May 2009
San Francisco, Redux
I have had a number of folks ask me if I was leaving San Francisco — like some other notables who have recently decided that The City By The Bay was no longer the place to be — because I moved out of my teensy weensy studio apartment in SOMA. The answer is — despite not immediately moving into something else — a decided ‘no!’ I don’t think SF...
Unmarketing and the Webful Brand: A Video From...
The video of my talk at the Somesso conference in London a few weeks ago is now up online for your enjoyment.
SOMESSO » Blog Archive » Video: Stowe Boyd on ‘Unmarketing and the Webful Brand’.
The talk was based largely on a post I wrote only a week earlier, of the same name:
[from Unmarketing and the Webful Brand]
If brands are to have any juice in this new online future,...
140tees Twitter Background Ad
I really think this @140tees background is a very tasteful ad.
140tees (140tees) on Twitter, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Thread The DMs, Please
Found out there is a Mac version of Tweetie, so I decided to take a look to see what the buzz is about.
Although I have become accustomed (addicted?) to the Tweetdeck model of multiple panels for various sorts of streams, I really like the way that Tweetie handles DMs. First, there is something that looks like a buddylist, showing friends that have been DMing you, or vice versa, recently....
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Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto
[crossposted from Microsyntax.org: A Messifesto]
Over the last several months, I have written a great deal about new types of ‘microsyntax’ for Twitter on this blog. By microsyntax I mean various ways to embed structured information right into the text of Twitter messages. The most well-known sort of microsyntax are the retweet convention (or ‘RT’) and hashtags (or ...
Location, Location, Location: More on /Location...
It has been an interesting few days, since I posted A Modest Proposal For More Microstructure: Twitter /Locations, in which I presented the idea of a new sort of syntax for Twitter (or microsyntax) to represent location. Instead of tweeting this
Just landed at SFO headed downtown ASAP
tweeple could instead post this
Just landed at /SFO headed downtown ASAP
The idea being to have a...
Enterprise 2.0 Launch Pad: Videos Live, Go Vote!
We have moved past the Twitter round into the first video round, so go check out the videos for the Launch Pad contestants and vote now. Voting for this round ends on Thursday.
Not by Links Alone by Josh Young
Josh gets to the core of the news v Google quandary:
[via Not by Links Alone « Networked News]
What we need is a search experience that let’s us discover the news in ways that fit why we actually care about it. We need a search experience built around concretely identifiable sources and writers. We need a search experience built around our friends and, lest we dwell too snugly in our...
In Defense Of Distraction by Sam Anderson
Sam Anderson talks to the attention police, those that say we have lost our productivity and god-given focus, and fallen into a cesspool of narcissistic web wandering, and comes out with a masterful counter argument in support of unfocus and mental nomadism.
As I have said for years, writing about flow, they will say that the cognitive and societal changes arising from web participation are...
Stowe Boyd
by Brian Solis
These days, when people ask me “What do you do?” I hardly know where to begin. One facile answer is “I am the front man for Stowe Boyd and The /Messengers.” Since it sounds like a band’s name, it throws the conversation into an oblique direction.
The /Messengers is really my consulting service focused on the social web revolution.
I am best...
Muck Rack
Popular Links - Journalists on Twitter - Muck Rack, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
A Modest Proposal For More Microstructure: Twitter...
[Update 14 December 2009: I have adopted Ross Mayfield’s term ‘geoslash’ in place of ‘location tags’. See Geoslash at Microsyntax.org’s wiki for a fuller explanation.]
Hashtags (Twitter tags) were proposed by Chris Messina, and in use by Chris, me, and others before tools existed to do much with them, aside from search. In similar fashion, I am proposing a...
Union Organizers Twitter Bombing Starbucks...
Interesting to read about the unionization efforts among Starbucks employees (with the usual global corporate union busting going on), and how the organizers are trying to subvert a social media campaign by hijacking the twitter tag that Starbucks is using, now known as Twitter bombing:
Twitter bomb Starbucks, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
[from the website]
Use these hashtags and...
Marquez Email Footer
My pal, Ian Forrester, told me that he has adopted the spirit of the Gabriel García Márquez quote — “Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life” — that he heard from me in a recent presentation, and uses this in his email footer now:
This e-mail is: []secret; [x]private; []public
GoPlan V2: Now With Activity Stream
GoPlan is Basecamp-inspired social project management tool, and in the newly released version 2.0 the nice folks at We Break Stuff have added an activity stream, reminiscent of Yammer or Workstreamer.
GoPlan v2, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
Looks interesting, although otherwise the product seems pretty much as before.
Unmarketing and the Webful Brand: Somesso, London,...
My friend Andrea Vascellari captured a video of my keynote at the Somesso conference in London last Thursday. It was entitled ‘Unmarketing and the Webful Brand’ pretty much a straightforward exposition of the thoughts in the post of the same name, here.
I think it was well-received. I was a bit shattered by lack of sleep. The night before I was in Manchester, and my hotel room...
New York Times And Google Look To Use SVW's...
Tom Foremski starts out by talking about the AP copyright brouhaha and winds up taking a lefthand turn into a very interesting convention. He suggests that we should all agree to a stricter approach to giving credit to the sources of anything we post, which he calls “adtribution”:
[from Support the Source: Creating a New Media Business Model and Keeping the Web Open]
...
#fixreplies
I have been in transit, running from conference to conference in the UK, so I missed the initial news about Twitter’s #fixreplies mess.
Biz’s latest post attempting (I guess) a recap and mea culpa just doesn’t scan for me:
[from #Twitter Blog: The Replies Kerfuffle]
Twitter evolves and thrives on how folks use it. Some of our best features are invented by users, so ...
Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad: Vote On TwitPitches!
In the spirit of much needed brevity, we decided this year to start the Enterprise 2.0 Launchpad process with a Twitpitch round. So around 50 contestants have posted their tweets, telling us in 140 characters why they should participate in the Launchpad round of 16.
Please go check out the competitors and select the one you’d most like to see progress. Vote closes on 15 May, this...
New Bit.ly UI
Some time ago, I hacked my Typepad templates here at /Message so that I could have bit.ly links automatically generated for all posts. Today, I clicked on the bit.ly for a new post, and a new UI came up:
New Bit.ly UI, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.
The hardworking folks at Bit.ly have taken a step out of my workflow by bringing up the ‘post to Twitter’ text box right in...
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New Spatialism: Reclaiming Social Space In Web...
I am going to be leading a Social Media Masterclass at the Thinking Digital conference on Wednesday, as just one element of a two week trip in Europe. Last week I was in Hamburg for the Next09 conference, and Andreas Vascellari got a video of my presentation on the Open Enterprise 2009 study, and interviewed me, as well. This week, it’s Thinking Digital, Futuresonic, and Somesso, in ...
Next09 Videos
I was interviewed by the guys from T3N Magazine in Hamburg, at the Next09 conference. Honestly I ramble a bit too much at the start — I had just gotten off the podium from my talk — but around 4 minutes I stop yammering and start talking about the ‘Web of Flow’:
Stowe Boyd @next09 about the Web of Flow and Flow Apps from yeebase media on Vimeo.
PS When I said...
I Had To Laugh
Following my recent post about the transition from the inbox to the stream (see From Email Culture To Stream Culture: Out Of The Inbox), I got a comment from someone called ‘s’ which actually made me laugh. Among other things, ‘s’ suggests I lack sufficient experience to write about these topics:
/Message: From Email Culture To Stream Culture: Out Of The Inbox.
I ...
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From Email Culture To Stream Culture: Out Of The...
In recent weeks, my work on the Open Enterprise 2009 study has led to many conversations where practitioners and other researchers have mentioned the movement away from email culture to more open models of interaction.
Here’s one way to characterize that movement, which at the highest level is from closed to open forms of communication, or as I characterized it in a presentation I am...