/Message

Stowe Boyd And The /Messengers

I am up-updating this in mid Mar 2008, to keep up with all the tectonic changes in my life.

The /Messengers is not a band, although it sounds like one. It's just is the name I dreamed up for my consulting business back in 2007, which had been called many, many things over the 13+ years since I started out as an soloist. There was Work Media, Running Light, and A Working Model.

I am best known these days for my writing (and the thinking behind it, I hope) at /Message, hence the /Messengers. I am obsessed with social tools, and their impact on business, media, and society. I coined the term "social tools" in 1999, the same year I started blogging, and I haven't looked back since. Writing and working with clients takes most of my time, but I also speak at various events, such as Reboot, Lift, Shift, Mesh, Enterprise 2.0, Office 2.0, Under The Radar, Next08, and Web 2.0 Expo, to name only a few.

Over the years my blogging has moved around. I started with a service called Convey.com with my first blog, Message from Edge City. The company shut down one fine day, and I lost my content. Ouch. I started a new blog called Timing on Blogger, and consolidated that into Get Real, a Corante blog that I wrote for a few years. I parted company with Corante, where I had served as president for two years, and left Get Real behind. I started /Message in January of 2006, and it has drawn a following of web industry insiders and social technology savants. It is not for the average bear. In June 2007 I was ranked #2 out of technology industry analysts by Technobabble. As of March 27 2008, I had 65K+ rss subscribers at /Message.

My work is principally oriented toward the theory and practice of social web application design and development, as well as related product strategy (like the activities formerly known as marketing). So far in 2007, I have worked with very large organizations (AOL, and the Open University, for example) to the most minute of start-ups (Workstreamr, for example, is a three person NYC-based venture).

My goal in consulting is to work closely with my partners (yes, I consider it a partnership) over a long enough period of time and dedicating enough time so that I can make a strategic difference. For some companies that could be just a day a month over the development of a new product release. For others -- and these are the ones that are most rewarding -- I work much more intensively, often taking on the role of chief product architect, and driving product definition and development. In several cases, recently, my involvement with startups has led to my becoming a parallel entrepreneur, and I am now involved in several companies as a co-founder, including Workstreamr, and others that I can't disclose at this time.

I serve on the advisory board of several other companies:

• b5 media, the Toronto-based blog network
  
• Mixin, a Lausanne-based social application start-up
  
• ImaginVenture, a Lugano-based venture capital company
  
• SchoolOfEverything, a London-based lifetime learning web application company
  
• Swift, a Boston-based social networking solution for conferences
  
• My6Sense, a Tel Aviv-based mobile social start-up.

In my engagements, I am often asked to bring in other consultants or organizations, which I do gladly and eagerly. In recent engagements, I have been able to work with Euan Semple, Brian Oberkirch, Kars Alfrink, Nikki Barton, and Khaiersta Flowers. Likewise, I have worked with design and development firms, such as Blue Whale Labs, Cimex, and Globallogic. These are the /Messengers.

So, I consider myself the front man of a constantly shifting collaborative network, a band of doers and thinkers, designers and developers. Sometimes it's a solo act, sometimes a duo, and when needed a combo.

I am having a lot of fun.

My email address is stowe DOT boyd AT gmail DOT com, if you'd like to contact me.

Tom Coates on Working At Yahoo

Apropos of nothing...

[from Twitter / Tom Coates

Working for a large company is a bit like being a parasite on a gigantic Sea Kraken, always nervous about its digestive and sexual problems.

Microsoft and Yahoo: Here Comes Yesterday

Dan Farber thinks the shotgun marriage of Yang's Yahoo with the post-Gates Microsoft makes all the sense in the world:

The timing is right for Microsoft and Yahoo shareholders. Yahoo stock is depressed and the outlook for price growth isn’t optimistic. “We believe in this combination more than ever and we made a great offer and we look forward to the dialog,” Johnson said during the call. He also said that the company has a “clear line of sight” as to how to move forward with the integration of the two parties.

Ballmer talked about the big vision. Software plus services and the Internet are transforming Microsoft’s business. “Windows users want to be ‘Live,’ he said. He alluded to an Office Live, which I assume is a cloud-based Microsoft Office and not just the current Office Live that provides a set of online services for small businesses. Yahoo has 500 million live users, services and technology that could help Microsoft transform…and take on Google.

Ballmer said during the press/analyst call that Microsoft had been talking with Yahoo for 18 months and called Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang last night to make the proposal. “We are confident this the right path for Microsoft and Yahoo.” I expect that Yang was somewhat relieved at this point to have such an offer after the week of Yahoo pummeling post earnings.

Yang certainly doesn't know what to do, and after having Hollywood Semel throw away a few good years of Yahoo's fortunes didn't help them much. They haven't turned the corner into the 21st century.

Microsoft thinks they know what they are doing, which is banking the fires and focusing on the enterprise. The Web is moving past Microsoft, making it the IBM of the 21st century, and like IBM, which let Microsoft, Dell, and others make hay during the personal computer explosion, now Microsoft is seeing Google, Facebook, and Amazon making inroads into the future at such a pace that they are floundering.

Personally, I think the Microsoft and Yahoo matchup is like two tired swimmers who bump into each other and then wind up drowning each other in their scramble to survive. But Yahoo will be the first to go under in this embrace.

We have already started to see the handwriting on the wall: a downturn, leading to a big reduction, leading to defections, stalled projects, political infighting, etc. I am sure that the best and the brightest over at the Brickhouse are creating business plans and prepping their departure posts.

Just smells like this decades AOL/Time matchup. It will go through. Microsoft will remove one competitor, but it won't work. It won't be enought to stop the future.

This is just as well for Yahoo, which had no strategy, really. They’d gone as far as they could with the old-media model, as exploited by the last CEO, former movie-studio head Terry Semel. Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang started saying the right things about turning Yahoo into a platform, but it probably would have taken years to turn his culture around. They were too used to operating like a movie studio or publishing house.

<update> Jeff Jarvis says more or less the same as me:

Will this be big enough to beat Google? No, because big won’t win in the end. Open will.

</update>

Dopplr Raumzeitgeist 2007: Where we went last year

Dopplr Blog » Dopplr Raumzeitgeist 2007: Where we went last year, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Dopplr has published a great image -- the Raumzeitgeist 2007, or 'space time spirit' 2007 -- based on the travels of all the Dopplr community in 2007. Soon they will be letting all of us make similar graphics, it seems.

Flu Vaccine Shortage Posts From 2004

I am reposting several posts I wrote in 2004 at Get Real during the flu vaccine shortage.

Ethics of the Flu Vaccine Shortage: What Would Network Science Do?

The flu vaccine shortage has brought to high relief the inability of our government to effectively respond to public health threats. This is the result of a laissez faire attitude toward the safety net that the government has an implicit obligation to put and keep in place for the old, young, and needy, but even more chilling, as the direct result of outdated ethics.

Confronted with a shortage of flu vaccine, the health care apparatchiks have responded in a 19th century, "women and children first" approach, which may feel like the ethical response, but is in fact not well-grounded scientifically. It turns out that doling out the scarce flu vaccinations to those most at risk will not counter the threat of epidemic. The government bureaucrats may continue in the old, wrong-headed, and unscientific rhetoric, but the public heath people should know better.

Network science has shown that human interaction is scale free: that is to say, some of us have significantly more contacts that the rest of us. As scale-free networks grow, those with more contacts are more likely to add new contacts. This is the power law of popularity and influence that we have seen at work everywhere in human interactions.

Research into the spread of diseases like AIDS has suggested an alternative approach to breaking the non-linear expansion of the epidemic, which diffuses through the population just like innovations:

[from Linked by Albert-László Barabási]

Despite differences in purpose and detail, all diffusion models predict the same phenomenon: Each innovations has a well-defined spreading rate, representing the likelihood that it will be adopted by a person introduced to it. [...] Yet knowing the spreading rate alone is not sufficient to decide the fate of an innovation. For what we must calculate is the critical threashold, a quantity determined by the properties of the network in which the innovation spreads. If the spreading rate of the innovation is less than the critical threshold, it will die out quickly. If it is over the threshold, however, than the number of people adopting it will increase exponentially until everybody who could use it does.

Recognizing that passing a critical threshold is the prerequisite for the spread of fads and viruses was probably the most important conceptual advance in understanding in spreading and diffusion. Currently the critical threshold is part of every diffusion theory. Epidemiologists work with it when they model the probability that a new infection will turn into an epidemic, as the AIDS virus did. [...]

For decades, a simple but powerful paradigm dominated our treatment of diffusion problems. If we wanted to estimate the probability that an innovation would spread, we needed only to know its spreading rate and the critical threshold it faced. Recently, however, we learned that some viruses and innovations are oblivious to it.

Research into the spread of computer viruses has led to a new, network science-based approach to modeling -- and countering -- human epidemics.

[from Linked by Albert-László Barabási]

The deadly virus [AIDS] must have followed the route already spotted in the spread of innovation and computer viruses: Hubs are among the first infected thanks to their numerous sexual contacts. Once infected, they quickly infect hundreds of others. If our sex web formed a homogeneous, random network, AIDS might have died out long ago. The scale-free topology of AIDS dispersal allowed the virus to spread and persist.

So the problem before us, ethically, should not be "find those who are the most at risk, and vaccinate them," but rather "who among us are most likely to be the hubs in the spread of the flu? Find them, and vaccinate them."

Especially when supplies are limited, the best hope to stem the rise of the epidemic is to find the most connected individuals in the population -- which in this case means physically connected, not virtually -- and immediately vaccinate them.

I am no expert in the determination of who are the most connected people, but it would likely include some obvious -- and non-obvious -- walks of life. Various kinds of public and health service workers come to mind: doctors, nurses, and other folks in hospitals, clinics, and medical offices who come in contact with the old, young, and infirm are obvious candidates. Starbucks barristas, taxi cab drivers, and bartenders -- while not at risk, necessarily, to succumbing to the flu -- are likely disease vectors who might spread the disease to hundreds of others if they were to contract it. I am even willing to concede that our Senators and Representatives to Congress are likely to fall into this group, and therefore administering vaccine to this group is in the public interest, even while it may appear to be self-serving.

While some have argued that administering AIDS counteragents (we still have no vaccine) to those who are most promiscuous only rewards unsavory and immoral behavior, we have no such quandary in this case. The flu is not a sexually transmitted disease, so there is no moral dimension to vaccinating the bus driver: he could infect hundreds of old, young, and infirm every day. And he would do so simply through doing his job, not through some arguably anti-social act. And worst of all, he could infect two dozen other bus drivers, who would infect thousands, again.

The scale-free network is there, we all know it, and you can't wish it away. Our best choice is to apply what we know.

The stupidity du jour is the bone-headed notion of vaccine lotteries. This is totally dumb, and intelligent people everywhere should rise up against its apparent "fairness." It flies in the face of reason, and squanders perhaps our only chance to stop the spread of the flu in a population confronted with an inadequate supply of vaccine.

The outcome of better science should be the betterment of society, on the whole, and an improvement in every individual's life. However, this is only true if those that govern our collective resources wisely take into account the best scientific thought. If they, on the other hand, disregard science and devolve into outdated ethics and pseudo-scientific mumbo gumbo, they should be hounded from office.

More on Flu Vaccination: Kids are the Supernodes

I posted a plea for the application of network science to the distribution of flu vaccine, last week. Various Corante contributors pointed out some fallacies in my arguments, or at least the fact that my arguments are not well supported by network research to date.

Both danah boyd and Clay Shirky pointed out via email that the studies I cited re: AIDS dispersal were much simpler to model because of the relative difficulty involved in spreading AIDS. The flu, on the other hand, is spread by very casual interaction -- breathing other person's exhalations, or using a cup touched by a flu sufferer -- so that the dispersal is much more general and open.

I concur, as far as the analysis goes. But I maintain that there is still a network gradient involved, and that people should be sorted out to those least likely to spread the disease -- older shut-ins, for example -- and those who are more likely to spread the bug.

Renee Hopkins Callahan came across an interesting support for this position:

[from NPR : Health Experts: Kids Should Get Flu Shots First]

Health Experts: Kids Should Get Flu Shots First

Morning Edition, November 1, 2004 · In a typical flu season, more than 40 percent of school-age kids get the flu. But health officials are trying to get the vaccine to Americans over age 50. New findings suggest children should be vaccinated first to reduce the spread of flu to older adults. Hear NPR's Richard Knox.

Turns out that kids get the flu at over 7 times the rate of adults, and then infect at risk adults. As Renee notes, "This test is based on a case in Japan where flu in older people almost disappeared after a period of years of vaccinating all school-age children, then returned after the vaccination program was discontinued."

So the empirical results suggest that vaccinating school age children may break the epidemic explosion, because schools turn out to be a hot zone for the disease, even though the children themselves are not at risk. So, when we are short of vaccine, we should target the kids to quell the epidemic. Of course, as is noted in the report, if you really are confronted with a pandemic, you should inoculate nearly everyone, but if you inoculate even 25% of the kids, you will see a drastic downturn in the overall infection in the population as a whole.

Action Streams And The Next Cycle In The Social Revolution

Got email from David Recordon of Six Apart yesterday, alerting me to some news:

[from Six Apart - News and Events: Time for Action: What We’re Opening Next]

Today, we're shipping the next step in our vision of openness -- the Action Streams plugin -- an amazing new plugin for Movable Type 4.1 that lets you aggregate, control, and share your actions around the web. Now of course, there are some social networking services that have similar features, but if you're using one of today's hosted services to share your actions it's quite possible that you're giving up either control over your privacy, management of your identity or profile, or support for open standards. With the Action Streams plugin you keep control over the record of your actions on the web.

David Sippey and Byrne Reese of Six Apart also add some insights:

[from Blogging Evolved by Byrne Reese]

But this plugin is not just about activity aggregation, it about control.

But this plugin is not just about activity aggregation, it about control. Because if there is one thing to learn from the one service that even remotely capable of performing this service for you, is that control and privacy is not just important, it is paramount. That is why this plugin:

• is 100% free and open source


• is available for a 100% free and open source blogging platform


• allows users to select which events are public and which are private


• allows users to select which services to aggregate and show activity from


• utilizes open standards to collect and publish data


• and allows users to distribute and do with this data what they please

You can see this plugin in action in a number of different places:

• on the front door of my blog, and on an archive I created
• on Sippey's, Mark's and David's blogs
• on Movable Type dot org's web site to collect and aggregate activity for the entire MT dev team
• and more places to come I am sure.

But no matter how "cool" I think this is, the single most important thing to me is that Action Streams has helped majordojo return to its original purpose: to act as a central aggregation for all of my activity online, and to do so in a way that just works that doesn't require me to do any extra work. Just use the tools I like to use, and let it do the rest.

Never, never put cool in quotes, man!

Michael Sippey Action Streams, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

So, a neat plugin. Yes, people would like to coalesce their myriad streams into something, but I don't think directing that into a old-fashioned blog -- into a publishing metaphor -- is really what people are dreaming of. Yes, I would like to have an archive to search against, although a tree of published pages is not really the best for that: that's what databases are for.

The real issue is that real control will have to be incredibly fine-grained, and the blog publishing approach has been too coarsely-grained in general for that purpose. Blogging is grounded in the 'everything is public' and 'everything is a page' model, and the technologies all reflect that to a great extent.

So, it's not blogging evolution that we need, but a new fusion of the concepts of social media reflected in real social context and the nature of the current web. Like many others, I believe we have to draw on what we know about social networks -- not just their current implementation on the web in Facebook or socially networked services like Flickr or Dopplr -- but real-world social networks: the ways that people share and don't share things with each other.

We are moving to a fragmented world of cascading streams: del.icio.us bookmarks, twitter updates, blog posts, Google reader recommendations, Basecamp milestone updates. Just like the old days of American wireless telephony, the various services don't interoperate well, and a variety of gasketry is emerging to bridge the various services in what turn out to be frustrating and partial solutions.

I get an RSS stream from Dopplr, for example, and plug it into my blog as a widget. However, the blog technology knows nothing about it, and the various trips that Dopplr is streaming don't flow into my blog's RSS feed. And should they? After all, Dopplr has a well-defined sharing model within the application, which allows me to share trip information in a controlled fashion. Exporting it outside of the context of Dopplr means that those controls are lost. I have opted to allow that info to be public, but others wouldn't.

In a sense, I am moving from a higher level of control to a lower one. Like many lowest common denominator approaches, this leads to something getting lost.

If we are going to bring down all these socially rich opportunities for sharing down to the level of open publishing we are going to lose a lot. We will bleed out all the social subtleties. We need to devise tools and technologies -- and the social expectations -- that will allow us to bring much more socially rich interaction into the context of social media.

One of the things I am focused on these days is a startup where my partners and I are are actively exploring these topics. Without revealing too much of our plans, I can characterize the world we see changing and that we hope to midwife. As we move from the 'web of pages' metaphor -- based on hypertext and publishing metaphors -- and enter a 'web of flow' -- based on information streaming through interpersonal relationships -- we will have some major disruptions.

The proliferation of hundreds -- perhaps thousands -- of highly specific social applications that will produce streams derived from people's activities, writings, and media is leading to a fragmentation of web identity and social connection.

There is no hope of 'one ring to bind them' at least in the near term. There is no standard, no app, no movement that is going to head off the next few years of chaos as various contending models are dreamed up and tested in the marketplace of ideas as applications, platforms, or widgety glue.

I am betting on a step-wise process, and the announcement from Six Apart is an example of that. We will see increasingly sophisticated widgetry being created, leading us one step at a time up and away from the page/ publishing model toward a new world of socially constrained streams. It will take years, but new standards will emerge, either de facto or de jure, that will allow us to control access to information flowing through a sprawling web of flow based on social controls. Whatever form this takes will certainly require the controls -- to some extent -- being pushed into the information that is flowing. The updates, photos, notes, recommendations, and videos that we will share through these streams will have to be locked (encrypted) so that only those to whom we have given the keys can open them.

We will need a federated identity system as the core of this, but just as important is the basic notion that a vast conglomeration of interoperating applications would have to share the metaphor of streams as the basis for everything, and move away from pages. We will need to federate the identity of the applications in exactly the same way that we will validate our human identities, so that applications can stream information on our behalf. A project management tool might serve a user the status update from a friend that was created in a Twitter-like app of the not-too distant future, and vice versa, the status update of that first user could travel out to the Twitter-like app, and be propagated to anyone allowed to see it. For this to work, the lock has to be in the stream droplet, and every application will have to allow us to slide in the key to open it.

Ultimately the ability to create a published page at a specific URL on the web will be something like the ability to dump the bits stored at a specific location on my hard drive: occasionally useful, but not the way that we generally interact with the information there.

I believe this is as profound a change as the movement from text to windows-based UI, or the movement from disconnected computing to the Web.

The final completion of the social revolution will be, not surprisingly, wiring the sociality that connects us together into the architecture of the platform we will be standing on.

links for 2008-01-31

• CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership - Hot Tech Toys from the Past: Geek Chic from the '90s Doesn't Look So Cool Today - Slide 06
  Man, seeing a Sony Mavica camera zoomed me back so hard I almost whiplashed.
  (tags: cio.com diann+daniel sony+mavica palm gear tech+toys)

links for 2008-01-29

• Pistachio Consulting Inc. » DEMO: last-minute tips & audience “scorecard”
  Tios for DEMOites and other pitchers: 'You might think presentations answer “What is it?” Nope. The good ones answer “What does it do?” and “What does that matter?”'
  (tags: demo pitches pistachio presentations)
• Eye-Fi » Home
  Wireless SD card. Smart!
  (tags: eye.fi wireless photography sd-card)
• Is the Tipping Point Toast? -- Duncan Watts -- Trendsetting
  Duncan Watts doesn't believe that influencers are critical for viral trends to spread. Hmmm. I bet he's wrong. Like saying school kids don't spread the flu.
  (tags: flu trends sociality social+networks virality tippingpoint malcolm+gladwell big+seed yahoo hushpuppies)
• Pete Cashmore, Bambi Francisco Discuss Mashable 2.0
  Drowning in "ish" "kinda" and "like", Pete fails to illuminate his plans for M 2.0.
  (tags: pete+cashmore mashable vator.tv bambi+francisco)

Publilius Syrus on Multitasking

[from Autumn Of The Multitaskers]

To do two things at once is to do neither. - Publilius Syrus, Roman slave, first century B.C

Or perhaps to do something altogether different?

links for 2008-01-28

• Capillaries can carry compressed context | confused of calcutta
  JP Rangaswami on Multisided Platforms
  (tags: twitter jp+rangaswami multi-sided+platforms)
• Facebook Apps On Any Website: Clever Move
  A new set of javascript libraries allows hosting of any Facebook App on any website. Another platfrom move.
  (tags: facebook app+platform)
• Yahoo (YHOO) Going Forward With "Drastic" Layoffs--Source - Silicon Alley Insider
  SVI reports that a source close to Jerry Yang has disclosed that serious layoffs -- 1,500-2,500 -- will be announced this week. I wonder the impact on Brickhouse?
  (tags: yahoo jerry+yang brickhouse)

IntelliScanner : For The Anal Retentive Inside Us, Screaming To Get Out

Even though I am actively working to own less crap -- in fact I am operating on the 'buy something/trash something' karmic law of ownerness, based on the assumption that your possessions possess you, not the other way around -- still there is something dangerously attractive about the tiny little scanner that you can use to catalog your possessions.

IntelliScanner - Organize Everything, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Exactly why I would want to spend the time to swipe every book I own, I don't know. Unless I was swapping them on some service. This would help with participation in Lala or Peerflix, I guess.

On a practical level, swiping the bar codes on food and other crap to automatically create a shopping list might be cool. Keep one in the kitchen, and swipe the cans and bottles as you put things in the recycles.

But I am just rationalizing, cause it looks like a cool gizmo.

links for 2008-01-27

• /Ambivalence: Bush Economic Stimulus: Make Begging Legal
  A satire, but a bunch of people thought it was serious. Almost believable.
  (tags: bush satire prostitution pelosi begging no+child+left+behind economic+stimulus)

links for 2008-01-26

• AttentionMax » Blog Archive » Move Over, Seth Godin, Einstein’s Here
  Max Kalehoff culls ten great einstein quotes, and suggests they could serve as chapters in a business text
  (tags: einstein seth+godin max+kalehoff pointer:henry+copeland quotes)
• Could Instant Messaging (XMPP) Power the Future of Online Communication? - ReadWriteWeb
  "imagine a web with decentralized, open standards-based IM at its center" Ok, that's easy.
  (tags: marshall+kirkpatrick xmpp jive+software jabber clearspace)

Design Police | Bring bad design to justice.

Design Police | Bring bad design to justice., originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I love it. I can hear my kindergarten teacher shouting at me, "Don't paint outside the lines!"

I recently watched Helvetica which opened my eyes to the various generations and schools of font-heads. I note that these guys use Helvetica for their stickers, hate Comic Sans, and recommend a grid: must be modernists!

Also, there is a mildly interesting -- although perhaps a bit too inwardly focused and self-aware -- discussion between various Adaptive Path folks about such stamps, here.

Personally, I want to start using this stamp on blogs on a daily basis:

stamp bullshit, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

links for 2008-01-24

• Stephen Fry » Blog Archive » Social networking through the ages
  Comedian Steven Fry completely misses the mark on social tools by looking backwards instead of living experientially.
  (tags: steven+fry pointer:bruno+figueiredo social+networks social+tools)

Dopplr Coincidensity Email

Dopplr has started to add some of the more obvious additional features, some of which I posed at the Building Social Applications workshop at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin.

As one great example, the coincidence area of a trip's expanded page, now includes the opportunity to email friends that overlap with a trip, so you can suggest getting together.

Dopplr Email, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

The Costs Of Being A Creative

I was sitting here, at 6:45am PT, having just gotten off a conference call about the design of my greatest obsession, Workstreamr (about which more is forthcoming in a few weeks, I promise), and I happened upon a tweet from my dear friend, Hugh McLeod. Hugh has a written a post on the the costs of being a creative (which, no surprise, includes the backhanded appreciation of the benefits of such a life, as well).

Among other points, Hugh makes the case for the 10,000 hour rule: it takes 10,000 hours of practice to attain mastery of any human craft. In Hugh's case:

"Creativity" is extremely time consuming. My cartoons didn't get any good [to me, at least] until I had spent well over a decade working obsessively on them. Hell, I'm still not there yet.

Three hours per day, 330 days per year for ten years gets you to 10,000 hours.

I had the same sense that Hugh did about his cartoons about my writing after two decades of regular writing, particularly honed during a 5 year stint writing a monthly newsletter and then a few years of blogging.

He makes the point that this leads to having 'no life' during that period. That three hours comes after work, after studying and eating. It cuts into the contemporary norms of life: television viewing for example, or keeping up with the Braves, or weekend camping trips.

It eats away at the dividing line between personal and work life:

When you get into the "creative" zone, the lines between "work time" and "off time" start getting blurry. And the deeper you get into that zone, the blurrier the lines get. I often work from seven in the morning till midnight and think nothing of it. A very smart friend of mine who works over at Blip.tv once told me, "I only work 3 or 4 hours a week,. The rest of the time, I'm playing." Working eighty hour weeks is much easier when seventy six of those hours is playtime for you.

It's only work if you have to make yourself do it. If you have to hold yourself back, it's play.

This life calls us, we don't pick it. And it has an austerity to it, since the majority of the time spent practicing our craft, perfecting the art, is time spent alone. In Hugh's case, feverishly drawing cartoon after cartoon, or a young software developer designing better abstractions, or a writer grappling with grammar and intention. Being creative entails a great deal of solitude.

(As a result, creatives can overdo when they are not off sharpening their skills and working their magic, but that's another post.)

Hugh points out that creativity comes from the work:

A sense of purpose only comes your way usually because you've been working your ass off over a long period of time, intensely cultivating it. And yeah, sometimes that will appear to more mainstream people as "Having no life". To hell with them. They don't know or care about you. Successful people get that way by doing the stuff unsuccessful people aren't willing to do. Harsh but true.

Paderewski, the physicist Polish creative, once said, "Before I was a genius, I was a drudge." There is a lot of slogging involved. And others, generally, will not understand: especially before you have invested the full ten years. "You'll never sell a book!" "You call that music?" "That's the dumbest design I have ever seen!" "Keep your day job."

Another good reason to work apart from others, so you don't have to hear all that negativity. Close the door, and sharpen your pencil.

Like making a fire from rubbing sticks together, creativity's heat comes from work. Work requires dedication. Dedication involves sacrifice, specifically of time and the absence of what might have been done instead.

Lurking behind Hugh's words is the implicit message that it is worth it, that the time spent apart in pursuit of purpose and the outcome of that pursuit -- in cartoons, writing, music, or working software -- balance the costs, that the juice is worth the squeeze.

It is for me, anyway. And obviously, for Hugh. How about you?

links for 2008-01-10

• OpenFrame: 'The iPhone of home phones' - Engadget
  Second life for home telephone? I have gone wireless, but a really smart home phone device might sway me. I don't know if this is cool enough, though.
  (tags: scully openframe home+telephone iphone)

Steve Rubel on The Lazysphere

I personally think Steve had too much rich food over the holidays, and it's made him dyspeptic. While I agree that Techmeme naturally leads to a pile-on mindset among a small group of bloggers, the notion that the entire blogosphere's value is declining is just silly:

[from Micro Persuasion: The Lazysphere and the Decline of Deep Blogging]

[...]

The Lazysphere - a working definition - is a group of bloggers who I won't name by name, but you can spot them a mile away. Rather than create new ideas or pen thoughtful essays, they simply glom on to the latest news with another "me too" blog post. Their goal is largely to land on Techmeme and sometimes digg - perhaps Google in an archival/Long Tail perspective. These sites - and Twitter too - have perpetuated a lot of lackadaisical writing. The Attention Crash is another factor at work here. People don't have as much time to think.

People have just as much time to think this week as last year. Personally, if we want to rant and rail against something that really stinks, let's tell people to turn their televisions off.

Steve, on the other hand, suggests that he, and a short list of those bloggers he thinks are worth reading, can turn the tide. The rest of us are just a bunch of lazy bastards, too busy twittering and echo-chambering to do anything meaningful.

Somehow -- maybe it's the political season -- this feels like a democrat 'attacking from the right': using the rhetoric of republicans to discredit those that are too liberal.

I believe that the nature of blogging *is* shifting, microtectonically, as people are exploring the use of new tools like Techmeme, Twitter, Seesmic, and so on. But it's not laziness: it's innovation and exploration.

Revisiting #*: A Meta #Hashtag For Reviews

Earlier this week, I responded to a call from Jeff Jarvis for a technique to do the following:

1. Denote in some unambiguous way that a Twitter tweet is a review, like a movie or book review,
2. Have those reviews collated somewhere, and
3. Have the collated reviews served back into a Twitter account.

Jarvis thought that using the @username approach made sense for step 1, but I suggested that using #hashtag would be better. I designated #*, or hashstar, for that purpose. The nice folks at www.hashtags.org have already implemented step 2. I tried to use www.twitterfeed.com to accomplish step 3, but ran into several problems: www.hashtags.org *does* produce an RSS feed for each #hashtag, but the RSS feeds apparently lack the sort of timestamps that www.twitterfeed.com requires. So my new hashstar twitter account sits empty, although the tagged tweets are accumluating at #* on www.hashtags.org.

(I am ignoring the inelegant @twitcrit title that Jarvis offered.)

The post led to a bunch of comments that are worth pulling out of the shadows:

[from the comments]

I had the best luck taking this PHP script for posting from RSS to Twitter: http://tinyurl.com/ypjuve

And then setting a cron job to run it every so often.

(I had to modify parse.php to use curl rather than fopen, since some hosting providers don't allow that).

In other words you may need to roll your own here.

Posted by: John Eckman | January 06, 2008 at 07:30 AM

Ugh. No thanks.

Hmmm... We don't block #hashtags as a tag. A quick look shows your tweet at http://hashtags.org/tag/hashtags/

I'll see if I can't get date/time put on the feeds for you today.

Thanks,
~Aaron

Posted by: Aaron Farnham | January 06, 2008 at 08:53 AM

Hasn't been implemnted yet, but Aaron is scheming about doing something much larger at www.hashtags.org. More to follow on that.

Stowe, we've had a Twitter Reviews system running since June 07 (same idea also runs on Jaiku and Pownce). You write reviews in a particular format like so:

Review RatingFrom1-5 ItemName: Opinion

and we collect them on LouderVoice if you let us know about your Twitter account. Anyone can search on them in LouderVoice (where they are presented as hreviews) and we send them to the source Tweet.

Details on our blog

We'd be happy to add support for hashtags too.

Posted by: Conor O'Neill | January 06, 2008 at 08:56 AM

I will give that a spin.

I have been doing a little book reading session for the last couple of weeks and used hashtags for couple of days to classify the twits.

Like your idea of #* for all reviews. Extending this idea can give us a whole little one letter taxonomy!

#$ - Finance
#? - question. will make hoosgot.com irrelevant
etc..

As an alternative for Twitterfeed why not look at Yahoo Pipes? From what I have seen it gives enough control to be able to filter the standard twitter RSS feeds.

Thoughts?

Posted by: Mahesh CR | January 06, 2008 at 10:49 AM

I love it! Let's publish a longer list, with #! for alerts, too.

One extra note: we actually ran with a similar setup to the one you are proposing from Jun-Nov. Basically anyone could friend @review, we'd friend back and then we'd collect all the reviews. But our user feedback was that they wanted their Twitter reviews associated to their specific LouderVoice account rather than being in a giant pool.

I'll see if we can get basic hashtags support in this week. The only tiny drawback is that #'s are used for channels on Jaiku so we may go with a slight variation for that platform.

Posted by: Conor O'Neill | January 06, 2008 at 10:52 AM

Will stay tuned.

I'm kinda suprised you did not see LouderVoice running at Reboot 9 because a few of the Irish participants were texting LouderMinis from Copenhagen. The integration with Twitter and Jaiku work really simply and reviews I make from the main website land on my Six Apart blog. In my opinion, if someone is going to duplicate the LouderVoice effort, you should try to raise the bar to incorporate other social media such as video or tagged images.

Posted by: Bernard Goldbach | January 06, 2008 at 01:52 PM

I didn't.

I have to admit I've ignored the hashtags thing, just because I never saw an explanation of what you were trying to accomplish (though I guessed pretty accurately).

I like this micro formatting idea, especially for reviews and other Tweets (perhaps #YVR - the three letter code for an airport - for updates that other travellers could use to warn them of congestion, etc.?)

I'll be following this discussion, and trying out a few reviews with #*.

Posted by: Eric Eggertson | January 06, 2008 at 07:31 PM

Hopefully, the www.hashtags.org guys will straighten things out and it will work, at some point.

Trying the "why not both?" idea, I started a tweet with both @twitcrit and #*. If it hadn't been for the Twitterfeed issues, everything would have worked perfectly. As it was, my tweet showed up at @twitcrit, hashtags.org, and Club 140, and it theoretically would have shown up at @hashstar if the technical issues could be resolved.

This illustrates an issue with multiple standards in general: namely, how can someone comply with multiple standards without breaking adherence to one of the standards? In this case, @twitcrit and #* are compatible with each other and can be used together, which is a good thing.

Posted by: Ontario Emperor | January 06, 2008 at 08:00 PM

LouderVoice support for hashtags in our mini-reviews on Twitter is now live. Example here. Pownce and Jaiku later today.

Posted by: Conor O'Neill | January 07, 2008 at 06:49 AM

Cool. Except I can't get it to work. Do the tags have to be at the end of the tweet? Bummer if so.

links for 2008-01-08

• Hotel Diva San Francisco
  Cool looking SF hotel
  (tags: hotel+diva san+francisco hotels travel)
• Raffaello Hotel Chicago
  Neat hotel in Chicago. I stayed there years ago while working on Digital Work.
  (tags: chicago raffaello+hotel hotels travel)

Two Surveys: Get Out Your No. 2 Pencils

Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen at AIIM Market Intelligence have announced that their Enterprise 2.0 Survey is up:

[from TakingAIIM: Enterprise 2.0 - Whaddya Think?]

[...]

AIIM Market Intelligence is undertaking a Market IQ study focused on Enterprise 2.0. Wanting to ensure we cover this topic from all perspectives and experiences we have assembled an advisory panel (press release) consisting of Andrew McAfee, David Weinberger, Patti Anklam, Stowe Boyd and Eric Tsui.

While the panel is a virtual brain trust in Enterprise 2.0, it does not provide the full 360 degree view we want to incorporate into our research. That is where YOU come in. We would like to hear about your opinions, experiences and perceptions concerning Enterprise 2.0. You can make them known to us by taking the AIIM Market IQ survey on Enterprise 2.0. (http://aiimmarketintelligence.questionpro.com/)

You have the opportunity in the survey to forward the survey to friends, which would be much appreciated. Speaking of appreciation, you may also select a charity (from list provided) to which we will make a $500 donation, on behalf of the survey participants, as well as request an early copy of the survey results.

Whaddyathink about participating?

Also was facebooked by Janna Anderson about a Pew study:

[via Facebook]

Stowe,

Hey, maybe you could help further the great cause of Internet research and take a break from Twittering for just a few moments...

I'd like to invite you to participate in an Internet research effort I just began in 2008 for Pew Internet. It asks people to think about how things will be in the year 2020. Take a look at the site and share your views if you'd like. If you think it is worthwhile, please also share the address with any of your friends who are knowledgeable about the Internet. Maybe you could Twitter it out there - that would be GREAT!

http://www.psra.com/experts

Thanks very much for considering this.
Best regards and Happy New Year!

Janna Anderson
www.psra.com
http://www.psra.com/experts

Word Of The Week: Video Snacking

With the bad weather yesterday, I became a 'video snacker' -- I was searching for short updates on the weather in video format. I fell right into the middle of a trend, even though I have functionally no recent history of TV watching. Still, I am intrigued with bite-sized video snacks, and after watching one or two about the weather, later in the day I sampled more on the Iowa Caucuses.

A runner-up to Word Of The Week: monumentous, referring to the Obama phenomenon.

links for 2008-01-05

• A Little 'Intel' on Apple's Next Move
  Arik Hesseldahl is betting against a touchscreen in the Mac ultracompact: "But will this new mini-MacBook also get a touch screen like the iPhone's? Perhaps, but probably not. The bigger the screen, the more it will cost. I think that means Apple will ski
  (tags: mac mac+ultraportable apple macworld)

Apple Tablet Laptop?

Apple Tablet Laptop - Macworld 2008 - MacBook Pro Plus - Steve Jobs - Popular Mechanics, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Glenn Derene has cobbled together a mockup for a Mac Tablet at Popular Mechanics. Wow. Takes the best for iPhone and Mac, and does magic with them:

[from Macworld 2008 Prediction: Apple's MacBook Plus Tablet Laptop]

[...]

I've worked with the Popular Mechanics design team to create the "MacBook Plus" computer of my dreams. It takes Apple's current technology, interface and design language—from iPhone to the latest Mac laptops—and uses them in a totally new hardware format. I'm guessing it would be pricey at, say, $3000, but that's only $200 more than the current top-of-the-line MacBook Pro, and I suspect Apple fanboys would cough up that kind of cash for something this slick.

I am holding out for an ultraportable, at the least. However, whatever they do, I hope it has enough video memory to drive my 30" monitor and 42" TV.

links for 2008-01-03

• Delicious Stumbles - Post to Delicious and StumbleUpon at the same time « // Internet Duct Tape
  A new hack for firefox to post to stumble upon and Del.icio.us at the same time.
  (tags: delicious+stumbles del.icio.us stumble+upon firefox hack)
• What to Expect at MacWorld - PaulStamatiou.com
  Yawn. The ultracompact is the only big news about to break.
  (tags: mac apple macworld announcements mac+ultracompact)
• Free WSJ.com Would Need 12x Traffic To Offset Loss; DJ Buy To Shave A Penny From NWS: Analyst
  WSJ probably can't make back the loss if it goes free.
  (tags: wall+street+journal wsj murdoch)
• Closet Assistant attempts easy Web wardrobe management, social networking for turtlenecks | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone
  You have got to be shitting me.
  (tags: closet+assistant social+networks wardrobe+management)
• Leveraging Ideas » Who’s Going to Buy Twitter?: Sam Huleatt - Social Media, Venture Capital and Startup Architecture Blog
  My partner at Workstreamr, Sam Huleatt, suggests that AOL should buy Twitter. That would be an plausible integration: Twitter with AIM.
  (tags: aim aol twitter sam+huleatt)

Twitter Graphs

Twitter Graphs, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I don't know exactly how to interpret these graphs, except for my inconstant use of Twitter.

Twitter's Business Model

Allen Stern wonders about the Twitter business model. Do they have a business model, he wonders? He points out that Twitterific is making money selling a client while Twitter -- who is managing the network -- is making bupkis.

Winer suggests that Twitter could offer a better client, and outflank Twitterific: Ok, but that might be small potatoes. If you are Ma Bell, selling phones is not the same as charging for access, though.

Calacanis makes the obvious riposte: in-stream advertising. No one is going to object to an occasional ad tweeting by, if the service is free.

Last, but not least, if third parties wanted to build other apps that use a twitter-esque social stream, they might make an agreement to reuse the twitter pathway. I have argued that common components of this type is the next step toward open standards in the social web (see The Architecture of Sociality: Building In Openness). As long as I could push stuff through the pipe, I would be willing to pay a per message bulk deal. And I believe that the notion of a common social stream -- being reused by many apps -- is a big chewy idea. However, it might be that the Twitter architecture is too limited for that. We will have to see.

World Wide Paperwork And Administrivia Day

Stephanie Booth and some other paperwork-challenged folks in Europe have designated today as WoWiPAD:

[from World Wide Paperwork and Administrivia Day (WoWiPAD) and Website Pro Day (WPD)]

[...]

So, another of these “get-together” initiatives I’m launching is the World Wide Paperwork and Administrivia Day, which we’ll call WoWiPAD from now on. Unless you’re super-organised or are already a GTD black belt, you probably have piles of receipts to sort, papers to file, expenses to invoice, forms to fill in, and various administrative things that just pile up and don’t get done, because, let’s face it, it’s way more fun to be earning $$ doing exciting stuff with clients than spending the day drowning in stuffy papers alone at one’s desk.

Obviously, we can’t really gather in one physical space for the WoWiPAD. No, you are not welcome to come to my place with your drawers, piles of papers, stapler — in short, your whole office. But what we can do, though, is decide on a date to do things together. Yes, just knowing that we’re not in this “alone” can be very supportive.

Whether you’re a freelancer, a small business owner, or just a somebody with stacks of paperwork to deal with on your desk, leave a comment here or sign up on Facebook if you’d like to participate in the WoWiPAD.

WorldBlu | Designing Democratic Organizations

A comment by Kareem Mayan on a recent post (see The Cult Of The CEO Gene) led me to Worldblu.com, which tracks the most democratic worklplaces. I like their design, too.

WorldBlu | Designing Democratic Organizations, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

They are currently reviewing companies for the 2008 list. According to Kareem, who is on their advisory board, the organization helps companies to make their workplaces more democratic.

WorldBlu | Designing Democratic Organizations, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

The Year Ahead: The Past Year As Context

I guess this is a combination of roadmap and resolutions for the new year. 2008 is upon us, or given the highly personal nature of this post, upon me.

Cyclic Time, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

It's Day One of 2008. I am sitting in my new office at 156 South Park (see New Office In South Park!), finishing up this prospectus for the year:

1. No Plastic -- after reading The World Without Us, I have been scared organic. I am putting saving the planet first on my list. So: no more plastic razors, plastic bags, plastic wrap, or plastic bottles.

   There is a floating mass of plastic in the Pacific -- a huge inorganic Sargasso sea or razors, bottle caps, and fish nets -- the size of Africa. LIterally billions of tons of plastic crap. I am going to do whatever I can to avoid contributing to it. [At the airport this morning, I went to Potbelly sandwiches for my take-on lunch, because they wrap in paper and use paper bags. Sandwich was good, too. Next: a Swiss wind-up razor. Uses no batteries or electricity, either!]
   

2. Less Writing, More Work -- For a number of reasons, I will be writing less this year, I bet. I quit the writing gig with Internet Evolution after a basic dispute about what is blogging and what isn't, but I am happy to not have the obligation.

   I am involved in a number of activities where I am acting as a founder and designer, coming full circle as a parallel entrepreneur. Over the course of the next few months I will be able to start disclosing what is going on in these activities, about which I have largely been silent. I will be writing more about my work -- especially these projects -- and less about other people's applications.

   Here's the rundown on what I will be working on in 2008:

   After amicably disengaging from Blue Whale Labs early in 2007, I returned to my solo consulting practice, renamed The /Messengers, and shifted my 'advisory capital' model of work into parallel entrepreneurialism. In essense, I have convinced people who initially wanted my consulting advice that we would all be better served if I were to become a partner in the envisioned product. When people disagreed, I generally fired them politely. (In a few cases, I have continued on in an advisory capacity, but not very many.)

   In most of these projects, I am the chief architect, designing the structure and moving parts of what I hope will be viewed as intuitive but powerful social applications.

   I have been able to write about the Open University Social:Learn project, at least a bit, but I haven't really detailed the application as currently designed. I am the chief designer of that social learning platform. I guess I will be spending time in Europe on this and other projects, which is likely to be as much as 2007: around three months.

   Social:Learn is based in part on design principles that are embodied in another project -- Workstreamr -- where I am also a founder, partner, and chief designer. It is my hope that these two applications -- and maybe others -- will share more than common design principles, but may in fact be the first two instances of applications that are sharing common components (as I described in a recent post, Social Architecture). I will be disclosing some key elements of the design for Workstreamr within the next month, I believe.

   I am also acting as the chief designer on another, unrelated social tool project that has yet to be announced, where once again, I am a co-founder: in this case, with some extremely accomplished and well-known partners. This is likely to be based in New York, as is Workstreamr, so I will be spending more time there than in recent years.

   Also, in 2007, I have become a member of the new advisory board at b5 media, and I will also be working with a new start-up in Europe as a board member and advisor, although that has yet to be announced. I am also an advisor to Going Far, Stephanie Booth's new media start-up (I supplied the name!), and a Boston-based social conference application start-up.

   I will be continuing my involvement with Rocco Pelligrinelli at Imaginventure, in Lugano Switzerland, advising on the direction of Playyoo, the mobile casual gaming platform, and on other projects.

   There are other discussions going on, with other groups, in particular, working with an innovative services firm on a new approach to helping entrepreneurs get new applications to market. More to follow as that firms up in the next weeks.

   Basically, I think I am maxed out, at least for the first half of the year, so, unless you have a hugely exciting opportunity, I am completely tapped out.
   

3. Less Theory, More Practice -- As a direct consequence of all these hands-on, highly involved projects, I will be (soon) able to speak about the thinking behind the applications I am designing, and use that to illuminate my thinking about social applications. In the past, I have critiqued others applications, alluding to all sorts of quasi-nebulous principles: like social scale, as in my recent finger wagging in response to the Google Reader sharing kerfuffle. Now I will be able to illuminate these ideas with actual applications I am involved in rolling out.
   
4. Social Work -- I have arranged a new office space at 156 South Park, and plan to do most of my work there, while in San Francisco. Formerly, I had an office at 625 2nd -- the Looksmart building -- but the place was loud and lacked ambient light. I really didn't like the feel, so I seldom went in during the last months. I worked in my teeny, tiny studio on Brannan, but, trust me, it's too small for that. I am moving my office junk -- printer, monitor, boxes of documents, #2 Xootr -- into South Park from my studio over the next few days. I am hoping that more people contact me to just have a chat in my digs, a coffee at El Centro, on the corner, or a glass of wine at Bacar or South. (This also means I will get back some space at the studio apartment, which is nice, too.)
   
5. Less Conferences, More Hanging Out -- I find the conference experience to be pretty tame, perhaps even lame. The same model of talking heads waving their arms around on the podium, powerpoints, blah blah blah style panel sessions.

   I intend to avoid most conferences, but I plan to set up more topic-focused salons when I wander around, and something regular in San Francisco. These will be small format get-togethers, a blend of invited and selected, mixing different sorts of people, never more than ten. Artists, designers, authors, musicians, and trouble-makers. I haven't figured out how to do this, but it will be a twisted blend of late night TV, a cocktail party, and an unconference. I am looking for sponsors, and I plan to videocast the outcome. And for some of them, I will be cooking the food, too. I will call this /Epicenter (www.stoweboyd.com/epicenter). More to follow, as it gains critical mass.

   You can be sure that the initial launch of the various applications I am working on will be premiered on /Epicenter, but I hope to reach way outside the familiar circle of the web, too, and wander off into architecture, design, music, sex, cognitive science, travel, history, fiction, wine, food: basically all my obsessions. And it won't be topical-focussed either, but more likely geolocal: when visiting Boston, London, or Munich, I will pull together some brilliant, funny, inquisitive and cantankerous people, mix it together with some food and wine, and see what happens. And then boil it down into a thirty minute something. Hang on to your hats.
   

6. Back To Martial Arts -- I have given my elbow and lower back two years to rest since the five and a half years I was working toward a black belt in Shito Ryu. My schedule -- and the relocation of the class -- makes it nearly impossible to attend the dojo in Virginia where I trained. I have decided to take up martial arts again. However, there is no Shito Ryu dojo in San Francisco. I am considering Aikido, and will be snooping around to find a teacher/dojo. In preparation, I am restarting karate-style physical training -- sit-ups and push-ups start again tomorrow -- so first step will be a health club that offers aikido and other martial arts based in SoMa. Watch /Ambivalence for more on that front.
   
7. Vacation -- I am going to program more vacation time into my life. In 2007, I sneaked a bunch of long weekends, and took the week 'off' between Xmas and New Year, but with my Dad's illness and recovery, it wasn't very restful.

   In 2008, I am planning to spend a month in Europe. Basic plan is to rent an apartment or house in Lisbon for a month, maybe make a few side trips. I will work in the mornings, and take the afternoons off.
   

8. Deferring The Book -- I had planned to spin a book out of the writing project at Internet Evolution, but I have scotched that arrangement. Given all the urgency of various projects, I am going to put the book on hold. Maybe in 2009, when the various apps I am working on have launched, and I can use their design as at least part of what I want to write about, my Social Revolution may come into existence.

I'm Being Stalked By Amanda Chapel

Facebook | Message: with all due respect, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Yikes. My dissing of Chip Griffin on the 'Social Media Rulebook' nonsense has brought a hyena lusting for flesh after me -- Amanda Chapel -- because of the scent of blood in the air.

"She" said:

With All Due Respect

What makes a "Stowe Boyd" any less of a "sock puppet" that an "Amanda Chapel"? You think the fact that you were named is somehow more legitimate/credible than someone who chose a name for themselves?

C'mon Stowe. You can argue better than that. I know you can.

- Amanda

PS I wasn't 'named' Stowe Boyd: it's a legal alias, now on my passport.

Why I Enjoy Flickr

Why I Enjoy Flickr, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Flickr is persistently fun, and a really great ongoing conversation on my 'life as a photostream.' Here's some recent activity: people commenting, favoriting pictures, adding tags.

Murmurs from WeFeelFine.org

WeFeelFine.org is super cool. Based on pulling text strings from the web that start with 'I feel'. This is the 'murmurs' view. Designed by Jonathan Harris.

[from Murmurs, below]

I feel around there you are cool these engines calm these jets I ask you how hot can it get and as you wipe off beads of sweat slowly you say I'm not there yet.

wefeelfine - murmurs
Originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd

[Update - what I thought was spontaneous poetry was lyrics from a Maroon 5 song, Secret Lyrics. Oh well, still nice.]

AIIM Market IQ On Enterprise 2.0 Survey

Dan Kneldsen at AIIM asked me to join a group he was putting together to join with him, Carl Frappaolo, and some others think deeply about Enterprise 2.0. They have blown the trumpets, and announced this advisory panel -- Da Da Da Daaa!!! -- like a Cecil B. DeMille movie. However, it is a group of smart people, so I can forgive the overblown hyperbole about how distinguished we are:

Enterprise 2.0 in 2008 - Announcing our Advisory Panel by Dan Kneldsen]

AIIM Assembles Industry Brain Trust as Advisers for Focus on Enterprise 2.0

AIIM - The ECM Association
12/18/2007

Silver Spring, MD - December 18, 2007 - The AIIM Market Intelligence group has assembled an advisory panel consisting of some of the industry's foremost thinkers on Enterprise 2.0.

The panel is a veritable "Who's who" consisting of:

• Andrew McAfee, Harvard Business School professor credited with coining the term Enterprise 2.0 in 2006;
• David Weinberger, Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, a co-author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" and author of "Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder";
• Stowe Boyd, industry consultant, prolific blogger, speaker and coiner of the term "social software"; [Actually, I coined 'social tools', Dan. Clay Shirky was the popularizer, if not inventor, of the 'social software' term. But I am cited in the Wikipedia entry for 'social software' so that's somewhat close.]
• Patti Anklam, knowledge management consultant and author of Net Work;
• Eric Tsui, Professor of Knowledge Management at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and also ex-Chief Research Officer, Asia Pacific, Computer Sciences Corporation.

Dan and Carl are conducting a market survey on how Web 2.0 tools and thinking are permeating the enterprise with 50,000 AIIM members. Should be interesting to see the results.

Here's the schedule:

• AIIM Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 survey launches on January 7th, 2008.
• AIIM Enterprise 2.0 Certificate Training Program premiers at the 2008 AIIM International Exposition & Conference (Boston, MA on March 3, 2008).
• AIIM Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0 report available the end of March 2008.
• AIIM Market IQ Webinar on Enterprise 2.0, discussing the findings of the report, will be held on Thursday, March 27th, 2008.

Stay tuned to Dan's blog for updates.

links for 2007-12-19

• That Rulebook Thing - Media Bullseye
  Chip Griffin returns to the Social Tools Rulebook meme, but not adding very much to the rewarmed and dumb conventional wisdom he served up the first time.
  (tags: chip+griffin the+social+rules+rulebook social+media pr)

Open Web Awards: Voting Begins

Here are the first four categories for the Open Web Awards voting:

Category: Mainstream or Large Scale Network

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Category: Application or Widget

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Category: Social News or Social Bookmarking

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

Category: Social Search

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

We will be posting the remaining categories over the next few days, so stay tuned.

Hashtags.org

It looks like the Twitter #hashtags convention that Chris Messina and others-- including me -- have been pushing has been implemented by a group of developers (Eli, Neil, and Paul, Cody Marx Bailey and Aaron Farnham, thank you!). The site is up and running at hashtags.org.

You only need to do a few things for it to work:

1. Add @hashtags as a Twitter contact ('follow'), and they will reciprocate. They will then see all of your public Tweets.
2. Precede any tag you want to use with the hashmark character ('#').
3. They have ignored my multi word convention, where #san francisco# would be used, and have gone with the easier-to-implement but uglier-to-read approach of #san+francisco. I checked this out empirically, below.

You can search for tags at their site, and each tag has an RSS feed, so you can subscribe.

Edgeio Falls By The Wayside

Edgeio is closing its doors, after two years and who knows how much money spent.

As Mike Arrington, one of the founders, sums it up,

[...] although the service rolled out on schedule, the revenues didn’t come in and user/partner milestones weren’t met.

I am still intrigued with the concept, as I said when they launched (see Rob Hof on Edgeio): people simply post on their blog (or other website) that they have something for sale, and a service, like Edgeio, trolls through the RSS feeds, and pulls out things that are for sale.

I think that this is a case of being too ahead of the curve, since it requires people to know a lot about techie things like tags and RSS feeds. Plus, pulling something from a blog and reposting it elsewhere removes it from its innate social scale: the community of people who read the blog in the first place. It de-socializes the touch point, and makes it a flat mass market.

Might have been more interesting to allow some kind of widgets to be plugged into Edgeio-style posts, to support transactions, or Q&A about the goods. This could take place on the blog, as opposed to some other site.

On the other hand, Edgeio as a service embedded in social networks? I am sure we will see a lot of that. Things there are a lot more structured and explicitly social than the blogosphere. And it has a built-in social element too: who better to buy your second hand bike than people who know and trust you?

Open Web Awards - Vote for Your Favorite "Mainstream and Large Scale" Social Network

The Open Web Awards voting is now starting up, and our first category is the somewhat oddly named "Mainstream and Large Scale Social Network".

The nominees are below. On Sunday Dec 16th we close the voting, and the top three will be selected for the final round of voting, leading up to the Open Web Awards ceremonies on 10 January 2008.

Category: Mainstream and Large Scale Networks

Sponsors: Cohn & Wolfe PR & Mashable Web Poll by Vizu

links for 2007-12-07

• Techdirt: AT&T Does Nothing, Convinces Reporter It Has Now 'Opened' Its Network
  "you've been able to do that ever since they launched their GSM network years ago. Basically, absolutely nothing happened here except that AT&T's marketing crew declared that AT&T's network is now open, and convinced USA Today to report it as if it were a
  (tags: at&t open+cell+networks google)

Tripit Adds Calendar Subscription

A few months ago, when the TripIt social travel app was released, I reveiwed it in detail, with mostly positive observations. However, I pointed out a real problem:

Tripit is very neat, and (aside from various UI quibbles) is easy to use and ready to go... except for the real show stoppers: no RSS and no iCal subscriptions. But those should be easily added.

Well, they have countered at least one showstopper: iCal support. However, they managed to add another UI quibble while doing so: they buried the iCal link for the user in the tab for MyFriends. It turns out their is a contact entry for me in the MyFriends area. Hmmm. Shouldn't it be on the MyTrips canvas?

Once I figured that bit of arcana out out I added a new trip to test. I did this in the simplest way possible: by forwarding a Jetblue itinerary email to the service. TripIt neatly parses the email and creates a new trip entry. I love that feature!

The event immediately showed in the TripIt calendar subscribed to in iCal:






Now all I have to do is switch over to TripIt as my travel logistics calendar, and continue to use Dopplr as my Dopplr as my location calendar. Bit of a hassle, but the benefits of the two services seem to justify it.

At Last: Yahoo Messenger For Vista

Yahoo has announced the pre-beta release of the long, long, long awaited Yahoo Messenger for Vista, available tomorrow, 6 December 2007.

One of the reasons for the long delay -- I have been told on a few occasions over the past few months on deep background -- is that Yahoo encountered some pioneering issues with Vista's WPF, the new graphics subsystem for Vista.

The product has been completely redesigned to take advantage of Vista functionality throughout. Other features include these [from press release]:

• Organize your conversations into tabs, or drag and drop a tab out to create a new window
• Keep up with your favorite contacts by dragging them into the Windows Sidebar gadget
• Send enhanced emoticons that have some extra oomph
• Change the color of your IM windows with a built-in skin chooser. Go crazy with a different skin for every IM window
• Adjust the display size of your contacts with a handy slider
• Arrange your contact list into multiple columns just by resizing your window
• Send instant messages to your Yahoo! and Windows Live Messenger contacts
• Send files to friends as large as 2 GB
• Find contacts quickly with the contact search bar. Type in a few letters of the contact's name or ID and they'll come up in filtered results.
• As-you-type spell checker that's smart enough to know that "LOL" is not something to correct ;)
• Right-click anywhere at the top of the contact list to see the preferences menu

Sam Sethi On Oliver Starr's Blognation Open Letter

[via twitter]

direct from ssethi:

hope I can prove you very wrong aout blognation. Wish people would comment with all the facts

It looks to me like the chorus of voices on this meltdown -- like Debi Jones and Nicole Simon -- seem to corroborate Starr's accusations in large part.

Me.dium Integrates Jabber For Presence

Me.dium -- the co-browsing plugin -- has integrated Jabber's XCP technology.

Jabber has a tremendously scalable architecture for presence and messaging, so it's no surprise that Me.dium looked to them to help grow their own scalability around presence. Why not use it for messaging, too, though?

I have periodically tried to use me.dium, but the user experience -- based on a radar display metaphor -- doesn't work for me. Why not simply adopt a buddylist metaphor?

2007 Most Memorable New Product Launch Survey

I get a kick out of lumping all new products together in one survey: gear, foods, cosmetics... what stuck in people's heads?

[from Launch PR: 2007 Most Memorable New Product Launch Survey Released! press release]

1. Apple iPhone (37%)
2. Microsoft Windows Vista (26%)
3. Febreze Candles (14%)
4. Domino Oreo Dessert Pizza (10%)
5. alli Weight Loss Capsules (10%)
6. Oreo Cakesters (10%)
7. Diet Coke Plus (9%)
8. Subway Fresh Fit Meals (8%)
9. Motorola Razr2 (8%)
10. Listerine Whitening Quick Dissolving Strips (7%)

While the iPhone was one of the most buzzed-about items of the year, with over 231,667 iPhone related posts indexed in Technorati and 21.3 million search results in Google, 77% of survey respondents could still not remember and name a single product in the top 50 new products launched in 2007, including the iPhone.

Apple slams with the iPhone. I was amazed that Razr2 made the list, but I don't watch TV, which is where most of these products are pandered. Still, the fact that 77% couldn't come up with a single product launched in 2007 is a condemnation of crappy mass marketing.

Oliver Starr Quits Blognation, Says Sam Sethi Is Cheat And Liar

Oliver Starr is not my favorite person. In one of the many roles he has head in recent years, he attacked me personally -- seemed actually to threaten me in some vague, blackmailish way -- when I suggested that Guidewire, where was momentarily working, was going to have real difficulty selling expensive reports on the tech world (see The Guidewire Report: A Bit Old Media, Don't You Think?). It's truly one of the oddest comments I have ever received at /Message.

But Oliver's harangue -- copied on Techcrunch by Duncan Riley (Blognation Meltdown: Writers Never Paid, Promises Not Kept) -- beats that screed hands down.

Here Oliver is clearly trying to bring down Blognation as a company, if it is in fact a company at all, or just a façade wrapped around Sam Sethi's ego, as Starr suggests:

[...]

I think this whole Blognation scam is all about one thing; Sam Sethi’s ego. You got tweaked by Michael Arrington last year and now you’re hell bent on showing up at Le Web with a dozen bloggers to back you up; your triumphant return to the scene of your demise - that’s right, you’ll show Mike and Loic and the world that no one fucks with Sam Sethi. You’ll show them that you’ve built - in less than a year - a blogging empire with bloggers from all over the world reporting 24 hours a day on all the topics the tech world wants to read about. You’ll talk about your advertising play and your new media properties, you’ll boast about your wine cellar and the possibility of hiring some huge name bloggers to round out your team.

I’m sure this will be punctuated by haughty tweets with what you think are big-brained ideas - your obvious effort - to be one of those smart cool kids who launch companies like twitter or Wua.la. You’ll probably stay at a very nice hotel in Paris and encourage all your bloggers to do so too.

And to get them to do so you’ll have convinced each and every one of them to pull the funds from their own dwindling bank accounts because the funding is in… and only has to be held by the bank for just a few more days…

Yes, I’m sure that Paris will be triumphant for you except for one teeny, tiny, itsy, bitsy little detail. Trivial in your mind but oh so important in the real world. Your big return, your blogging network, the content in every post, and nearly everything you’ve said or written about Blognation; it’s all based upon lies…

And when that dirty truth leaks out - there won’t be anywhere on earth you can run where the truth won’t find you. (not to mention the lawsuits that are sure to follow close behind)

Sincerely,

Oliver Starr

If even one half of what Starr says is true, it is very dark days for Blognation indeed.

I have had some experience in the blog network arena, since I worked at Corante for several years, initially as a non-paid blogger -- we all were, in those odd days -- and later as a partner with the oh-so-powerful sounding title of President. However, there was very little to preside over. While we had a pile of blogs, 50 or more of them, only a handful drew any serious traffic, and many were outright dead. When I left, and shut down my blog there, Get Real, I was something like 15%-20% of the traffic of the whole company.

It's a slow process to drive traffic to a blog, even with the built-in amplification effects that come with cross-linking in a network. It took me more than nine months to get /Message back to where Get Real had been in terms of impacts and growing an active community of readers. During which I didn't make a nickel. Hell, I am still only making a few hundred dollars a month directly from /Message.

I wouldn't recommend that building a blogging network -- especially in the tech space -- is going to be a slam dunk. There are so many bright minds writing about tech, and so few with truly deep perspectives and true voice.

b5 Media has developed an alternative strategy -- I am a member of the advisory board -- which makes real sense. I have always believed that you can't create communities: you can only find and support existing communities. Jeremy Wright and his partners have over 290 blogs with over 10 million unique visitors per month, ranging over topics as broad as bass fishing and blogging, knitting and city-specific travel.

Any way, the professionalization and scaling of blogs is an iffy thing. It's not just a matter of rounding up a bunch of bigmouthed essayists. The world is full of them, as Oliver Starr demonstrates. Getting a sustainable business model working, including some sort of acceptable revenue share with aspiring pundits, is very dicey.

My sense is that Blognation has hit the classic service business start-up problem: fixed expenses and variable income. Solving that problem by not paying workers who expect -- and depend on -- a check every month leads to this sort of mess. We'll have to see if Sethi can salvage anything from this collision, but if Starr's declarations are supported by other authors it might be lights out at Blognation.

Gmail: AIM Integration

Google has finally rolled out the long awaited AIM integration into Gtalk, which also means it's become available in Gmail.

In the drop down menu under 'contacts', the option to sign in to AIM is now an option (for some at this point, rolling out to the entire community over time):

The first time through, you have to login to an existing AIM account, or create one:

Then, AIM buddies show in your Gmail contacts list with a tiny AIM icon:

I have only noticed one snag so far, based on next to no use: Feedcrier, the service I use that pushes RSS streams to me via AIM, seems to lose all its links though this latest connection. Here's an iChat and Gmail AIM chat, side by side. Note the links in the iChat in blue:

One headache so far. So I can't close iChat just yet. Anyway, I can access Gtalk chat through the iChat Jabber interface, so I am not really sure which mode I like better, anyway.

[Update: 5 Dec -- The world is getting around to fooling with Gmail's AIM integration, a day after me.

And, by the way, the new group chat feature doesn't work with AIM chats in Gtalk.

]

MizPee: Geolocational Service That Google Forgot... Or Did They?

Got pinged via email today about a new geolocational service -- MizPee -- which allows you to find a toilet relative to your location. Here, I have helped the universe by adding the Starbucks near my place in San Francisco, since it didn't show on the search. Likewise, the three restaurants nearest my house didn't either.

MizPee, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

There is supposedly a mobile app, or mobile web page, but when I typed my phone number in I a/ didn't have an option for Cingular, and b/ when I used AT&T (which owns Cingualr now), I got an error.

I logged in from my mobile directly -- using www.mizpee.com directly -- and it worked, although the Starbucks I entered wasn't available.

Hmm. Seems like an easy add-on for Google. So I did a search on Google maps just to check. I discovered a new feature of Google maps, called community feeds, and one of those was a mash-up of public toilets by Safe2Pee.org:

I think MizPee is going to have a hard time making a business out of something being mashed up inside of Google maps. I haven't tried the community feeds thing on the mobile Google maps, but I bet it's supported.

Visible Path Acquisition

I got an email from Lynda Radosevich at Visible Path today, indicating that the social networking concern is being acquired. Visible Path is a former client: I wrote for their Centrality blog for a year or so (I just looked and they still have me listed as the Editor, as well as being president of Corante... slightly out of date!).

I have long believed that their technology is not a product in and of itself, but more like a set of features that would make sense embedded in something larger, like a SalesForce.com. (Note: I don't know who the acquirer is, but Visible Path has developed an integration with Outlook and SalesForce.com.)

Lynda also said that the management in general would not be continuing on, just the technology team, so I guess CEO Antony Brydon and Lynda will be off doing new things, soon.

Old Media Types Wish "Citizen Journalism" Were Dead

I have never liked the term "citizen journalism." It makes blogging sound like a civic duty or something embedded in a political process. I have favored the term "artisan journalism" to suggest the true shit at work.

It's much more like the movement of artisan beer making -- which shook the world of beer production in the US in serious ways -- but did not put Budweiser out of business. If you want to drink swill, it's still available in every 7-11 in a America. However, if you want to drink high quality, local, and fresh beer or ale, it is now available in nearly every third tier burg in the US.

Artisan journalism -- like /Message, and a gazillion other blogs -- is not a replacement for the local newspaper or the tech trade mag: it is something else, entirely. However, just like the guy sitting at the counter at the 21st Amendment brew pub who is not buying Budweiser tonight, someone reading this is spending less time reading CIO.

Like artisan beer making, artisan journalism operates on a different scale. At /Message, I don't write about every last tech topic. I never write about security, for example, and I don't track Microsoft closely. That's the freedom of being an artisan: I can pick what I want to focus on.

However, an artisan can out-perform a larger enterprise in the areas of their focus and expertise. In my case, I could argue that more conventional tech pubs can't match my obsession with social applications.

I am even willing to grant that there is a role for more general pubs in a world where long-tail economics engendered by the Web foster the emergence of thousands of artisan experts, merrily typing all day long. What exactly it is remains to be seen, but it's possible.

Still, I am unsurprised that the old media types continue to slander artisan journalists:

[from Citizen journalism on its way out? by Leah McBride Mensching]

Citizen journalism is being hindered and may even be dying at the hands of citizens themselves, a growing number of media experts believe.

The fad journalism model is being brought down by poorly written and poorly presented content that is greatly inferior to content produced by experts, they say. To put it bluntly, if you need information on a subject, would you rather rely on the edited and proofread opinion of an expert, or the misspelled musings from some guy sitting in his basement?

Steve Boriss, associate director of the Center for the Application of Information Technology at Washington University in St. Louis announced on his blog Thursday that “citizen journalism is dead. Expert journalism is the future.”

Hmmm.

The article pokes at the corpses of a number of failed media attempts to harness "user generated content" -- another boneheaded term that I dislike -- as a way to butress up failing old media models. Now that they can't effectively exploit "indigenous content" -- the term I favor -- they pooh-pooh the whole exercise as a fad.

Meanwhile, we see the growing influence, if not outright dominance, of artisan journalism in tech and politics, and the collapse of newspapers and many magazine sectors.

So, I am all for the death of the term "citizen journalism" (and "user generated content", too, while we are at it), but to make the argument that the trend to artisanry is dead because these media tycoons can't make it work the way they want is nuts. It's like failing a test after reading the textbook and declaring that literacy isn't all it's made out to be.

The argument being made (by Steve Outing and others) is "quality matters". Who's arguing? But to declare that the only way to get quality is old-fashioned journalism is just plain wrong. These efforts failed because old media people don't understand the Web, or the long tail. There will be a lot more variability in quality, but there will still be excellence out there.

Not every brew pub will be producing super beer every day. But an environment where people are experimenting, and changing the rules of beer making, has led to much better beer everywhere. Even Budweiser is better now.

The survivors in the old media game will be those that learn from the artisans as fast as possible. And you don't learn by declaring it a fad.

[pointer from JD Lasica]

links for 2007-12-04

• Video: Blogs in Plain English | Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English
  3 minute video makes blogs easy to understand
  (tags: lee+lefevre common+craft blogging blogs blogs+in+plain+english)
• Web Worker Daily » Archive 7 Myths about the Internet «
  Fear not rationality.
  (tags: internet+is+evil)

MyOffice: Facebook Social Project Management

I discovered a Facebook app a few weeks ago called MyOffice, which provides a social project management capablity within Facebook.

Basically, you can define projects, which have tasks, events, discussions and files, and then you can invite other FB users to participate in obvious ways.

There is a global view, which shows a dashboard of all your projects. You can then select a single project to actually do work. Here you see a project I created called "Xmax". The overview tab presents a time-ordered list of project updates:

Clicking the Tasks tab leads to a list of tasks. Tasks can be assigned to others and assigned a date for completion.

Facebook | MyOffice, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

At the moment there is no way to track time spent on tasks, so MyOffice won't help in that regard.

I am a really big fan of blog-style social media as a major element of social project management. MyOffice is pretty rudimentary in that regard. MyOffice provides a project Discussion, where topics can have posts associated with them:

There is a neat Digg-like thumbs up/thumbs down capability, although I am not sure how relevant that is in small scale project teams. I would rather see a more standard post/comments capability. In fact, this for me is a show stopper.

The solution has a schedule, which consolidates dated tasks and other events -- meetings, milestones, deliverables, whatever:

Files can be uploaded and shared:

There is no versioning supported, so this is very basic.

All in all, a small, basic, free social project management system. In and of itself, I can't see it competing with Basecamp or Huddle, but for avid Facebook users it may prove useful for small teams.

The systems allows people to make projects public, and then others can browse them and join them. Seems a bit odd to me, but perhaps with better descriptions and search it would be useful in some way. I see the biggest use will be for the more standard private, 'by invitation only' projects.

Dopplr Tips

The Dopplr folks have an early release of a new feature supporting 'tips' on various cities. They have asked the group of early testers to not publish screenshots, which I am going along with.

The notion of Dopplr members providing travel tips on restaurants, hotels, and any other sort of public locale is a good one, and lines up with one of the directions for Dopplr that I outlined in my Building Social Applications workshop at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, recently.

The current user experience points where they are headed with tips. You create tip 'posts' associated with a city, that look like a structured blog post. You can tag these items (although the tags are not yet active for navigation), and you can create an entry, including a link to something, like a restaurant's website.

Obviously, there is a lot more to do:

• Searching for most 'tipped' -- what are the most popular? They have a 'Agree? Disagree?' feature, but they need a better display than just a list.
• There is no rating system? I guess, at first, the premise is that people will provide tips only for those things they realy like. What is I want to tip friends about a bad experience?
• Map integration -- Since I am providing the address, it should show on a map.

The direction is good, and I am sure they will roll out a richer experience before going live.

There is one clue of other work in progress, too, aside from the tips. One of the problems with Dopplr today is that it's notion of geolocational granularity is fixed, and binary. If you are visiting San Francisco, you are in San Francisco: period. On the finer-grained side, you can't be just in SoMa, or The Financial District. On the larger-grained side, the fact that Oakland and Palo Alto are relatively close is lost. However, in real life, both of these scales are important. In this release, I noticed Dopplr is highlighting that San Francisco is 'not far from' San Jose. Might be better to provide a list of other popular, nearby cities, but at least this is headed in the right direction.

links for 2007-12-03

• 02138 § Poking Facebook
  Pulling down Zuckerberg's pants
  (tags: facebook mark+zuckerberg 02138)
• The Jeff Pulver Blog: Embracing your “Life Major”
  Jeff talks about getting fired and recasting his life. Introduces the idea of a 'life major', a lifetime learning version of a 'calling'.
  (tags: jeff+pulver life+major)
• The FASTForward Blog » Serena has Adopted Facebook as Their Intranet: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary
  Bill Ives: "Serena is really replacing its existing intranet with Facebook as a front end linked to a low-cost content management system behind the firewall. "
  (tags: facebook intranet bill+ives)

Six Apart Dumps LiveJournal: What's Next, Vox?

Well, they are finally headed in the right direction: Six Apart has sold one of its inexhaustible supply of blogging soutions -- in this case LiveJournal:

[from Six Apart - News and Events: Six Apart Announces New Home for LiveJournal]

Six Apart, the world's leading independent blogging software and services company, today announced that SUP, an international media company, has acquired LiveJournal (LJ), the pioneer of social networking communities online used by millions of people around the world to connect through personal journals and topic-based communities. SUP has established an American company, LiveJournal, Inc., to manage and operate LiveJournal globally.

I never understood the acquisition in the first place, just like I never got the reasoning for building Vox, instead of building on Typepad or Movable Type.

This is promising: maybe they can focus on building some real innovation into their mainstream products, and do something materially constructive for their many eager customers.

Next, they should find someone in China to buy Vox, and then they can get down to business.

Webifying The Living Room

Fred Wilson must have been reading my mind. He wrote a post called Bringing The Web Into Our Living Room, which is exactly what I am doing in my Reston home.

I have a Mac Mini set up, right now, mostly for watching movies. I am going to buy a larger LCD TV on my next visit there, and I will have some good photos.

I actually have donated all the VHS to charity: I can't stand fooling with it any more.

Word Of The Day: Global Weirding

Thomas Friedman turned me on to a new term today:

[from The People We Have Been Waiting For - New York Times.

[...] sweet-sounding “global warming” doesn’t really capture what’s likely to happen. I prefer the term “global weirding,” coined by Hunter Lovins, co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, because the rise in average global temperature is going to lead to all sorts of crazy things — from hotter heat spells and droughts in some places, to colder cold spells and more violent storms, more intense flooding, forest fires and species loss in other places.

Yes, exactly.

And why the hell aren't people up in arms about the ecosphere going sideways? Why isn't there rioting in the streets, demanding that our governments actually step up and do something? Why are people so complacent?

Tom Peters, back in May of 2005, said that global warming was being badly marketed:

[from Issue Most Poorly Marketed?]

Why is an issue that is so grave and so real so poorly understood? Why has the issue of global warming been so poorly marketed? Why is the brand called "The Global Warming Catastrophe" such a weak brand?

Well, I think Global Weirding is a better brand.

Thomas Freidman -- in the same article today -- goes on to suggest that some people have stopped waiting for large centralized and powerful entities -- multi-national corporations, the governments, and other powerful agents -- and have decided to be the change we need in the world:

I got together with three engineering undergrads who helped launch the Vehicle Design Summit — a global, open-source, collaborative effort, managed by M.I.T. students, that has 25 college teams around the world, including in India and China, working together to build a plug-in electric hybrid within three years. Each team contributes a different set of parts or designs. I thought writing for my college newspaper was cool. These kids are building a hyper-efficient car, which, they hope, “will demonstrate a 95 percent reduction in embodied energy, materials and toxicity from cradle to cradle to grave” and provide “200 m.p.g. energy equivalency or better.” The Linux of cars!

They’re not waiting for G.M. Their goal, they explain on their Web site — vds.mit.edu — is “to identify the key characteristics of events like the race to the moon and then transpose this energy, passion, focus and urgency” on catalyzing a global team to build a clean car. I just love their tag line. It’s what gives me hope:

“We are the people we have been waiting for.”

This is exactly the sort of thing I have been talking about when I say that what is happening on the web -- web culture -- will have to be the path toward saving the world. We, the edglings, the denizens of the Web, we have to do it. Open source design for hyper efficient vehicles is just one such path, one instance of what we have got to do.

If we wait for the crowned heads to take action, the whole world might become an ecological cesspool. The US government can't even rebuild the levees in New Orleans (leaving aside for the moment whether we should or not), so we shouldn't look to them to save us when we are confronted with a situation a millions times more devastating.

Sarah Mines

Ian Forrester, a pal of mine at the BBC, alerted me to a new blog, written by Sarah Mines, ostensibly writing thoughts as she reads The Cluetrain Manifesto. Apparently that tactic is not working -- she's too busy -- but she did drop a couple of haunting aphorisms into the word salad there:

[from Reading the Cluetrain: Part 2

[...]

Learning to speak with a human voice is not a parlor trick. It can’t be “picked up” at some tony conference.

[...]

Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end. If their cultures end before the community begins, they will have no market.

If Sarah Mines learns to explore her own ideas a bit more deliberately, we could have a new true voice out there.

Tel Aviv Geek Dinner: 27 October 2007

The Facebook event for the upcoming Tel Aviv Geek Dinner is open to anybody who'd like to come. Lot of cool folks coming already, and I will get to meet Liad Agmon, from Semingo, the company that has asked me to visit. (Semingo is involved in some very interesting -- totally stealthy until now -- work in social search, and I am sticking my nose into it. More to follow.)

It's my first trip to Israel, and I will have a day off to lie at the beach and work on presentations for Berlin.

PS Similar geek dinners are being planned for Geneva (25 Oct), London (1 Nov), and soon, Berlin, since I will there for the Web 2.0 Expo (haven't picked a day, yet).

With Apologies To Henry David Thoreau

Beware of any undertaking that requires editing your Twitter stream.

Bubblicious?

Matt Stone and Matt Richtel turn their attention to the millions that Web start-ups are raising or receiving in acquisitions, and wonder if things are just a bit too bubblicious:

[from Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again - New York Times]

Internet companies with funny names, little revenue and few customers are commanding high prices. And investors, having seemingly forgotten the pain of the first dot-com bust, are displaying symptoms of the disorder known as irrational exuberance.

Consider Facebook, the popular but financially unproven social network, which is reportedly being valued by investors at up to $15 billion. That is nearly half the value of Yahoo, a company with 38 times the number of employees and, based on estimates of Facebook’s income, 32 times the revenue.

Google, which recently surged past $600 a share, is now worth more than I.B.M., a company with eight times the revenue.

More broadly, Internet start-ups are drawing investment based on their ability to build an audience, not bring in revenue — the very alchemy that many say led to the inflation and bursting of the dot-com bubble.

The surge in the perceived value of some start-ups has even surprised some entrepreneurs who are benefiting from it.

[...]

The trend is described as a return to madness (by skeptics) or as a rational approach to unlimited opportunities presented by the Internet (by true believers). Greed, fear and a desperate rush to pick the next big winner are all adding fuel to the fire that is Silicon Valley’s resurgence.

Well, well. But these investments are not an IPO frenzy, this is not taking widow-and-orphans' money from pension funds. This is largely venture money, money from weathly folks. They have to diversify their investments, and they are putting some of it in bets on the Web. With traditional media and traditional software plays in steep decline, what should they do? Sit it out?

And the competition between the Leviathans -- Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and the waning AOL -- is a battle for the future, not the past. It's not about last year's innovations executed more efficiently. It's Tomorrowland, and Jaiku, Twitter, and Facebook are enclaves of visionaries, inventing the future. That's what the Giants are after.

Tim O'Reilly is quoted in the article saying the bets being made are "irrational", and that "there are going to be a lot of people out of work again" when the bubble pops. Seems like Tim is speaking contrary to the themes of the Web 2.0 conference opening today, which is a co-production of his company. I spoke to him briefly last night at the opening of the new 1 Lombard St offices of O'Reilly Alphatech Ventures, in which O'Reilly Media is a partner, and which has investments in a batch of Web 2.0 start-ups like Tripit, Wesabe, and Satisfaction. I suppose his investments are bets, too, but I wonder if his partners at OATV consider them irrational?

And O'Reilly seems to be contradicting John Battelle, another co-producer of the conference, who wrote this in November 2005 for the New York Times, addressing the same bubblicious remarks two years earlier:

[from Building a Better Boom]

[...]

But regardless of all this déjà vu, we are not in a bubble. Instead we are witnessing the Web's second coming, and it's even got a name, "Web 2.0" - although exactly what that moniker stands for is the topic of debate in the technology industry. For most it signifies a new way of starting and running companies - with less capital, more focus on the customer and a far more open business model when it comes to working with others.

My sense is that it is not time to head for the hills, at least not quite yet. Battelle made the case that this boom is structurally different: new start-ups require less capital now to get their companies off the ground, it's not being fueled by IPOs, and we are building on a more stable platform of technology. Perhaps most importantly, there are more people on the Web everyday, doing more there than ever before.

While there are going to be busts to match the booms, and astronomical prices to buy tiny promising start-ups will continue to poke us in the eye, I think any short of shake out will not be driven by irrationality, but by a shortage of vision in the larger players. They look inside and see less innovation that outside. No surprise, when the entrepreneurs thrive externally and are naturally more risk oriented than those who plug along punching the clock at Consolidated Widgets, Inc.

The Bigs have a lot of chips to bet, and they are all eyeing the chips of their competitors. Sure, they could always sit out a few hands, but if they do, they may be looking at a single competitor with all the chips. So they stay in the game, and keep betting. It's not irrational, even though they are making big bets. They are playing for all the marbles, and the only other option is to quit.

A steep decline in the stock market, precipitated by the housing bust or people waking up to the costs of the bellicose global politics of Bush's White House, could send major ripples across the pond, puncturing the current status quo of tech's buying frenzy. Absolutely. But in the meantime, I bet they will continue to raise the ante.

Marcien Jenckes Out At AOL

Valleywag reports that Marcien Jenckes, the VP and General Manager of AIM at AOL, is out in the newest round of cuts.

Observing AOL these days is like watching a drunk fall down the stairs.

I still maintain that they should unbundle AIM -- the biggest asset they have, I think -- and spin it out with a small team focused on doing that well. Sure, continue to have all sorts of media and ad deals with the rest of AOL, but get rid of the bureaucratic cross-integration that ties AIM down, like Gulliver and the Lilliputians.

I have met a lot of smart people at AOL, but many are gone, and the culture is extremely inward focused, while the world outside is passing AOL by.

The acquisition of Userplane -- widely heralded as one the proofs that Jenckes was smart and moving AIM in the right direction -- was a good deal, but we haven't seen any real revolutionary stuff coming in AIM itself.

Twitter, Jaiku, and a rising tide of flow apps are taking the core principles of instant messaging and moving way beyond what AIM is focused on.

In this new world, instant messaging is a commodity, like landline telephone service when the cell phone explosion came along. AIM, with a foot in the world of communication and another in the world of media, is straddling, and may be loosing its balance.

Tim O'Reilly on Techmeme

Tim O'Reilly has a great post, finding a synthesis between Facebook app uptake, the recent Quant meltdown, and Techmeme piling on behavior. It is only the latter that I will touch on here:

[from Facebook, the Quant Fund Meltdown, and the Techmeme Leaderboard]

[...]

When reviewing the Techmeme leaderboard, and then bouncing from there over to Techmeme itself, I was struck by the fact that the surest way to stay up on the leaderboard is to make sure to comment on stories that are currently appearing on the front page of techmeme! This is a self-reinforcing system, where all of the major tech blogs end up covering the same stories. Yes, someone always breaks the news, but you see this amazing pile-on effect. I'm not sure it's healthy.

In thinking about the future of collective intelligence, we need to make sure that we not only think about systems that lead to convergence of opinion, but also ones that ensure divergence, and fresh inputs. The surest way I know to get this is not to pay attention to the breaking news in your own pond, but to find the next community over, and to create new cross connections. Once the connections are well established, move on.

[...]

One of the tensions we struggle with all the time is how much energy to put into following areas we've uncovered that are now well known, and how much to spend on exploring the unknown.

This observation has to be considered from both macro and micro perspectives:

• On the personal level, an individual only has to spend some amount of time wandering around the web, staying away from the groupthink that emerges at sites like Techmeme. This is one of the reasons I don't like sitting in an RSS reader, too: I want to travel the sidelinks, the trackback, and errant pointers that increase the incidence of bumping into something truly novel, or some new unique perspective.

  (It's a side note, but I was struck by Matt Biddulph's (from Dopplr) recent use of the term 'Coincidensity' to denote (I think) the fact that the likelihood of bumping into interesting people goes up as the people are closer together. I think I want to extend the term in this context, to assert that to increase the coincidensity of novel ideas bumping into you you have wander around to increase your chances.)
  

• On the social level, if people opt to game the system at Techmeme, and the system rewards that, you will see piling on. Sometimes piling makes sense -- as when some new shiny tool is released and everyone fools with it or opines about it. Other piling on behavior is linkbaiting: a half-baked observation couched in incendiary prose, leading to a bar fight. In the latter case, the tool maker should be interested in countering the likelihood that such behavior leads to uppage on the list. Digg spends a awful lot of time countering nefarious schemes, and ultimately, Gabe Rivera will have to decide how to shape the culture at Techmeme.

I recently agreed -- more or less -- with Jason Calacanis that Techmeme is reflective of the way popularity works in general, which is not "fair" in an egalitarian sense, but which works, more or less. At the same time, I lust for a lot more random input, and strongly suggest that people only treat Techmeme as one food group in a healthy web diet: go forage for more roughage out past the top 5000 tech blogs in the world, or read the stuff that's not on Techmeme today.

I personally hanker after the tool I designed for AOL -- a project that has been sidelined based on the politics and downsizinggoing on there. Nerdvana is an application that memetracks what your trusted sources are commenting on. I could care less about the opinions of many of the folks that are the in-crowd at Techmeme, while many of them are wonderful. And I trust a number of people who aren't included as sources there.

Anyone who is interested should ping me, because I would still like to build Nervana. It solves a real problem.

And it might take the pressure of Techmeme: in a world where people could balance the supposed wisdom of the technorati with the opinions of those they trust, the power of Techmeme -- if that's what it is -- would be diluted in a very grassroots and social way.

Tel Aviv Geek Dinner: 27 October 2007

The Facebook event for the upcoming Tel Aviv Geek Dinner is open to anybody who'd like to come. Lot of cool folks coming already, and I will get to meet Liad Agmon, from Semingo, the company that has asked me to visit. (Semingo is involved in some very interesting -- totally stealthy until now -- work in social search, and I am sticking my nose into it. More to follow.)

It's my first trip to Israel, and I will have a day off to lie at the beach and work on presentations for Berlin.

PS Similar geek dinners are being planned for Geneva (25 Oct), London (1 Nov), and soon Berlin (haven't picked a day, yet).

links for 2007-10-16

• Eye on Winer
  I discovered today that soemone maintains a blog called "Eye On Winer" which tracks Dave Winers many controversies. Wild.
  (tags: dave+winer eyeonwiner.org)
• Netscape Was Better As A Digg Clone: Viewers
  Duncan Riley reports that Netscape readership has dropped like a stone since they jettisoned Calacanis social news model, and went back to a -- gulp -- portal strategy.
  (tags: netscape aol digg duncan+riley)

LitLiberation

Another good cause for Blog Action Day:

[from LitLiberation: Scalable Education Revolution]

What is LitLiberation?

30% of rural children in developing countries aren’t enrolled in school. Let that soak in. For $17,000 — split among 10 friends at $1,700 each, for example — you can build a school with your names on it, immortalize your friendship, and give education to tens of thousands of children over decades.

LitLiberation is the largest online literacy experiment in history, redesigning fundraising as a competition with world-class prizes. You are part of the experiment.

Can we raise $1,000,000 from normal people in just four weeks? Many of the world’s top CEOs and bloggers think so.

We should be working hard to support literacy worldwide. Our only hope is an educated world population.

[pointer Brian Solis]

Blog Action Day: Save The Planet

I interrupt the usually unbroken stream of tech here to acknowledge Blog Action Day, and to present a few posts on the environment from my /Ambivalence blog, where I post about art, culture, and life:

Al Gore: Head Of The Gaia Government-In-Exile
Jamais Cascio on Solving the Climate Crisis
easyJet.com: Carbon Offset
George Soros

I also want to offer Stanley Kubrick's observation -- "If you can talk brilliantly about a problem, it can create the consoling illusion that it has been mastered." -- as a cautionary note about Al Gore's Peace Prize. Just because he suggests that we might just barely be able to avert disaster if everything swings together starting sometime last week, and so so in a carefully cadenced baritone, we can't afford complacency.

Turngin around global warming is the defining challenge of our time. Everything else is secondary. We should be in the streets, demanding that our government put aside the politics-as-usual, line item veto, who said what back when we invaded Iraq nonsense, and get down to governance. Or we will lose.

Google Calendar Tasks: Coming, But In What Form?

The anonymous but authoritative Google Calendar Guide announced on 5 October in the Google Calendar group that GCal will soon have a to do/task list feature:

[from Petition for a ToDo List - Feature Requests and Miscellaneous | Google Groups]

Hey everyone - thanks for the loud and very clear feedback on your desire for a to-do/task list feature. We're pretty passionate about to-do lists here as well, and we've got something in the works. Of course, we're working to add our special Google secret sauce to the to-do lists space (which can take some time to get right,) so we don't have something to announce just yet, but the entire team is listening to these threads closely.

Please be patient - we'll have more to talk about soon.

This is a fairly fast response to a 12 September user petition to get Google in gear on the need for this.

Here is a sketch of what I think Google should role out:

1. Task lists are like Calendars -- Should support creation of multiple named task lists, not just a single list, along the lines of multiple named calendars. Like calendars, these should be have public, shared, and private access settings.
2. Tasks should have a title, and optional fields: notes, status (incomplete, complete, etc.), time estimate, time actually spent, due date, URL, people associated with the task, etc.
3. Tasks can be assigned to or shared with others, and accepted or rejected (much like event invitations). Status information can be accessed when tasks are assigned or shared.
4. Tasks should be displayed on the calendar if a due date is assigned. (Note: would be better if due date was optionall a range, as in 'due this sometime next week'.)
5. Tasks should be taggable. The same tagspace should be shared with calendar entries (please add those). Ultimately, it would be good if there were in the same tagspace as Gmail (get rid of the 'labels' term).
6. Should be an export capability to get task information in Excel or .csv formats.
7. Should be able to link Gmail email to tasks from within Gmail. Likewise, should be a browser bookmarket to select any URL and associate with a task.
8. Views should allow for any combination of feilds with specific values and tags, such as "show all tasks due this week tagged 'Jones&co' assigned to 'Betty'".
9. Email, IM, and SMS alerts should be provided.
10. Full APIs so that external apps can play.

Just a stab, but Google should be able to this done quicker than most based on the technology already in GCal and GMail.

[pointer from Garrett Rogers]

links for 2007-10-15

• Facebook Has LinkedIn In Their Crosshairs
  Arrington discusses how Facebook is about make an endrun on Linkedin, based on the 'networking' option in the API. I sitll like 'It's Complicated'.
  (tags: facebook linkedin social+networks michael+arrington)
• My Rank is fading quickly, almost as quickly as Technorati itself | The Marketing Technology Blog
  Douglas Karr reads the eulogy for Technorati: a cancer metatasizes.
  (tags: techorati, douglas karr, old media metastasizes)

Twitter As PR

Well, it's not a surprise, that many people and companies have been using Twitter as more than the normal Twitter baseline to... do what exactly? What is the baseline use of Twitter, anyway?

Allen Stern seems to suggest that the give-and-take of conversation is the basic mode of Twitterizing, and that this mode can be easily coopted into broadcast:

[from When Does a Social Network Become a "Publicity Network"? | CenterNetworks - Social Media News, Opinions and Insights]

A social networking tool becomes a publicity tool when "I speak, you speak, I reply, you reply" becomes "I speak, you listen".

There seems to be a growing commercialism on Twitter. I have no problem with companies using the Twitter network to post updates about their service -- 'Our server is down; back up in a few hours' -- but hucksterism is different. If a broadcast PR model takes over, and fills the channel with spam, Twitter will be ruined.

What, More Rankings?

Arrington and Scoble are amassing lists (manually, of all things) of various blogs subscribers at Google Reader.

I am (momentarily) at 43.

Rubel points out (via Twitter) that as more stats of the old media crowd pour in, the 'pee wee league' bloggers will be pushed out. Steve also makes the sensible observation that the long tail will rapidly be discerned (surprise), and that it might be more interesting to verticalize blogs, instead of lumping them all together.

My take: it's just another go at the same thing. Yesterday we were talking about the meaningfulness of the the Techmeme Leaderboard, and Gabe scrambled to establish that that Top 100 List was legitimate, and the source of legitimacy is Google, leading to... another Top 100 List. Which will have more or less the same 100 sources on it.

Yawn.

Kevin Burton

[from Twitter]

Any significantly advanced technology is incomprehensible to VCs.

Dave Winer Doesn't Get Facebook

Dave Winer states that Facebook sucks:

[from Why Facebook sucks (Scripting News)]

[...]

It's another one of those user generated content things, only this time I'm building up an address book that I can look at, but can only do things with it that Facebook lets me do.

Why exactly do I need Facebook to get in between me and my address book?

I mean, I understand why they want me to tell them everyone I know, but how about letting me download a copy to my computer, so I can back it up, use it on my iPhone or Blackberry, bequeath it to my heirs, write a book about it, or give a copy to Google or Netflix or Yahoo, or you get the idea.

It's the last thing they don't want me to do, give a copy to a competitor of theirs. And they hope I won't notice that I'm doing all this work and not insisting on at least being their equal when it comes to my data.

Sometime in November Google is rumored to be revealing their answer to Facebook. Whatever it is it will surely have an API, and will allow Google apps to share the info, and it will, if it hopes to compete with Facebook, provide some access to this data to app developers. But the true measure of their gravitas will be whether they give full control of the user's data to the user. If they do that, no matter what's missing from their software, it won't suck. Permalink to this paragraph

Dave, you are really crazy if you think that Facebook is a big address book. That's like Ted Stevens saying the Internet was a big bunch of tubes.

As I recently noted in a post responding to Christine Rosen's mealy-mouthed negativism about Facebook (see Christine Rosen on Virtual Friendships and The New Narcissism), people don't grasp Facebook by peering at it from afar. But even though she isn't for it, and doesn't grok, she at least knew that it was about friendship, connectedness, and a sense of belonging,: not a phonebook.

[from Christine Rosen on Virtual Friendships and The New Narcissism]

[...]

And of course we can't expect Rosen -- who is naysayer, albeit well-meaning -- to gain a personal sense of involvement by taking off her shoes, rolling up her pant legs, and to wade out into the flow. Too cold! Too wet! Too many risks!

Online interaction is increasingly a flow of small touches, brief quips, recommendations, updates, and inquiries. I maintain that you can't analyze your way to understanding how it all works, anymore than you can master the piano or martial arts analytically. You have to wade in it, maybe even wallow in it, to get it.

But those who live in a world of thought and will, who analyze their way through everything, are generally reluctant to wade in the water. It's easier to sit on the bank, telling stories of all those who skinned their shins on a rock, stepped on a frog, lost their way, slipped and drowned.

Yes, there are risks involved. Yes, people do jump headfirst into the shallows, and break their necks. And that may be enough to keep a lot of people out of the flow. But not the rest of us. Some of us live more through the skin than the brain, are pulled more than pushed, are more curious than cautious. It takes all kinds to keep it rich, even the reluctant and risk-averse.

Hey, Christine! Come on in. The water's fine.

Hey, Dave! Come on in. The water's fine.

Update 12:40pm 14 Oct -- After reading my post, Dave Winer offered this via Twitter:

Stowe Boyd is a creep. I've been wanting to say that for quite a long time. Now I have. Onward. 25 minutes ago from web

Stowe Boyd is just the kind of idiot who parades his idiocy around by saying other people "don't get" something, when he "gets" nothing. 17 minutes ago from web

To which I twittered:

@davewiner - Thanks Dave. Nice. Tasteful. I feel that you don't get it, but I wasn't attacking your character or intelligence. Pretty low. 10 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to davewiner

I guess I join the club of people publicly savaged by Dave Winer. Hey, Jason make room! 10 minutes ago from twitterrific

So much for a discourse based on ideas. It's particularly interesting how Dave wants to snipe at me in Twitter, and then states 'onward', like he's over it. Then he goes on to continue his personal attack.

Didn't he start his linkbaiting with an inflammatory title, Why Facebook Sucks? He has to expect that someone is going to call him on it, since there are 40M+ users doing things on Facebook, and its not principally being used as a Rolodex, people.

Snap! LinkedIn is Not A Social Network?

Marshall Kirkpatrick is pulling pants down again, and after panning the LinkedIn decision to be a closed platform, he bitchslaps Dan Nye, CEO, and Facebookers, too:

[from LinkedIn Platform to Be a Closed One]

[...]

It's Not a Social Network!

Nye also told the Times that LinkedIn doesn't consider itself a social network, either. That's funny, that's what Facebook loudly insisted on to its developers pre-platform launch, too. They weren't allowed to mention MySpace or the phrase social networking in their PR. Facebook is a social utility - they insisted. That was an eye-roller at the time and sounds even sillier now.

We'll see what the LinkedIn platform looks like when the rubber finally hits the road, but when it happens - don't quit your day job to be a LinkedIn app developer.

Looks like Facebook is winning with the 'Social Graph' meme (which is dumb), but at least they are willing to admit it is largely synonymous with Social Network.

Reminds me of Jonathan Miller's sidestepping of ethnic typecasting when he said, " I'm not a Jew. I'm Jewish. I don't go the whole hog." [As reported by Steven Pinker in The Stuff Of Thought]

Maybe sidestepping the social networking term has some marketing purpose, but it seems like nonsense to me.

Calacanis on Gaming Techmeme

Jason does not equivocate: "Techmeme is brilliant," he states.

And I agree with him. Techmeme is a great site, and the model of memetracking that Gabe Rivera has implemented has great social dynamics which yields very interesting patterns of interaction, and makes for a good reading experience.

Jason's arguments for Techmeme, however, are a bit convoluted at times:

[from Why TechMeme is great and the haters hate (the *official*, 100% approved, final word on TechMeme)]

[...]

In the real world some folks get too much attention relative to their ideas, while others with great ideas sometimes get marginalized. The marginalization could be based on them not being popular, their inability to communicate, or any number of reasons--fair and unfair.

At a party you might have a large group of folks around someone listening to their stories for any number of reasons. Perhaps the person is great story teller or really intelligent. Perhaps they're rich or powerful, or maybe they're really good looking.

Is this fair to the ugly duckling in the corner of the room who has a good story to share that they are ignored? Of course not, but TechMeme releases so many of those biases that exist in the real world! Many of the folks on TechMeme have never meet each other.... in fact, many of the folks I know in the industry I found because of TechMeme.

Jason seems to be saying that life is unfair, and that popularity plays a big part in who gets how much air time in social groups: absolutely true. So, many people who have good things to say get less time to speak because those with higher status have a socially defined 'right' to more airtime.

Rivera hasn't invented these biases, he has just emulated them in the ranking system within Techmeme. So, the assertion goes, he is not doing evil by merely reflecting the systems that we all live in. And I buy that, since people can become prominent through the system, as well: so long as they are invited to the party in the first place.

As Jason notes in his post, anyone can get to the top of the homepage with a well-written (or linkbait dripping) post, and so it is (relatively) open.

An apparently negative take on this is that Techmeme represents a game, with certain implicit and explicit rules, and those that choose to apply themselves to the game with intelligence will find a way to 'win' the game. Jason implicitly suggests the point of Techmeme is to get a story to the top, or to get onto and rise to the top of the Leaderboard. (Jason is such a naturally gifted striver and climber that he doesn't even think to reflect on that.)

My agreement with all of this comes down to pragmatics: we are social animals, and this is how we perceive the world. We can't concoct some sort of social revolution that will rewire this part of our minds, and thereby achieve perfect egalitarianism, even if such a thing makes sense (and I am uncertain as to whether it does, anyway). What we are left with is what we have, and it seems to work reasonably well in general.

I also agree that there are some people who are bitter about the way the world works, who believe that the inequities of the power laws within social systems can be overturned, like the effort to legislate that Pi sould be rounded to 3.

Techmeme is a microcosm of the larger world: a true high fidelity fractal of that greater context. While that does not exonerate the participants from its shortcomings, it's easy enough to just not come at all. There are other ways to keep up with tech news, or to participate in the community. This isn't a kindergarten, after all, where we need protection. And I don't agree with some that it's an old boys club, excluding the worthy in favor of the privileged.

Those Spiking Feedburner Stats: Not A Bug After All

[from a comments on post "Activeweave Stickis"]

Hi Stowe, Marc Meyer, CEO of Activeweave, here.

First, it's really Activeweave BlogRovR, not Stickis (which is smaller), which accounts for your subscriber growth. We're contacting feedburner now to change the product name they report.

You and I chatted awhile back and I mentioned we were adding you to our technology bundle of blogs, remember? So what happens is that as we acquire users, which is happening at a great clip, they're offered the chance to subscribe to pre-selected bundles of blogs in a variety of categories and shown blogs in the bundle. Many choose to take the default subscriptions in tech, and these get subscribed to /Message.

BlogRovR isn't intended to replace a feed reader, but to complement feed reading activity. When a RovR user subscribed to /Message visits something on the web which you've blogged about, they'll see a summary of your post and can also go to your blog with a single click.

For example, if they visit Paul Graham's blog post about living in a startup hub, they'll see a summary of what you've written about it and can visit your blog from there. They'll even see your post it if they visit say TC and he's written about the Graham post.

They can of course also use their BlogRovR homepage as a jumping off point to your blog too.

Lastly, it would seem that we may have NOT reported our numbers for awhile after we added you, accounting for the sudden jump when we did start to report them. There ought to have been a more gradual trailing up.

Ping me if you have any further questions, and we'll figure out the Stickis vs. BlogRovR reporting issue on our end. Also, try BlogRovR again and let us know your thoughts.

Whoops. I had completely forgotten the call with Marc, since I have agreed to a number of reposting or listing relationships.

But it's nice to know that the recent growth in RSS subscriptions (11,626 this morning, averaging 230+ new subscriptions per day) is not a bug, but something real, even if it is kind of a slamdunk by Marc's company. I am not complaining.

Christine Rosen on Virtual Friendships And The New Narcissism

Christine Rosen does a pretty good job of cataloging all the shadows in the brightly lit world of social networking. Her conclusion makes her case pretty well:

[from The New Atlantis - Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism by Christine Rosen]

These virtual networks greatly expand our opportunities to meet others, but they might also result in our valuing less the capacity for genuine connection. As the young woman writing in the Times admitted, “I consistently trade actual human contact for the more reliable high of smiles on MySpace, winks on Match.com, and pokes on Facebook.” That she finds these online relationships more reliable is telling: it shows a desire to avoid the vulnerability and uncertainty that true friendship entails. Real intimacy requires risk—the risk of disapproval, of heartache, of being thought a fool. Social networking websites may make relationships more reliable, but whether those relationships can be humanly satisfying remains to be seen.

There are myriad pitfalls in this open village, many of which she details:

1. break-ups are announced online by the jilted ex, leaving the other feeling exposed,
2. people can become entranced with the interactivity, and come to believe that have to remain connected at all times or they will miss something,
3. and by identifying themselves through lists of stuff -- music owned, books read, places visited, groups joined, people friended -- users can appear like magpies hoarding shiny bits of trash.

But these perceptions are largely the result of dissonance between the observers' esthetics and ethos and those that are emerging online.

Rosen and the many others of her ilk -- she quotes Michael Kinsley, who wrote in Slate that these online spaces are “vast celebrations of solipsism" -- begin with a well-articulated revulsion about the whole sticky mess, and then move on into claims of illegitimacy, in essence.

She throws a few barbed metaphors our way -- perhaps online networking is like the elaborate portraiture of the gilded age, perhaps it is unformed juveniles wallowing in their "protean selves", perhaps it's just an unwillingness to take on the risks of "real intimacy" -- all aligned to discredit the core experience of online involvement.

To indulge in a few unsupportable analogies myself, I could suggest (only to discredit her logic, mind) that because real-world friends sometime lie and hurt us, then friendship as an institution is questionable. Because students can become concerned with social status in schools, then schools should be disbanded, and all children should be home schooled. Some people become addicted to texting, so we should outlaw it. Since involvement in organized religion can lead to a decrease in non-religious activities, organized religion is basically negative. If you follow this course of reasoning, which is basically the sum of all fears, you are soon left with nothing.

Whenever people become involved in something, they leave something else behind. As people move online, hanging out with people there, they will spend less time hanging out with people in their physical neighborhoods. We know that as people spend more time online, there are spending less time watching television: a direct correlation. Is Rosen advocating that people should go back to watching more sitcoms?

No, this is another hidden call to a return to a mythical, fallen Golden Age, an echo in the minds of a leading sect of philosophers and pundits. We are clearly falling into a new dark age, they seem to say. We are losing touch with the old verities that underlie the 20th Century's bourgeois middle-class dreamtime, a way of life that involves consumerism, unconcern for the world as a whole, and a willingness to live in the small, through the nuclear family and a rigid allegiance to company, tribe, class, nation, religion. But it felt cozy to many, even though it alienated the rest.

Not all that move online for connection are consciously rejecting the inadequacy of industrial norms, but that is the undercurrent. We know it is not enough to chat with the same twenty people we work with, or the people we physically interact with every day. There is a larger world out there, and there is more in it than old school interaction can bring us.

David Weinberger introduced the term "continuous partial friendship" (derived from Linda Stone's derisive "continuous partial attention") as a way to indicate the looseness, but realness, of online connection. It may seem to be less, since it is partial, but the reality is that all friendship is discontinuous, even the realest of meatworld relationships. It is a matter only of scale. And I maintain that it is these tools that will allow us to scale friendship in new dimensions.

Leisa Reichelt writes of "ambient intimacy", a lovely and evocative term, that suggests that what we are gaining is a return to something lost: that third space -- neither home nor work -- where we can interact in a relaxed, egalitarian, and open way, with people from extremely different walks of life. This is not a portrait gallery, as Rosen asserts, but the corner cafe, or a pub, or playing checkers on the cracker barrel at the country store.

And of course we can't expect Rosen -- who is naysayer, albeit well-meaning -- to gain a personal sense of involvement by taking off her shoes, rolling up her pant legs, and to wade out into the flow. Too cold! Too wet! Too many risks!

Online interaction is increasingly a flow of small touches, brief quips, recommendations, updates, and inquiries. I maintain that you can't analyze your way to understanding how it all works, anymore than you can master the piano or martial arts analytically. You have to wade in it, maybe even wallow in it, to get it.

But those who live in a world of thought and will, who analyze their way through everything, are generally reluctant to wade in the water. It's easier to sit on the bank, telling stories of all those who skinned their shins on a rock, stepped on a frog, lost their way, slipped and drowned.

Yes, there are risks involved. Yes, people do jump headfirst into the shallows, and break their necks. And that may be enough to keep a lot of people out of the flow. But not the rest of us. Some of us live more through the skin than the brain, are pulled more than pushed, are more curious than cautious. It takes all kinds to keep it rich, even the reluctant and risk-averse.

Hey, Christine! Come on in. The water's fine.

[pointer from Basti Hirst]

Stanley Milgram

The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson. Often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act.

links for 2007-10-13

• The Next Social Network? It's Web 2.0, And It Knows Where You Are
  The world is catching up to the promises of presence. At long last.
  (tags: presence web+2.0 facebook tim+oreilly chris+messina)
• Silicon Alley Insider: Internet Recession Watch: Falling Ads, Taxes, Housing
  Uh-oh.
  (tags: the+quiet+crash internet+recession)
• Gore Wins Nobel Prize, High Court Gives It to Bush
  That would figure.
  (tags: al+gore nobel+peace+prize george+w+bush)

Eric Schmidt Is Another Bozo Using "Social Graph"

[from Google Gives Some Hints About Social Network Plan - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog by Miguel Helft]

[...]

Mr. Schmidt did say that over the next year, Google is planning to use information it has about the connections between its users, something techies call the “social graph,” to improve searches and other Google services. He said the company would like to sell advertising for Facebook, a position currently enjoyed by Microsoft. And he highlighted Google’s existing social network service, Orkut, and its deal to sell ads on behalf of MySpace, the largest social networking site.

Something techies -- who can't be bothered to ponder the term "Social Network" -- have started to use in an amazingly faddish way. It's a sign that you are with it if you talk about the social graph instead of old-fashioned social networks.

Actually, on a closer read, it's not clear that Schmidt used the term. It could be that Helft is the one that is trying to look cool, in which case I take it all back, Eric.

Internet Evolution

CMP has started a new collective blog at the new Internet Evolution, and asked me to get involved along with a roster of very, very interesting people, including these folks, and a long list of others:

1. Craig Newmark of Craigslist.com
2. John Grimes, CIO, U.S. Department of Defense, and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration
3. Philip Rosedale, CEO, Linden Lab
4. Ralph Szygenda, CIO, General Motors
5. Don Tapscott
6. Thomas Dolby
7. David Weinberger
8. Robert Scoble
9. Cory Doctorow

For some reason the Groucho Marx quip -- "I would never join a club that would have me as a member" -- comes to mind, although I really don't feel that way in this case. I have kicked off with the so aptly titled post, So This Guy Walks Into A Bar, And ..., where I deftly sidestep the reasons that CMP would ask me to be involved in the Internet Evolution project: I'm flattered, but baffled. However, I do divulge something, a project I have dreamed up. I plan to write a series over the next six months at Internet Evolution, leading -- I hope -- to a book. My working title is The Social Revolution: Why The New Web Matters, and my next post will be What's The Web Worth?. Stay tuned, Edglings: more to follow.

Activeweave Stickis

I don't really grasp Activeweave Stickis, but it has become the channel through with 7500+ are accessing /Message (according to Feedburner)?

And it is the inclusion of Activeweave's numbers in my Feedburner stats that accounts for the 6500+ jump I saw the other day (see The Tim O'Reily Effect).

I owuld love to have this explained to me.

links for 2007-10-12

• Facebook Reality Check: It's not worth $100B, and it won't crush MySpace or Google (but it does rock)
  Jason reins in the ballooning hyperbole about Facebook while praising it as the best SNA ever
  (tags: social+networks jason+calacanis facebook)
• Signing Up for a Gmail Account? Consider Google Apps Premier at Digital Inspiration - Software Reviews, Internet and Technology Guide
  If your hit the storage limit at Gmail, you can get 25G with Google Apps Premier
  (tags: google+apps+premier gmail pointer:cleverclogs)
• Product Review Palm Centro Cellphone - New York Times
  Pogue really likes the Palm Centro, and says that slimming it down in size and features works. And he coins a new word:"your thwackage may vary"
  (tags: david+pogue thwackage plam+centro, palm, centro)

What's Going On At Corante?

I haven't been very involved with Corante since my departure there in January of 2006. I know my old posts aren't some hallowed ground, but man the weeds are really bad there now. Either take the blog down, or clean out the spam, guys.

We Build Our Tools And They Shape Us: How Lifestreaming Is Shaping Web Culture

Aside from a reprise of my Building Social Applications workshop/seminar (new and updated), I am leading a session on Lifestreaming at the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin on 6 Nov at 9am.

My abstract:

New applications like Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, and Pownce have rapidly emerged as the leaders in the exploding lifestreaming niche. This networked form of communication has been compared to talking on a partyline, and the flow of updates, insights, and recommendations is having a big impact on how people perceive web sociality. What are the long-term impacts of this new medium on media, business, and society?

Got to put a lot more flesh on the bones. I will touch on Leisa Reichelt's Ambient Intimacy meme, which focuses on the nuances of streamed relationships, and David Weinberger's Continuous Partial Friendship insight. But I want to peel back the layers a bit more on this onion, and start to touch on workstreaming in earnest.

Cultural Dissonance

I have taken the DLD conference off my upcoming events. The request for me to speak has been withdrawn.

I have never attended the DLD conference, which is managed by Hubert Burda Media, a German publishing company I have had no contact with, so there is little social capital involved. But I think this is an interesting case in cultural dissonance: since this has occurred in the past few years with two European conferences. In both cases I was asked if I would like to speak, to which I responded, yes. And in those cases, subsequently, the offer was taken back. With apologies, etc., very politely. Nonetheless this has never happened in the US, where I have spoken countless times. Maybe it is some subtle interpretation of 'would' that I am missing, as in 'would you do this if we ask you to?' with emphasis on the if.

Or perhaps it is just a different model of developing conference programs. I have served on dozens of US program committees, and people are solicited for proposals, but once you accept them as speakers you do not reneg later.

Well, I am scaling way back on conferences in general, and I can happily forego yet another travel opportunity. But being called 'Steve' in the last email rankled more than being told there were far, far too many wonderful speakers vying to participate.

Still Looking For Typepad Template Hacker

I want to make some changes to my Typepad style sheets and templates. Last time I went down that rat hole (no offense, Six Apart) I barely got out alive.

Any designers/hackers out there interested -- I'm paying real money -- can contact me by leaving a comment on this post.

ooprint's Blogger Business Cards

I love it! Business cards with a tag cloud:

I don't think I am going to switch from Moo cards, but I like the ooprint designs, and the tag cloud could actually be helpful as a way to forestall that quintessential American cocktail party question, "What do you do?" (My usual answer, by the way, "As little as possible."). You could just hand the interrogator a card and let the tag cloud explain. Maybe I could craft a tag cloud, and get it on the back of my next batch of moo cards? Or maybe the design geniuses at moo will just offer this as a service. Or ooprint could start offering moo-sized cards with the tag cloud on the back? Looks like a looming global competition for the all-important technoid geek business card market!

links for 2007-10-11

• The Jeff Pulver Blog: Social Media / Internet Communication Trends: The Conversation
  Jeff Pulver makes the case for conversational marketing. IT's been said before, but this is short and sweet.
  (tags: conversational+marketing conversations jeff+pulver)
• I was having problems with Feedcrier. May have been related to FasterFox plugin for FireFox.
  I have removed the Fasterfox plugin. Seemed to be causing issues with Feedcrier and Adegga. Could be related to cacheing.
  (tags: fasterfox, firefox, feedcrier, adegga)
• Why to Move to a Startup Hub
  Paul Graham tells entrepreneurs to give it up and move to San Francisco.
  (tags: san+francisco paul+graham tech+epicenter vc)

Jott

Jott is a new phone service to allow you to send yourself -- or others -- reminders via email, or post to blogs or other services. Reminds me of Spinvox in that both must be using human being to do near-real time transcription. (Spinvocx is a service to which you can redirect voicemail, which is Spinvoxed, and shows up as email.)

One of the cool features is that you can Twitter or post to your blog using the service:

Steve Rubel twittered today that he believes Jott will get goobled by Google in the next two months. Perhaps.

At any rate, Jott is now a speed dial on my phone. What I would like is an integration with Remember The Milk. (Although stuff shoing up in my email is just one click away from being in RTM, anyway.)

<update> 16 Oct 2007

Got this clarification from Spinvox via email about the role of human beings in its transcription service:

Hi Stowe,

I’m Tony Carter and I work for SpinVox, and I read with interest your recent post on Jott, in which SpinVox was mentioned. I wanted to clarify a few things about the way messages are converted.

In your post, you suggested that both companies “must be using human beings to do near time real transcription.” While I can’t speak for Jott, I can tell you that as far as SpinVox is concerned, this is not an accurate statement.

SpinVox has developed a sophisticated learning system called the Voice Message Conversion System to carry out automatically the majority of conversions. When the system encounters a word or phrase its does not know or understand, it is able to refer to a human for assistance. The human then trains the system so that word or phrase becomes known to the VMCS for future use. In that way, the VMCS is constantly evolving and learning, increasing in accuracy and speed with each conversion.

But the main point is that while humans do help train the system, messages are converted by machines.

I was hoping you would consider posting a clarification or follow-up post on your blog so that your readers fully understand how the service works. We’d be happy to post a response, if you’d prefer it be addressed that way.

Thanks and please let me know if you have any questions.

Tony Carter

Public Relations Director - North America

SpinVox

</update>

Adegga Launches

My pal, Andre Ribeirinho and his team in Lisbon, have launched Adegga, a social wine discovery service.

Basically, its a social network about wine. You can talk about wine you have, want, have enjoyed, or lust after. Invite your friends and share your reviews. Will have an ecommerce business model, connecting people with twine sellers who actually have the wines they want.

(Now to go search for that wonderful Gala 1 from the Argentinian Bosca vineyard, or for some of that Esporao that Andre and I shared at SHiFT.)

Debate With Dave McClure On "Social Graph"

Teresa Valdez Klein set up and moderated a debate between Dave McClure, the man behind the Graphing Social Patterns conference this week, and me at the conference earlier this week.

.

Basically, I think it is a mistake to use the nonce term 'social graph' in place of 'social network' because it may cut the relationship with over 50 years of research and understanding that has been developed in Anthropology, Sociology, and Economics about social networks, and their role in society. No one has demonstrated any reason that 'social network' is inadequate.

The Downside Of Using Web Apps

links for 2007-10-08

• The Biggest Thing the Web Brings is Choice? What Does Choice Make Scarce? « SmoothSpan Blog
  Bob Warfield explores another scarcity metaphor. Hmmm. I wasn't saying that: I was making the argument for better tools, though.
  (tags: stephanie+booth bob+warfield economics+of+scarcity social+economics)
• A VC: Web Startups Are A Commodity
  What sort of Web will it be if we have tens of thousands of small apps acting as building blocks in a 'mosaic web'?
  (tags: mosaic+web fred+wilson paul+graham startups)

Anne Zelenka on The Connected Age

I am a big fan of Anne Zelenka, and I like much of what she is pushing at with her recent post, From The Information Age To The Connected Age at GigaOM. But some of the dots don't connect for me in the arguments about 'web work' replacing 'knowledge work.'

I can accept the knowledge work moniker -- which is, by the way, the 1959 coinage of Peter Drucker, which is generally lost in the sauce -- although it was relentlessly abused by the business book mavens of the '90s (like Davenport and Prusak) and the big N consulting firms (where N is some small positive integer). Knowledge work is basically getting paid to work without sweating. However, I don't buy into all of the distinctions she draws between knowledge work and the new web work:

[From The Information Age To The Connected Age]

Who Matters -- Ok, I agree with the top-down v bottom-up distinction. This is the rise of the Edglings, the fall of the Center, once again.

Style of Work -- project-driven task work versus bursty discontinuous work? Hmmm. I think this is really a transition from personal productivity to network productivity: webheads are willing to trade personal productivity to remain connected and to help others make headway. That makes things bursty, and involves more context switching, but is a better manifestation of network altruism that the tempo of the work.

Currency - I don't buy in on the attention-as-a-resource metaphor (as I have discussed at length elsewhere), first advanced by Herbert Simon, and now taken as a given. This is something like Freudian principles of the human psyche, which have become internalized through the endless chanting of popular culture; however there is no proof whatsoever of the existence of id, ego, superego, and so on. It's like witchcraft in a culture that believes in ghosts and spells. In general, people use attention as a shorthand for time, basically arguing that the pace of life has 'sped up' -- another metaphor. What this really means, I think, is a shared collective perception that our lives are busier than ever, meaning that we are working longer hours, or that the traditional divide between work and non-work has become blurred. But the latter is actually a return to the pre-industrial integrated notion of life, one that was put aside with the rise of industrialism. In non-industrial cultures, the line between work and play is pretty vague. For a lot of people who actually are unwilling to examine where they spend their time, really, the sense of being overly busy often translates into how much time they are spending commuting (which has gone up slightly in past decades), or watching television (which has fallen somewhat from it's peak of over 4 hours per day). This attention thing is strongly linked to the folk wisdom made popular by Alvin Toffler that we are being driven crazy by information overload, another metaphor gone mad. In a sense, this whole preoccupation with attention can be viewed as the war between contending media within ourselves. People externalize media choices as being something out there demanding our attention, when it could just as well be framed as individual and social choices we make. Metaphors matter, again.

The rest of her points are dead on, although I will quibble about one theme. Knowledge is an emergent property of social relationships. We are as smart as the conversations we have been involved in (David Weinberger, Gregory Bateson, et al). In a time when we can invest more and potentially get a greater return from our social relationships, we could simply state that we are made smarter because of those higher-order, more complex relationships.

Whatever way we want to compare work in the twilight of the industrial era ('the information age' we are leaving behind) with today's webbed world (the 'post-industrial economy' we are moving into), it's clear that the metric for measurement will be based on the connections we are making through and because of the Web.

I can't wait to read Anne's book. I am certain that it will be extremely rewarding and thought provoking.

Tim Bray

[from The Intimate Internet]

Techmeme is boring. The real news is elsewhere in places they're not looking.

links for 2007-10-07

• I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer | Science | The Guardian
  Mycoplasma laboratorium - first living thing with an artificial (human-made) chromosome.
  (tags: science biology craig+venter pointer:guy+kawasaki)
• The Fakebook Generation - New York Times
  Alice Mathias is ambivalent, ambiguous, and arch in her description of the motivations and meaning of Facebook.
  (tags: facebook alice+mathias social+networks)

Twitter in Facebook

Facebook | Stowe Boyd, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Why do I lose the name of the person I am messaging in Twitter when it is displayed in the Twitter Facebook app?

Stephanie Booth on Too Many People

Stephanie Booth's post on Too Many People is not about over-population: it's about over-connection. Or maybe connection burnout.

Stephanie sounds a bit world-weary, which is maybe one of the side effects of living in a stream with a gross of friends updating us every few minutes about their location, food habits, or minor annoyances. It like watching Koyaanisqatsi: both uplifting and frustrating at the same time.

(And her post comes at an interesting moment for me, since I just passed my 1,000th 'friend' at Facebook, which precipitated an experiment. I have 1,000 friends there, who knows how many reading my blogs, and hundreds reading my Twitter stream... but I can't seem to scare up a single person to have dinner with me tonight through these techniques (see Starving For Thai: Basil At 7:30pm 6 October -- and this tweet). Yes, of course, it might be that everyone knows I am just an offensive windbag, but I usually do pretty well the old fashioned way, emailing people. This is just a test of the emergency dining network.)

[from Too Many People]

We don’t tell some people certain things. We don’t mention that we’re meeting with Judy after lunch. We act a bit more distant with Tom than with Peter, hoping he’ll “get the message”. We tell Susie we’re too busy to see her, but drop everything when Mike invites us on a date.

Online, it’s even easier. We don’t respond to IMs or e-mails. We read certain blogs but not others. We chat absent-mindedly with Joe who is telling us his life-story, while we have a heart-to-heart discussion with Jack. We mark our status as DND but still respond to our best friend. We receive Twitter notifications on our phone from a select few, and keep a distracted eye on others’ updates. We lie more easily.

So, online, we actually have more freedom of movement (mainly because our emotional reactions are not so readily readable on the moment) to deal with some of these “awkward relationships” than offline — particularly, I would say, what I’d call the asymmetrical ones. From a networking point of view, being online is a huge advantage: the technology allows you to “stay in touch” with people who are geographically estranged from you, with a greater number of people than you could actually manage offline (”continuous partial friendship“), and it also allows you to keep in your network people who would probably not be in your offline circle, because it helps you tone down relationship awkwardness.

[...]

To some, maybe, I’m “just another fan” — that I can live with, even if nobody likes being “just another fan”. But does one have to make conversation and appreciate every reader of one’s blog? If you like somebody’s blog, does that automatically mean they’re going to like you? Find your presence or conversation interesting? The hard reality of celebrity and fandom, even micro, is that the answer is “no”. It doesn’t mean that as a fan, I’m not an interesting person in my own right. It doesn’t mean that if I got to spend enough time with the person I’m fan of, they wouldn’t appreciate my company and find it enriching. But the fact I’m a fan, or a reader, doesn’t earn me any rights.

And increasingly, I’ve noted over the four or five last conferences I attended that there seem to be more people who want to get to know me than people I want to get to know. Or people who are interested in me for business reasons, but of the type where they get something out of me, and I don’t get much out of them. Or people who have been reading my blog for ages and are happy to be able to talk to me, but I know nothing of them.

I’ve reached a point where I don’t want any more people. I can’t keep up with my people, to start with. I feel spread too thin. I want to deepen relationships, not collect superficial ones. Contacts are useful for business, and though I’ve said many a time that the line between business and personal is more and more blurred, business contacts do not have to become personal friends. I know there are lots of wonderful people out there I don’t know. Lots of wonderful people I’ve maybe brushed aside or pushed away when suffering from “people overload”, when all I want to do is climb into my cave and stay there.

Stephanie's 'spread too thin' comment reminded me of a line from The Lord Of The Rings, where Bilbo says to Gandalf "I feel thin, like butter spread over too much bread.' Had Stephanie been a bit more light-hearted about this, she might have taken the tone that Bilbo emplyed when he made his dramatic departure from his Hobbiton birthday party/farewell celebration: "I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."

Even at basic human scale, with a circle of friends bounded at Dunbar's Constant (good name for a bar, by the way) of 150 plus or minus, we can still like some more than others, be held in high or low regard among the group, lust for some, and be stalked by others. It's a mixed bag, a bagatelle.

With significantly more contacts there is a greater variability, and more turbulence in the flow. And the flow itself becomes a figure in the circle in a way, because it is so instumental. It takes on a character on its own, and like the third person in a conversation, it can act like a strange attractor, distorting or amplifying the chaos that we are trying so hard to make sense of.

But, I am an optimist and an advocate for social tools, so I look at the sunny side and see the chatter of a crowd of friends, but on a cloudy day it can seem like being pulled by a boisterous crowd at New Years in some direction you do not really want to go, or even the ravening of a faceless, keening mob.

We have to look to the tool makers to build in safeguards that promote human scale, that keep controls in our hands, that provide greater and greater nuance in online relationships. Otherwise, burnout, backlash, and bail-out is inevitable.

links for 2007-10-06

• Mac Mini to be replaced by Mac Nano? | Crave : The gadget blog
  Damn, I just bought a Mac Mini!
  (tags: mac mac+mini)

links for 2007-10-04

• Bubblewatch: The Industry Standard Is Coming Back - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog
  Does this augur a bubblicious economy? Brad Stowe thinks so: "As if we needed any more evidence that the bubble is back in Silicon Valley, technology media company IDG plans to revive that hallmark publication of the dot.com era, the Industry Standard."
  (tags: industry+standard bubblicious tech+scene)
• Silicon Alley Insider: TechCrunch to Sell to CNET for $100+ Million?
  The recent grumbles about Skype and MySpace overvaluations will soon be joined by CNet, who will say, years from now, "We paid $100M for this?"
  (tags: michael+arrington cnet techcrunch overvaluation bubblicious)
• The downside of Google's product development process: Google Notebook, Google Bookmarks, Google Share Stuff... ummmm which one should I use?!?!?
  Jason Calacani grips about three difference services at Google for sharing snippets and links.
  (tags: google google+share+stuff google+bookmarks google+notebook jason+calacanis)
• iPhone Revisited (Verdict: Don't Buy) - Gizmodo
  Gizmodo is thumbs down after the recent Apple firmware upgrade mess.
  (tags: iphone gizmodo iphone+firmware+mess)
• Micro Persuasion: Use Your Cameraphone as a Visual To Do List
  Steve does what I do: I take pictures of things as to-dos, like the window of a restaurant I want to try.
  (tags: cameraphone visual+todo+list)

links for 2007-10-03

• Joining ConceptShare at Will Pate
  Will Pate is joining Conceptshare as full-time evangelist. Great product, great team.
  (tags: will+pate conceptshare canada social+design)

Guy Kawaski on The Blogosphere

[from San Jose Mercury News - Venture funding: The stupidest idea ever]

I have a very low opinion of the blogosphere. I think it is made up of about 250,000 people who are mostly 45-year-old men who live with their mother and have dead cats in their refrigerators.

Why Me?

Is there some reason why I am getting this idiotic link exchange emails all of a sudden?

[via email]

Hi dear, blog owner or webmaster, i'm Quentin, i have a very special offer
your blog.

Review [blanked].com on your blog

All you need to do is; reviewing [blanked].com project; on your blog or web
site. You need to add a single post about [blanked].com. It can be your own
thought about [blanked] or you can use the text here ( http://www.[blanked].com/inc/
). And your post has to
include at least one link to http://www.[blanked].com. And then reply your
mail; including our post url on your blog, also your blog url and
information. That's all.
What will you get?
1 We will review your blog back at http://www.[otherblanked].com (PR2)
It belongs to one of a friend.
2 We will send you an invitation to join [blanked].com
About me;
I'm a moderator here at [blanked].com. I'm planning to generate good
relation-ships with World-Wide blog owners. This is one of the
oppurtunities.

Quentin Tarantula
Moderator at [blanked].com
Thank you very much!
Have a nice day!
http://www.[blanked].com

Yeah, have a nice day, Mr. Tarantula. This is a great way to generate good relationships with bloggers everywhere.

Steven Pinker

The goal of education is to make up for the shortcomings in our instinctive ways of thinking about the physical and social world.

From The Stuff Of Thought

links for 2007-09-14

• Silicon Alley Insider: Americans: TV Getting Worse, So We're Watching More
  "AOL and AP released a poll suggesting that 62% of Americans think TV programming is getting worse, but are still watching more. Over a quarter (27%) are watching at least 21 hours of television a week, with 13% saying they tune in more than 30 hours, up
  (tags: tv, aol, ap, television)
• CuteCircuit + The Hug Shirt
  "The Hug Shirt is a shirt that makes people send hugs over distance! Embedded in the shirt there are sensors that feel the strength of the touch, the skin warmth and the heartbeat rate of the sender and actuators that recreate the sensation of touch, warm
  (tags: hug shirt, bloothtooth, long distance love, time magazine, pointer:swiss+miss)
• Snitter: Snook's Twitter - Snook.ca
  Snitter is an Adobe AIR-based Twitter client.
  (tags: snitter twitter adobe adobe+air)

William Gibson

the street finds its own uses for things.

[Offered up by Anne Galloway as part of her disquisition on how we consider technology innovations to be inevitable, and through that we obscure our own agency in the process.]

Eons Lays Off 1/3 Of Staff

Right on the heels of all the prosy, rosy predictions of boomers and other older generations adopting social networking tools designed for their particular needs, we learn that Eons, a company devoted to folks 'on the flip side of 50', has laid of one third of its staff:

[from Xconomy � Blog Archive � Eons Announces Big Layoffs as Company Refocuses on Social Networking: “It Was Kind of Like Survivor.”]

[...]

Eons’ site right now has nine major categories: people, fun, love, money, body, lifepath, obits, games, and travel. According to the company and our source, it will no longer pursue areas like obits (offering online obits was a core premise of Eons at its founding) and travel, which are time consuming and costly to keep updated with fresh content. “Obits and travel, they’re just probably going to be spun off,” the source said. “They really need more investment, more concentrated focus.”

Going forward, Eons will focus on the community-building and social-networking aspects of the site, found mainly in its people section, which among other things hosts a collection of blogs and user groups dedicated to topics like games, romance, health, and investing. While Eons as a whole has been struggling, “The community is thriving,” our source says.

Having rasied $32M in venture funding, with $22M of that in March, Eons is well capitalized. The story offered -- that CEO Jeff Taylor is reducing staff as part of a refocussing of activities around social networking -- is plausible, so I believe that they are going to do that. Better than whatever alternatives they have, and after all, the New York Times said building social networks that target boomers and other age groups is a good thing, right? Well, I disagreed with the Times, and I maintain that this age-group oriented approach to social networking won't fly. Social networks aren't targets. This isn't only style point-and-shoot media, like rolling out a magazine in 1990. Social networking is about people's lives, not their purchasing habits. But people seem to beleive that this will just be something like selling Folgers, or denture cream. It isn't.

I don't buy the 'demographics is destiny' arguments, even if Eons has been able to raise $32M. I believe that some people in these various age groups will adopt social networking, but it will be based around passions -- like music, travel, politics, sports, and so on -- that are not age-specific, and you can't make them be. People will affiliate with others that share their passions, and artificial boundaries dreamed up by marketing research firms will fail, even if they sound meaningful to the partners of General Catalyst and Sequoia Capital. These 'Leisureworld' social networks will have to mutate into something more real -- and without really being tied to age at all -- or they will wind up in the dead pool.

links for 2007-09-13

• Social Graph: Concepts and Issues
  Alex Iskold does a good job summarizing a bunch of social network theory
  (tags: social+networks facebook mark+granovetter six+degrees+of+freedom)
• Simple Living Manifesto: 72 Ideas to Simplify Your Life | zen habits
  I am not trying to simplify my life, per se, but I find strange overlap with much of this, especially working so I can have time alone, small house, fewer appliances, and so on.
  (tags: pointer:swiss+miss zenhabot, simple life, simplify)
• Joho the Blog: Why Koreans blog
  "the leading reason (42%) Korean bloggers blog is "To create a record of my thoughts."" How unAmerican!
  (tags: blogging korea united+states pointer:david+weinberger)

Andrew Lark As Dell's New VP of Global Marketing & Communications

Wow. Big news from Andy:

[from Andrew Lark: The Larks Are On The Move]

Well, it’s been an interesting week! I spent Monday - my first day as Dell’s new VP of Global Marketing & Communications, at the launch of a new family of storage products targeted at the SMB market.

[...]

So what of Group Lark and my other interests. I don’t plan to miss a beat. The team at Group Lark will keep motoring along. And I’m as passionate as ever about my involvement with No.8 Ventures – New Zealand’s leading technology VC firm; my board position with Endace – perhaps New Zealand’s first crack at building our own Nokia; and my role in assisting with NZ start-ups and entrepreneurs through NZTE’s Beachhead program.

Some other questions I got over the past week. Will I stop or reduce my blogging? Never. In fact, I’m launching a new blog, The Daily Lark, next week with the help of the team at Marker. And, I look forward to participating in Dell’s blogging efforts. Are we moving to Austin? Yes, with great trepidation – we love Los Gatos.

I will miss you Andy, although I might see more of you in this role than the work you were doing with Log Logic.

Clay Shirky on Arrogance and Humility

I am enjoying aBriefMessage.com, where great minds explore design in 700 words or less. Clay Shirky wades in:

[from A Brief Message: Arrogance and Humility]

[...]

Arrogance without humility is a recipe for high-concept irrelevance; humility without arrogance guarantees unending mediocrity. Figuring out how to be arrogant and humble at once, figuring out when to watch users and when to ignore them for this particular problem, for these users, today, is the problem of the designer.

David Cushman on The Edgling Future

David Cushman does a masterful job of pulling together thoughts from Doc Searls, Alan Moore, David Reed, and, yes, yours truly, into a great post. One snippet:

[from Faster Future: Don't just witness the network. Be part of it]

[...]

What characterizes the new world we see emerging?

It is inhabited by what Alan Moore refers to as the We Species, what Stowe Boyd calls the Edglings. These people are nodes on the network. They are constantly connected to groups of their choosing and creation. They expect to co-create, rate, share, shape, design, engage - participate.

In this world there’s no need for mass media. Mass media is about the lowest common denominator – pleasing as many people as possible for as much of the time as possible.

But the possibilities are now much greater. Now there are tools available which allow anyone to please themselves – and their self-selecting groups of shared interest - all of the time.

Mass Media was always about offering you a load of content you didn’t want (literally in the case of magazines) stapled to content you did.

Where digital content applies, now the user can choose exactly the content they want, and only the content they want.

This disaggregation leads to one-to-one relationships between relevant content and relevant selling opportunity. Advertising is no longer about reaching the maximum number of any-old eyeballs. Now it is about reaching the optimum number of the exact right eyeballs. And if there’s no need for a mass audience for advertising eyeballs, what role is left for mass media?

Interruptive ads on TV aren’t working, we’ve stopped looking at the banner ads on websites and we tune away the moment an ad appears on radio - if we are still putting up with our listening choices being made centrally for us!

Now we are seeing that it’s more important to be famous for 15 people, than for 15 minutes.

[...]

There are new rules:

1. Serve the community first

2. Niche global NOT mass.

3. Two-way flows – NOT broadcast

4. Networks NOT Silos

5. Power of the node over power vested in hierarchies

6. Adhoc, self-forming communities over directed teams.

7. Persistent conversation trumps ‘capturing’ ID.

8. Real-time, niche-community-focused, user-generated information over News

9. We should all act as shared contributors to and users of common pool resources.

10. We should learn to cherish Group Forming Network Theory (Reed’s law).

Read it. Amen.

Kent Newsome on The Conventional Wisdom About Facebook

Kent, who is generally smart, goes off the tracks in response to the newest flap about Facebook costing corporations millions in lost productivity (see /Message: Facebook Is Bankrupting Our Business! Shut It Down! Shut It Down!). He suggests that I made a case for the use of Facebook as a corporate tool, which I didn't, at least not explicitly. Here's Kent:

[from Newsome.Org]

Stowe Boyd muses naively about Facebook as the big corporate business tool that it ain't. First of all, one look at just about anybody's Facebook page will tell you that unless you're selling beer, iPhones or webcams, there are better ponds to fish for customers. Secondly, I can think of very few reasons anyone in a real business setting needs to be farting around on Facebook all day, particularly those not in sales or marketing (the blogosphere seems to believe wrongly that 99% of the workforce is involved in one or the other). Finally, there's a troubling, though probably true in many cases, assumption that it's perfectly normal to use Facebook primarily to sell a bill of goods, so to speak, to your "friends." Poking for profit. Or something like that.

What I said was that corporations have a tendency to distrust new communication technologies when they appear. It has happened everytime: telephones, email, IM, the Web. Whatever. Corporate types resist the adoption of these technologies, and then, subsequent embrace them.

Individuals, notably, adopt them for their own purposes. This is the Social = Me First meme, I have spoken on widely. The gist of the idea is that people adopt social tools, initially, for some highly personal reasons, but stick with them for the social connectedness that they gain from them. This is because people can only discover themselves, can only realize their potential, through relatedness with others.

Important to the corporation is the degree to which our striving for personal awareness and self-discover overlaps with business goals. It is only the most narrow-mind and short-sighted of management that actively ignores the primary motivations of human apsiration. Anything like enlightened management will actively support personal development to the degree that it does nothing destructive, and it should, within limits, be willing to bear the apparent costs incurred. This is why companies allow employees to make personal phone calls, why they underwrite education and training, and invest to create pleasant environments. These costs are real, but accepted.

In the specific case, people adopt Facebook for some personal motivation: to stay connected with an online network of interesting people, let's say. This is much like the motivation that drove instant messaging adoption: another trend that conventional business logic tried to stamp out. Only later did it become obvious that networked connection was a productivity enhancer, and companies now accept it as routine.

So, the same will prove true for Facebook and whatever other social streaming applications emerge. It is the far-sighted companies that will accept the time loss as the inevitable investment in employee connectedness, and realize that the basis for future competitive advantage will not be blind, grinding efficiency but the highest degree of connectedness.

And I don't think that this is naïve, although it might be idealistic and forward-looking. In a few years, when 'workstreaming' has become the norm in business, it will become the conventional wisdom to support it. Today, it smacks of faddishness. So did blogging a few years ago, but now corporate types get tattooed in business school with the phrase "markets are conversations." That has become dogma.

Brain Solis makes a contribution to this discussion in his recent post

[from Facebook is the Hub for Your Personal Brand]

[...]

Facebook is much more than a social network. Its infrastructure facilitates profile and presence aggregation, channeling all online activity through one main hub. Simply said, it becomes a repository for every social media product, which ultimately transitions from a static profile into a dynamic destination for your personal and professional brand.

And, with lifestreams and data streams creating additional channels to broadcast social activity, Facebook also further contributes to the "river of relevance" by allowing people to create a visually-rich, centralized dashboard that also helps to tell your story and spark conversations.

With social tools adapting their services to Facebook through the use of widgets , we can easily share a wealth of integrated activity including twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce for microblogging, RSS readers for sharing relevant stories, flickr for sharing pictures, "video" or kyte for adding live or packaged video, upcoming.org for sharing events, and the list goes on and on.

I believe that companies will directly benefit from individuals building their reputation in their markets and industries through social means, as provided by Facebook and others. Consider the recent hiring of Jeremiah Owyang by Forrester as the direct consequence of his personal branding as a web strategist, and how they intend to take advantage of that intangible asset that he has developed. Or the more well-known case of Steve Rubel.

In the final analysis, Facebook and its cousins are inevitably going to be business tools, because business people are too smart to not adopt better technologies to help them get their work done. In a hyperconnected world, getting things done increasingly means harnessing the network, not just doing piecework.

Again, the companies that get wise to this fastest will be the first to benefit; and those that wait will lose.

links for 2007-09-12

• ALLIED by Jeneane Sessum: If I were writing the press release...
  Jeneane wishing that Google would come along and benevolently solve the heath care crisis.
  (tags: health+care jeneane+sussum google)
• The Social Graph and Objects of Sociality - Bokardo
  "Why our relationships can’t be explained without the objects and experiences that we share."
  (tags: social+networks social+architecture)
• Center for Media Research - Half Of All Web Viewers Reading What The Other Half Has To Say
  "Data from the survey show that user-generated content is in tremendous demand across the generations, with 51% of all consumers watching and/or reading content created by others." Consumers, my ass.
  (tags: new+media social+media the+people+formerly+known+as+the+audience pointer:david+weinberger)
• Apple confirms: iPod touch cannot add calendar appointments - Engadget
  Uh-oh. Starting to get buyer's remorse over my iPod Touch purchase.
  (tags: ipod, ipod touch, apple, gear)
• Behance :: Articles :: A Network Of Creative Professionals
  The Behance Network is a platform for creative professional networks. Behance was founded with a simple philosophy: Your ideas are more likely to actually happen when you are organized, productive, and accountable."
  (tags: behance creatives creative+professional+network social+networks design)
• Behance :: Action Method
  Wow. That's me. "In the Action Method, the outcome of every idea or interaction must be captured and transformed into action steps, backburner items, and reference items. Our research reveals that most productive creative professionals and teams identify
  (tags: behance action+method creativity process)
• BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Cable companies must die
  "Call me an optimist, but I believe that every company — every industry — that makes its money by screwing its customers is doomed."
  (tags: jeff+jarvis comcast cable+companies+must+die)
• 80 Beautiful Typefaces For Professional Design | Design Showcase
  NIce fonts
  (tags: fonts design typefaces)

More On The 'Demographics Is Destiny' Meme

Traditional media seem all aglow with the neat and tidy notion that different agre groups will naturally gravitate to separate social networks. Kind of like the Web does LeisureWorld:

[from The Graying of the Web - New York Times by Matt Richel]

[...]

Social networking has so far focused mainly on businesspeople and young people because they are tech-savvy and are treasured by Madison Avenue.

[And because the use the web a lot, which leads to the likelihood of real money.]

But there are 78 million boomers — roughly three times the number of teenagers — and most of them are Internet users who learned computer skills in the workplace. Indeed, the number of Internet users who are older than 55 is roughly the same as those who are aged 18 to 34, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a market research firm.

TeeBeeDee’s founder is Robin Wolaner, who in 1987 created Parenting magazine. That year, at least seven magazines focused on being a parent were started, and Ms. Wolaner said she was seeing the same sudden recognition of a need for Internet publishers to respond to the demands of older Americans.

She came up with the idea for the site, she said, “when I was sitting around with friends and we said, ‘We’re not going to hang out at the AARP site. What is there for us?’ ” (Plus, she said, she wanted to find a community where she could discuss her interest in getting an eye lift).

“There’s a recognition that this generation now uses the Internet just like younger people,” she said. “The one thing this generation hasn’t done yet is network online.”

[Uh... and the theory is that if you build it they will come right? Except that in general you don't create online communities, you mediate existing ones.]

The question is whether they’ll want to network in large enough numbers to justify the tens of millions of dollars going into the space. Indeed, the interest from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists has led to a mini-boom in sites that cater to baby boomers, creating what they say is both critical mass and a likely falling out.

More like a mini-bubble, where a bunch of graying entrepreneurs and social-network-happy investors are chasing a dream: that people want segregated worlds on line. That older folks want to hang only with older folks. But it runs counter the nature os social networks and the way the Web has evolved.

Connection transcends demographics. We have to hope it does, or else the bullshit line that the old media idiots used to throw out as a condemnation of the blogosphere -- just an echo chamber where people can find people with exactly the same parochial viewpoints to agree with -- may become the basis of sound business models. I don't buy it.

While some cultural boundaries have real meaning on the Web (like language-oriented, cultural, and religious sites, for example) the fact is that everything we have learned about the web suggests that attempts to create demographic walls based on age will fail.

Google Social Activities Stream: Mocha-Mocha (Or Makamaka?)

A video leak has led to a new insight into what Google is doing behind the scenes in its social tools development:

[from Nooglers and the PDB: Reactor - Google Blogoscoped Forum]

[...] Google's recent big social effort is called Mocha-Mocha (or Mocka-Mocka?), and will become the infrastructure for all social stuff across all of their applications. As a part of this, a new feature called Activity Streams will be introduced or at least implemented in Reader this quarter. This will be comparable to Facebook's News Feed (Minifeed?) feature, and integrate Gmail's addressbook and contact list.

Also there will be some other Gmail and Orkut integration, but this might just mean there will be links to Reader.

Google is interested in allowing users to comment on items they share, but this currently isn't a priority.

Calling tags 'labels' is called 'kind of a historic accident and needlessly confusing'.

So, Google has noticed the rise of flow apps? Twitter, Facebook (the mini-feed), and so on? Jeez, I hope so. Lifestreaming (and soon, workstreaming) is clearly breaking into the mainstream (haha) when Google is drilling it's noobs on the socialization of Reader, and maybe other apps? Could be interesting if Google rolls out streams across all apps (reminds me of a design I have been working on, by the way).

I like the fact that they are going to (apparently) rectify the goof with 'labels' -- I hope that reaches into Gmail land.

[update: 7:38pm - Google Operating System has this to say:

Apparently Google learned something from Facebook's success and intends to connect all of its social applications. The new central place for social activities will create feeds for all or your events ("activity streams") and share them with your contacts, if you choose to do so. I called this Social Gmail, but the name of the project seems to be Makamaka.

]

Tech Digest Has Been Out Of The Loop: Barack Obama Has Been On Twitter Since March

Hmmm.

[from Tech Digest: Barack Obama signs up to LinkedIn, expect Twitter account next]

Yep, LinkedIn, which was once one of the most popular sites on the interweb, and allows business people and assorted corporate-types to network with one another. Before you roll your eyes and proclaim it to be yet another dismal PR attempt, consider the following...

With LinkedIn's average age of user being over 29 years of age, and all with strong business leanings, it does make sense for Obama to be reaching for new voters via the site. He currently has 150 friends, or 'connections' on there, a considerably small number for the site, which suggests he isn't following in the footsteps of Tila Tequila and adding everyone and their Mums. Let's wait for the topless pics though...

Barack is one of my close personal friends on Twitter. Has been there for months!

* Name: Barack Obama
* Location: Chicago, IL
* Web: http://www.barackoba...
* Joined: Mar 2007

* Following: 4865
* Followers: 4578
* Favorites: 0
* Updates: 29

Victor Papanek

Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order.

[pointer from Matt Webb - sorry I missed his talk at d.construct]

Facebook Is Bankrupting Our Business! Shut It Down! Shut It Down!

The usual business hue-and-cry about the newest communication technology to come along wasting precious minutes and costing businesses a fortune form all that goldbricking:

[from BBC NEWS | Technology | Facebook 'costs businesses dear']

Workers who spend time on sites such as Facebook could be costing firms over £130m a day, a study has calculated.

According to employment law firm Peninsula, 233 million hours are lost every month as a result of employees "wasting time" on social networking.

The study - based on a survey of 3,500 UK companies - concluded that businesses need to take firm action on the use of social networks at work.

Some firms have already banned employees from accessing Facebook.

Get back to your lathes! You are burning daylight! Work, work, work!

This is the usual pattern. No news here.

When American businesses started to roll out telephones on the desk of every office worker the same nonsense prevailed. After all, the employees would use the phones for personal calls! And gossip! A total waste of money! Grumble, grumble, grumble. We heard the same griping with the rollout of email, then IM, then the Web, and now, social networks.

I also go along with Ethan Kaplan on this:

BBC NEWS | Technology | Facebook ‘costs businesses dear’

if Facebook cost your business “dear,” then you shouldn’t really be in business. If you can’t figure out how to leverage any social network for your own business, and the tendencies of your employees to enjoy them, then time to rethink your strategies.

Technorati Introduces Topics: Yawn

Technorati has introduced Topics:

[from Technorati Weblog: Introducing Technorati Topics]

[...] today we are releasing a major overhaul of the Technorati Home page and a completely new area of the site that emphasizes blogs, Technorati Topics. With Topics, we help you discover what bloggers are writing about in Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life.

Each topic features blog posts from many of the best blogs out there to help you discover what's going on. The posts are refreshed frequently to reflect breaking news, new opinions, and the latest from the Web. We've set out to help you find some great blog posts to read and we've organized them by easy to browse topics. We considered a number of factors to get the seed list of blogs including Technorati Authority, frequency of posting, use of relevant tags, links to related subject matter and general topicality.

Everything streaming through Technorati -- millions of posts per day -- aggregated into six categories? Six? It's ridiculous.

Is the notion that someone would actually click through to the Technology Topic page and watch the posts go by? There is no search, no filter, no way to use Technorati tags to channel the torrent of posts. How could this be useful?

When I think of the dozens of things that Technorati could do to improve and leverage the treasure of all those tags, I could scream. Instead, we get this half-hearted push into Techmeme territory, but without the clustering of stories that make Techmeme usable.

This is going to be yet-another-flash-in-the-pan like the ill-designed WTF feature, which went nowhere.

As I said in a recent post, Technorati is suffering from lack of vision, big time, and if they can't get their act together, someone else -- probably Google -- will start indexing all those tags out there.

[Update 10am: A lot of detractors out there.]

links for 2007-09-11

• textually.org: Apple iPhone hits the one million mark
  Lest we forget in all the iPhone pricing fooforah, it took only 74 days to reach 1M iPhones, which took two years for iPod.
  (tags: apple iphone ipod)
• Even in a Virtual World, ‘Stuff’ Matters - New York Times
  NYTimes plowing old fields here, about Second Life.
  (tags: second+life new+york+times)
• Drivers risk two years in jail for using their mobile phones | the Daily Mail
  Yikes. Don't text while driving in the UK, I guess.
  (tags: mobility texting UK)
• Influential Marketing Blog: The Ogilvy Blogger Outreach Code of Ethics (Beta Version)
  A good idea, not taken far enough
  (tags: olgilvy blogger+relations BR)
• How To Be An American Again » War Isn't Football
  "I’m sick of stupid comparisons between the Iraq War and a football game. There’s no pigskin, there’s no goal post, no fourth down, no cheerleaders. And most football players tend to end up alive, instead of dead after the game."
  (tags: halley+suite iraq war+isnt+football)
• apophenia: SNS visibility norms (a response to Scoble)
  "I think that one of the reasons that the tech crowd lurves Facebook is because they both want the "transparent society." This is the philosophy that information dissemination can only be beneficial and that people should not seek to hide things. ... "
  (tags: danah+boyd robert+scoble facebook social+networks openness)
• Newspapers in 2020: Death of editors?
  Steven Baker gets it, but 2020 is too long to wait
  (tags: newspapers new+media)
• Multitasking tradeoffs: individual versus group productivity « Jon Udell
  "When I interviewed Mary Czerwinski on the subject of multitasking, interruptions, and context reacquistion, she made a fascinating observation about her teenage daughter, and tied it to some research findings. ..."
  (tags: multitasking jon+udell mary+czwerwinski networked+productivity add cpa continuous+partial+attention)
• Agency Byte » Defining Project Boundaries (and Keeping Your Client Within Them)
  Scope Creep [pointer from Swiss Miss]
  (tags: scope+creep consultingology consulting)
• Is My Questions the most spammy Facebook app? : Rashmi Sinha’s weblog
  What is spammiest Facebook app? Inquiring minds want to know.
  (tags: spam social+spam facebook rashmi+sinha)

David Churbuck on Corporate Journalism

A contender for word (or pahrase) of the week, although David's post is from June 2006:

[Corporate Journalism at Churbuck.com]

[...] In conversations with another McKinsey colleague, Tom Hayes, a former NYT reporter, we came up with the term “corporate journalism” to describe what we were doing inside of the Firm: applying classic reporting techniques inside of an organization to determine what, if anything, was “interesting” and deserved attention. That filter, “interesting” is subjective. Through McKinsey’s lens it meant information that could enrich the firm through more client engagements and increase the effectiveness of its consultants.

I like it. If more corporate types -- and PR flacks -- gave up on "marketing communications" and "PR" and aspired to corporate journalism, things would be much better. And I don't just mean to spin better story-telling, or to get down to 'facts': I mean that the discipline of journalism, despite all its troubles, is a better bedrock to build corporate communications on than the mishmash of powerpoints and press releases that we generally see.

Charles Darwin

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

Attributed to Darwin, but I can find no source.

[pointer from Fred Wilson to Bob Lefstez]

danah boyd Is Confused By Facebook Success

Cousin danah is puzzled:

[from apophenia: confused by Facebook]

I am utterly confused by the ways in which the tech industry fetishizes Facebook. There's no doubt that Facebook's F8 launch was *brilliant*. Offering APIs and the possibility of monetization is a Web 2.0 developer's wet dream. (Never mind that I don't know of anyone really making money off of Facebook aside from the Poker App guy.) But what I don't understand is why so much of the tech crowd who lament Walled Gardens worship Facebook. What am I missing here? Why is the tech crowd so entranced with Facebook?

I agree it's odd. But, as I pointed out in a recent post, The Architecture of Sociality: Building In Openness, the path to openess requires collections of independent applications to start sharing common services. Until that happens, openness is an abstraction, and one that has basically no traction in the minds of the average user. But the techies, who might know better, are still end users; and the benefits of very large networks override any moral qualms about supporting the growing hegemony posed by Facebook.

Slices and Networks: Is Demographics Destiny?

I noted that Multiply (disclosure: a former client that I have no financial stake in) raised $16.6M:

[from Multiply, social networking for 30-somethings, raises $16.6M]

[...]

Besides larger social networks, like Myspace, Facebook, Hi5, etc., competitors include Friendster (which is also growing fast), which claims to have already nailed the 30-something market, TeeBeeDee for people over 40 and Eons for people over 50.

The big question for Multiply is whether it can distinguish itself as more 30-somethings join Facebook and other sites. Multiply didn’t rank in Comscore’s recent study of the top social networks worldwide, released in July, because it didn’t yet have the 10 million unique visitors required to be included in the study.

I don't buy the "demographics is destiny" theme of these sites, despite the funding they might attract.

First of all, people's social networks are not neatly parceled into demographic slices. A 30-something dad with kids may spend a bunch of his time palling around with other 30-somethings, but also with people through work, and family members of all ages. Ditto his wife. Ditto his 50-something dad.

Perhaps I am a great counter example, since I am 54 (in a few weeks) and I am connected to professional contacts as young as 19 (Jessica Mah) and a few (a tiny few!) that are actually older than me, and every age bracket in between.

I think people affiliate around ideas, causes, relationships, and purpose. And that transcends age demographics.

I think that locality is stronger than age, but even there, massively open networks -- like Facebook and Twitter -- will ultimately prevail, by simply allowing people to find other local people. Like Facebook's local networks.

If people thought that demographics is destiny, wouldn't Facebook have age groups assigned? Personally, I would ignore it if they did.

Actually, I think the sizzle of Multiply is more the attractiveness to some people of having private networks for friends and contacts. But again, if you can have that in a larger network, as an option, then the argument for Multiply fails to convince.

Still, the world of social networks may be big enough for a thousand offerings to exist, but the benefits of larger network access seem to argue against it. If you are a music nut, you are unlikely to only listen to one genre, so the apparent attraction of belonging to a post-punk-only music network doesn't really work. Ditto sports. Ditto fashion. In every one of these major lifecycle threads, people who are seriously involved would rather be in a broader network.

There seems to be a clear break between sites for music and sites for sports, however; and similar natural cleavages between fashion and high tech. But I think the age-based slicing of networks will fail, with the exception of the youth market.

Upcycling: Word Of The Week

I stumbled onto upcycling last Sunday:

[from Romancing the Flat Pack: Ikea, Repurposed by Penelope Green]

[...] "upcycling,” a process whose name was coined by William McDonough, an architect, and Michael Braungart, a chemist, in their 2002 book, “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.” They used the term to describe the process of taking something that’s essentially waste and moving it up the consumer-goods chain.

Now I need to buy the book:

[from the authors' website]

William McDonough's book, written with his colleague, the German chemist Michael Braungart, is a manifesto calling for the transformation of human industry through ecologically intelligent design. Through historical sketches on the roots of the industrial revolution; commentary on science, nature and society; descriptions of key design principles; and compelling examples of innovative products and business strategies already reshaping the marketplace, McDonough and Braungart make the case that an industrial system that "takes, makes and wastes" can become a creator of goods and services that generate ecological, social and economic value.

In Cradle to Cradle, McDonough and Braungart argue that the conflict between industry and the environment is not an indictment of commerce but an outgrowth of purely opportunistic design. The design of products and manufacturing systems growing out of the Industrial Revolution reflected the spirit of the day-and yielded a host of unintended yet tragic consequences.

Today, with our growing knowledge of the living earth, design can reflect a new spirit. In fact, the authors write, when designers employ the intelligence of natural systems—the effectiveness of nutrient cycling, the abundance of the sun's energy—they can create products, industrial systems, buildings, even regional plans that allow nature and commerce to fruitfully co-exist.

Cradle to Cradle maps the lineaments of McDonough and Braungart's new design paradigm, offering practical steps on how to innovate within today's economic environment. Part social history, part green business primer, part design manual, the book makes plain that the re-invention of human industry is not only within our grasp, it is our best hope for a future of sustaining prosperity.

In addition to describing the hopeful, nature-inspired design principles that are making industry both prosperous and sustainable, the book itself is a physical symbol of the changes to come. It is printed on a synthetic 'paper,' made from plastic resins and inorganic fillers, designed to look and feel like top quality paper while also being waterproof and rugged. And the book can be easily recycled in localities with systems to collect polypropylene, like that in yogurt containers. This 'treeless' book points the way toward the day when synthetic books, like many other products, can be used, recycled, and used again without losing any material quality—in cradle to cradle cycles.

The Google Reader Next Button

Perhaps the single most helpful innovation in my life for far in 2007: the Google Reader 'Next' button.

I don't like the RSS reader experience, but the Next button (a bookmarklet in Firefox, in my case) allows me to jump from actual blog pages in situ, one by one. I never have to hit the back button. I just click to go to the next place, glance to see if it is interesting, perhaps draft a blog post, perhaps create a Del.icio.us bookmark, whatever. But I don't ever think, now, "what should I read next?" I just hit the Next button.

Outfoxing Del.icio.us

So I outfoxed Del.icio.us.

The social bookmarking app does not support images -- you can't associate an image with a bookmark. Well, you can, sort of: you can stick the HTML for displaying an image into a bookmark, but Del.icio.us doesn't render it.

But I am now having my Del.icio.us bookmarks automatically posted into Typepad everyday as a 'links for the day' post, and when I stick image code into the bookmarks, the images are rendered correctly in Typepad. Neato.

links for 2007-09-09

• About the Blue Brain Project
  A bunch of swiss researchers are trying to reverse engineer the human brain!
  (tags: blue+brain human+brain+research)
• Swiss Top 100 Blogs
  Top three blogs in Switzerland are written by women, and I read all three: textually.org, swiss miss, and climb to the stars.
  (tags: swiss+blogs blogs textually.org climb+to+the+stars swiss+miss)

Reactee

links for 2007-09-08

• TechCrunch UK » Blog Archive » Welcome back to TechCrunch UK & Ireland
  Mike Butcher relaunches Techcrunch UK (and, oh, Ireland)
  (tags: mike+butcher, techcrunch, techcrunch+uk, techcrunch+ireland)
• BBC NEWS | Technology | US backing for two-tier internet
  US Department of Justice as all for a two-tier Internet, where providers can charge for first class treatment of packets.
  (tags: net+neutrality)

Bill Gates on Steve Jobs

[from I, Cringely . The Pulpit . The Puppet Master]

And that 1999 quote from Bill Gates about Jobs: “He has to know that he can never win.”

I don’t think Steve knows that at all.

Apple Loyalty: We Will Only Know When The Next Cool Thing Comes Out

More buzzing today about the iPhone price drop, and all the griping it has caused:

[from IPhone Owners Crying Foul Over Price Cut by Katie Hafner and Brad Stone]

[...]

[the history of very fast price drops in cell phones] must have been what Apple was counting on. But the size and speed of the price cut alienated some of Apple’s most loyal supporters.

[...]

Mr. Jobs said the cuts were precipitated by a desire to build demand aggressively for the product in the coming holiday shopping season. Analysts, however, wondered if it was indicative of sagging demand for the expensive phone.

[...]

Rob Enderle, president of the Enderle Group, a market research firm in San Jose, Calif., was skeptical of the store credit.

“A $100 credit could be perceived as adding insult to injury,” said Mr. Enderle, noting that store credits are seldom well received. “It’s a way to make you go buy something else, and gives the company a chance to make more money.”

But Mr. Enderle might be underestimating the sheer power of Apple loyalty.

Sounds like Rob is one of the unhappy early buyers himself. And we don't know what motivated Jobs to take the aggressive move, but I am betting on more souped up iPhones, and a decent camera, before Xmas.

Like some others, I think that the iPod Touch is an extremely cool toy, and I can't wait for mine to arrive (on or around 2 October). I am too stuck on having a small phone with a great camera (n95) to move to iPhone, now.

Regarding customer loyalty, what no one seems to be saying is that we will only know the true impact of the price drop when Apple rolls out the next cool thing. If Apple loyalists don't line up outside the stores the night before the release of the Apple iWidget (whatever the next shiny thing is) then, and only then, will we be able to judge the real impact of this brouhaha, and whether it is a PR hiccup or a serious defection of loyalists.

My bet is on hiccup.

Stress In The Early Stage Of Design

The counter to fear is not certainty, but courage.

Yahoo Messenger Mac 3.0 Beta: Still No Voice!?

A new version of the Yahoo Messenger for the Mac:

[from New Mac Version: Beta 2]

Tabbed IM windows: When you have two or more conversations going on, they appear as separate tabs in a single window. Less clutter for your desktop! Plus, you can drag a tab out and make it into its own window (or drag it back in to consolidate). Tabbed conversations are a preference, so if you prefer having one window per IM conversation, you still can.

Chat rooms: Yup, the same Yahoo! chat rooms that Windows users have been using are now open to Mac users.

Message archiving: All of your IM and chat room conversations can now be archived on your computer.

Improved stability for webcam and file transfer: There were issues with these in the past version so the team did a lot of bug fixes and under-the-hood work to improve them.

More emoticons: We added in the additional emoticons that are in our other versions of Messenger, so Mac users now have them all!

Although this latest Beta doesn’t yet offer voice calling, we’re still working on it and hope to offer it soon.

Emoticons, schemoticons! Voice is the thing that everyone is waiting for and expecting (see Yahoo! Messenger 3.0 beta 2 for Mac finally hits the streets).

This is the development group that stated at a briefing over a year ago that the Mac was going to be the leading platform for development, and that all new Messenger innovation was going to happen there first. Well, not if their endless cozying up to Microsoft continues to be first priority, I guess.

No discussion of the endlessly open interoperabilty issue: if they can make it work with Microsoft, why can't they interoperate with gTalk, AIM, and Skype? I guess that dream is just totally dead. I have given up on these giant companies ever getting together and doing what is obviously in the public interest: interoperability. And I don't believe that the FCC or the Justice Department will every get around to fixing this stupid mess, either.

ContactOffice: No Offense, But The Metaphor Is Tired

I took a look at ContactOffice at Office 2.0:

Yikes. The office metaphor, based on documents, a calendar, and so on. Isn't this tired? Are we so stuck around this set of metaphors -- the physical reality of files? the set of apps in a row? -- that we can't think outside the box?

In particular, I think sticking with the notion of a physical file is inherently limiting and problematic. In a world increasingly based on feeds, flows, streams, posts, and so, we can move past the static world of files and search, into a richer world of flow and filters.

Zoho Business

I joked with Raju Vegesna of Zoho last night at the Office 2.0 kickoff party that they must have 500 programmers to generate all the products they have. He replied, "No, only 150." A hundred and fifty programmers? My god, and no revenue model, I thought.

Well today the revenue model comes into sharp focus with the announcement of Zoho Business:

[via email]

Zoho Personal is what we offer today for individuals. As we said previously, our applications will continue to remain free for individuals.

Zoho Business (ZB) is the new category we are launching and it is aimed at small & mid-sized businesses. ZB will be available in two versions - Free & Pro. Below are some of the highlights of Zoho Business.

* Company level Admin Console
* Domain Management (for pointing your domains to Zoho Apps)
* Centralized User and Group Management
* Single Sign-on across several Zoho Apps
* Zoho Apps include Writer, Sheet, Show, Wiki, Notebook, Email, Cal, Tasks, Planner, Viewer, Chat etc.
* Customization Options
* Multiple levels of Security including SSL
* Remote Backup
* Telephone Support and more.

ZB will be available in Private Beta now and it'll step into Public Beta next month. We are aiming for the GA release during the first quarter for next year. The pricing for ZB (while not finalized) will be around $40/user/year.

If you are targeting Google -- the obvious competitor, although lacking many of the tools that Zoho has rolled out -- you have to have at least 150 developers, I guess. If this enterprise offering takes off, I bet they will be hiring even more.

Jobs Didn't Screw You: A Contrarian View

Don't get me wrong. The price drop for iPhones seems to be a slap in the face for early adopters, as has been advanced in glossy headline all over the Web (Apple Snubs AT&T, Hoses Early iPhone Buyers, Apple announces new gear; Screws early adopters, Poll: iPhone price drop blues).

Why are the early buyers sniveling? Two days ago they weren't complaining that the price for the device that so many of them love was too high. And they didn't bitch when they were in line waiting to get the brandy-new, shiny device.

It's just a weird psychological dissonance, a sense that they have been jilted, been fleeced: like some out-of-town rube being played by a sharp taxi driver.

But it just ain't so.

The price cuts are intended to move product, and clean out the stock of this generation of iPhones, so that new devices can be rolled out. Did you think that your early purchase came with some price guarantee? Don't you know that prices drop once production steps up in most products?

Personally, I am waiting for an iPhone that is smaller (yes, I want a Nano iPhone), and one that has a better camera. Likely will take a year or so. IPhone is a phone that wants to be a computer, but my MacBook Pro is too good a computer to be matched by today's iPhone. And the camera? Don't ask.

My Nokia N95 is just too good a camera phone to walk away from: it has radically changed my life because of its vitamin-packed five million pixels. The other breakthrough phone product of 2007. It's a phone that wants to be a camera, and does a pretty good job of it.

Technically, I shouldn't say I am 'waiting' for an iPhone, since I received one yesterday at the Office 2.0 conference reception, but I am not planning to switch to the phone.

But after yesterday's announcements from Apple, I am ordering an iPod Touch: an iPod that wants to be a web device -- no phone -- and that is an interesting fusion. Good for music, movies, and wifi built in. Safari, address book, calendar. And that awesome interface. More to follow. They ship on 28 September.

[Update: The USA Today interview with Steve Jobs is getting a lot of buzz, and he addresses this issue.]

[Update 4:40pm 6 Sep 07: Jobs offers a $100 store credit to all (almost all? Most?] iPhone buyers.]

links for 2007-09-06

• PopCap: Over A Third of CEOs Play Casual Online Games At Work
  61% of techies surveyed say they play casual games at work, a lot on breaks, at lunch, etc, even while on the clock (gasp!). They play a lot: up to 15 minutes a day.
  (tags: casual+gaming)
• PC World - Don't Ban Facebook at Work, Researchers Advise
  "the TUC [British Trade Union Congress] is advising companies -- in Britain at least -- that the outright banning of such sites in the workplace may be something of an "overreaction." Unusually sensible.
  (tags: facebook british+trade+union+congress, social+networks)
• swissmiss: Find the Perfect Unregistered Domain Name
  PickyDomains uses crowdsourcing to find good unregistered domain names based on your criteria.
  (tags: pickydomains crowdsourcing domain+names)
• 11 Ways to Optimize Your Mac's Performance
  Very helpful
  (tags: mac+os+x)
• BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Business 2.0 - publishing 1.0 = 0
  Jarvis agrees with my "Business 2.0, And Media 1.0, Is Dead" characterization of the Business 2.0 collapse.
  (tags: business+2.0 media+1.0 jeff+jarvis)
• contentious.com - How to blog without the time sink
  Amy Gahran boils it down: use your blog as your backup brain.
  (tags: blogging blogs amy+gahran)

Instant Messaging Etiquette Backwashes Into Email

Anne Truitt Zelenka suggests that email etiquette is changing, which she likens to immunity:

[from Rising Email Immunity Leads to Conflict over Email Etiquette � Web Worker Daily]

[...] we’re seeing conflict over exactly how email should be treated.

Is it okay to delay response or not to respond at all? Are short, to-the-point emails curt and cold, or are they okay in a time of crushing email volumes? Could you treat email like a river, similar to Twitter or chat streams, ignoring stuff from the past in favor of focusing on the present? Or is it critical to process email with some empty inbox scheme that focuses you on each individual message