
Although it is a bit gloomy (maybe the overcast of the past week in the Bay Area has dampened Robert’s sunny nature), I have to agree with some — definitely not all — of the complaints that Scoble has leveled at blogs. In particular:
[from Has/How/Why tech blogging has failed you]
More ways we’ve failed you?
Our commenting systems really suck. I didn’t realize just how...
The New Ordering Of Information: An Assault On The...
guest post by David Cushman
When Knol – google’s answer to Wikipedia - first showed up I feared it was the answer to a question no one was asking. It addressed the ‘problem’ that Wikipedia content could be untrustworthy. To whom? The crowd soon sorts out the odd iffy bit of vandalism and dampens out inaccuracies extremely rapidly.
Personally, I’d rather trust the crowd than one single...
Newspapers that Twitter: June numbers | graphic...
Link: Newspapers that Twitter: June numbers | graphic designr.
� Enterprise 2.0 as part of a larger theme > Blog...
Link: � Enterprise 2.0 as part of a larger theme > Blog Home.
The whole point of a thesis is solving a big problem: information overload. Now, there are problems with that term in that I think it can inherently add negative connotations (where “overload” is a bad thing), when that shouldn’t necessarily be the case (see Stowe Boyd’s thinking on this). Still, its the best thing we have...
The Nation - McCain, the Analog Candidate -...
Link: The Nation - McCain, the Analog Candidate - NYTimes.com.
“You don’t actually have to use a computer to understand how it shapes the country,” said Mark Soohoo, a McCain aide for online matters, at a conference on politics and technology. “You actually do,” interrupted Tracy Russo, a former blogger for John Edwards.
Not knowing how to use a computer could reinforce a notion that Mr....
/Ground: Globosclerosis and The Limits Of Open...
I take on David Brooks of the New York Times over at /Ground:
[from /Ground: Globosclerosis and The Limits Of Open Markets]
Brooks — despite being a columnist for the liberal New York Times — is conflating the supposed ‘openness’ and ‘liberalism’ of free trade with a long list of other ills: Dafur, Zimbabwe, and Iran. The supposed thread linking these...