"I can’t think of anything that demonstrates the sovereign nature of the self better than a blog.” - Doc Searls
About the Author
Stowe Boyd is a well-known media subversive,
and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative
and social technologies. His new blog is Message.
I fiddled around with the Yahoo MyWeb Beta, primarily because I wanted to see how they might have integrated with Yahoo 360 -- the social networking solution in desperate need of a reason to live -- but I have already uninstalled the toolbar from Firefox. I had hoped the Yahoo 360 integration would lead to a social search/bookmarking solution that actually built on a buddy list and/or social network, but the integration is not available yet. The MyWeb solution without that looks like just another search and bookmarks system, and there's not enough there to justify changing my little ways.
I also took a look at the MyYahoo, with RSS aggregation built-in. Again, since I already have a gazillion RSS feeds in Bloglines, there is no reason to move to a portal-style solution -- but that's old news, since RSS feeds have been supported there since last fall.
All the buzz about the mad innovation going on at Yahoo doesn't seem justified, with the obvious exception of their acquisition of Flickr. Maybe Stewart and company can reorganize the mindset at Yahoo away from portals and into the paths of socialness.
Over at Blogspotting, the new Businessweek blog on blogging, Heather Green explores an insight from Mena Trott: "over time, people will get more control over who sees their blogs. They will be able to make different parts of their blog private, so that they're open only to certain people. This is already happening to some extent at LiveJournal, the service that Six Apart bought in January." The full socializing of social media waits for the full integration of the buddy list: being able to specifically label each blog entry with the specific circle (or circles) of buddies you want to be able to see it, up to and including the whole world. [Note: technologies like Traction Software already provide these sorts of access control -- it just hasn't shown up in Moveable Type or Typepad yet.]
I don't agree with Tom Coates that Trackback is dead. His argument is that trackbacks have been driven to extinction by the spammers, but blacklist and moderation tools solve that problem, really. And the near-term possibility of an instant messaging-style digital identity system (a la Six Apart's TypeKey) that would support a blogosphere-wide gated community of verified users should fill us with hope, not dread.
Giovanni Rodriguez provides a great analysis of the context surrounding the EFF's recent recommendations regarding blogging anonymously. He doesn't touch on the growing tide of conformist pressures in the blogosphere, but otherwise does a masterful job.
I get a perverse pleasure from Steven Johnson's arguments about TV being more complex today, and that this makes TV viewers smarter (see New York Times piece, here). His argument conflates the notion of complex plotlines -- more characters and scene jumping -- with viewers getting smarter. But I think that he is missing the point: it's not intelligence, per se, that is being stretched through these mental gymnastics, but instead, the same sort of situational awareness and attention shifting that goes on with serious video gamers. Intelligence is about making judgements, and reasoning, rather than being able to keep track of which shell the pea is under. On the other hand, increasing situational awareness and inculcating a predisposition toward Continuous Partial Attention is a requirement for surviving in the modern world, so I shouldn't knock increasingly complex TV, although I avoid watching it myself. Still, I buy into some of his premises:
The kids are forced to think like grown-ups: analyzing complex social networks, managing resources, tracking subtle narrative intertwinings, recognizing long-term patterns. The grown-ups, in turn, get to learn from the kids: decoding each new technological wave, parsing the interfaces and discovering the intellectual rewards of play. Parents should see this as an opportunity, not a crisis. Smart culture is no longer something you force your kids to ingest, like green vegetables. It's something you share.
Still and again, the days of huddling around the TV to receive a daily dose of mediated culture from the analog media moguls are numbered. Digital media will absorb TV and other analog media, and that's when we will really see smart TV: when TV can be socialized like blogs, when the shows are not mass-produced reality nonsense, but real people videoing their own lives, telling their own stories, and when we finally walk away from the constraints of mass markets. Internet TV will be something completely different.
While I was stuffing my self silly at the Les Blogs conference in Paris, David Weinberger was at what must have been a fascinating conference: Microsoft's Social Computing Symposium. Here's his summary of presentations by Amy Bruckman (George Institute of Tech), Robert Kraut (Carnegie Mellon's CommunityLab), Randy Farmer (Yahoo), David MacDonald (U of Washington), Fernanda B. Viegas (MIT Media Lab). He has numerous other entries on the symposium, as well. I have to get invited to this next year, so I better tone down the invective about Windows a notch.
Jeff Jarvis has taken a long hard look at Google: "I love Google; we all should. I don't hate Google. But I think it's time to consider fearing Google. Just to be safe."
A number of cool folks, including Randy Moss, Jim Purbrick, and Jerry Paffendorf are co-conspirators on today's Second Life Future Salon, which is a futuristic look at virtual worlds and their broader application.
Our need for communication tools has been increasing at a phenomenal rate. Face to face is almost never possible. And how many times can you play phone tag, even when you have cell phones? It's just not fun. Today, people need a myriad of ways to communicate - and those communication tools that allow for multitasking are high on the list. They do not increase the work load, like tracking someone down on the phone may - in fact, they may even be a part of the solution for increased productivity.
Right now, IMs are being increasingly used in the corporate world - companies are larger and more geographically diverse than ever. And customers are no longer down the street - they can be anywhere. Small businesses too profit from the prevalence of communication tools - IMs and VoIP clients are becomming de facto business tools. Both internally and externally. When you are working on 10 things at once, it is distracting to walk over and talk to your coworker - but talking on an IM is seamless - no disruption on either end. I know not everyone would agree with this, but it is becoming the case.
Fast, effective communication with employees, partners, customers and other critical contacts — wherever and whenever business requirements dictate — is becoming mandatory. While e-mail helps, it is not always the best choice to resolve an immediate question or for group collaboration. Most of us can recall times when we composed an urgent e-mail only to receive an "out of office" response, or when we wanted to attend a meeting but could not travel for it. The desire to increase productivity, ease collaboration, and reduce costs is forcing many organizations of all sizes to look at newer communication tools. The challenge is to introduce new tools without increasing the complexity of our interactions while also maintaining a secure communications environment.
While the article does continue as a sales push for the Microsoft cross-platform Live Communications Server, it does pique my interest in the push for secure but fully integrated communication tools. As Stowe has envisioned, there is a significant need for collaborative tools that give freedom of choice for communicating. An organized, all-in-one system that is user friendly and mobile. I think IM is one part of the picture, but I wouldn't count on it as being the solution to all productivity needs in the corporate world.
I met Felix Petersen, one of the bright minds behind Plazes, in Paris at the Les Blogs conference. They have released some new, cool functionality: a mapping of where you have logged in over the past 30, 60, 90, or 365 days. Here's the map of my travels over the past year.
I noticed a few mistakes in the lat/long have screwed up the map: my trip to Vancouver for Northern Voice, for example, has me in Ontario somewhere. But that was operator error on my part. Also various trips are missing, where I wasn't using wifi, like Nice, Amsterdam, and London, last summer. I think Plazes needs to add support for tagging via ethernet, not just wifi.
What I want now is integration with my future calendar events, so friends and family can see my upcoming travel plans, and could then contact me about getting together. I have already asked Felix to put on the wishlist, but who knows?
Microsoft is pushing for an ultra-mobile community - 100 million mobile PC holders by 2008.
Microsoft's newest mission is pushing for a Mobile PC for every person. These are not run-of-the-mill laptops or desktop replacements. Microsoft is aiming for broad, general acceptance of a whole new category of carry-everywhere, always-connected computing devices with batteries that last all day long.
Since mobile computing is growing at a rate of 15% greater than computing in general, there is a real demand for mobile connectivity. However, as of yet, mobility has not been long lasting without jacking into a power source after a couple of hours.
Bill Gates, Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect, described one such ultra-portable device during his WinHEC keynote Monday. Dubbed the Ultra Mobile 2007, that device was about the size of a paperback book. Gates described it as costing less than $1,000, weighing less than 2 pounds, and having a camera, phone, music player, and video player.
Wandering around at Les Blog, I will be pursing the topic of "The Blogging Antihype Begins" -- more or less following up on the themes I touched on in the Enough With Blogging Already post the other day. I think that a rising tide of invective is imminent: just as blogging becomes a household word, we are going to see an instantaneous and seemingly spontaneous antihype against blogging. I am going to find other data points, I hope.
Rather than doing another panel session for my next True Voice show, I will be doing a monologue after the conference with sound bites that I am recording here in Paris. I am a little tired with the panel format so I presume other people are too.
Doc Searls has posted a batch of photos from the speaker's dinner last night, like this one (http://www.flickr.com/photos/52614599@N00/10748221/in/set-265939/) that show Mary Hodder, Joi Ito's hand, and me.
Mary and I spent most of the dinner brainstorming on the "Paris Index" -- an idea that I will leave to Mary to explain, except to say its a way to evaluate blogs.
The idea to hold the Les Blogs conference in the French Senate building is backfiring -- a very compressed schedule has now been hosed because of security measures in the building. We were filing in in small groups, having IDs checked, and passing through a metal detector. It is now almost 9:45am, and we are just beginning.
Great dinner, great conversation. Mary and I were at work on what we called the "Paris Index" -- a way to collate all sorts of metrics about blogs. I will let Mary blog it: I am merely the co-inventor.
How is it that most webistes don't offer mobile versions? And, for those who do, why don't you take the time to actually make your websites accessbile and clean for viewing on mobile phones? It seems the effort in the marketplace is tentative, at best, to support this growing trend. Are we truly ready to see a giant step forward from this market?
The bad experience with WAP 1.0 and lack of seriousness is one of the main reasons why many are missing out a huge opportunity. I could not agree more with Russell’s remark that 'within the 18 months, the mobile web is going to become the next big thing.'
I am surprised at the lack of consistency right now, and the lack of progress that has been made in recent months. Mobile phones can do so much more than make a call now - the tools are there to push for connectivity in so many ways. But the uptake has been slow and inconsistent. One of the main obstacles to growth is the lack of effort put forth to test the waters. It's just not consumer friendly. There is nothing compelling me to view either my feeds or websites online. The technology is expensive, the formatting is awful, and the UIs are quite unfriendly.
However, I can also see the mobile environment picking up on the trends pretty quickly: better tools, a consistent standard for viewing, and design appropriate for mobile viewing. And hopefully, pricing models that encourage trial of these new added services. There is a great analysis of the state of the environment by Russell Beattie.
It's not a chicken and egg thing any more. There are more XHTML-MP phones out there than all the PDAs combined. It's a fact: 50% of the people who own phones in the U.S. (that's 85 million people) bought them within the last 18 months. And since every operator since Christmas 2003 has sold XHTML phones, this means there are at *least* that many WAP2 phones here in the U.S. ready to see mobile content.[Russell Beattie]
I have been way too nuts recently to do a good job of dissecting a recent piece in Darwin (where I used to have amonthly column) entitled Enough With the Blogging Already. I guess this the start (or more) of the inevitable blog antihype from those that don't get it, don't buy in, or who hope it will all just go away. I refute the author's points one by one, below, in line.
Graeme Thickins
1. Business doesn’t do “passion.” That, according to the experts, is the prime requirement for launching and successfully building a voice with a blog. On the contrary, business is about logic, predictability, executing a strategy, even-temperedness, a steady hand – and, yes, earning a profit (something absent in the field of blogging). Name one successful CEO known for passion who’s lasted beyond a short flameout period (okay, besides Steve Jobs).
Yikes. I thought all sucessful businesses spon around the axis of some sort of passion: service to the customer, building the best product, or fighting to provide the absolutely lowest cost. Something. Companies operating without passion are doomed. But anyway, I think passion is only one of many key elements to successful blogging, not the key.
2. Business doesn’t like gossip. The blogosphere is well known as a caldron [sic] of innuendo and over-the-back-fence chatter. (That’s not to say some political blogs haven’t helped get to the truth in some notable instances -- such as the Dan Rather incident. But we’re talking business here.) The fact remains that business people still have two big questions when it comes to this blogging phenomenon: Who would I trust out there? And, what would I get out of slogging through all this uncontrolled chit-chat?
Hmmm. And the traditional media aren't? I know lots of firms that are trying hard to use media, in general, to spread "buzz" -- hard to distinguish from gossip -- and gravitate to places where people are exchanging information that is personally important to them with others that likewise are interested: gossip.
3. Business doesn’t like doing public experiments. Again, this seems to be one of the favorite recent themes of the hypesters: that businesses should start blathering with their “corporate voice.” But a mainstream business doesn’t let just one person speak for all its interests. And that applies even to the CEO – or, I should say, especially to the CEO in the current climate of ethics lapses and Sarbanes-Oxley.
The idea behind corporate blogging is to have a dialogue with your market, not just another vehicle for the corporate voice. That's why Sun, Macromedia, and Microsoft's efforts have been so effective. It's not Gates yammering, its hundreds or thousands of Microsoftees talking about what they are up to. It's not just another pipe, Graeme, its a conversation.
4. Business doesn’t bare its soul, and certainly not its personal diary. In fact, companies don’t do diaries, unless they happen to be one-person firms that do blogs. It should come as no surprise that business does not choose to hang out its dirty laundry for all to see, which is exactly what some proponents of blogs say companies should do. (I’m not making this up.)
Many businesses have been successful at involving their markets through an ongoing serialization of information regrading product roll-outs, response to critical issues (Bhopal) , and corporate events (like mergers). Many are not. The notion of transparency is not solely a question of blogging: blogging is merely a medium for such things. But, if a company is not interested in the benefits of that sort of interaction, they certainly won't gravitate to blogging.
5. Business is already time-strapped and blogs burn time like nobody’s business. Roger McNamee, famed Silicon Valley VC and private equity investor, recently appeared on CNBC business news. When asked where he thought the next big investment ideas and business opportunities would be, he said: “People don’t have enough time.” So, who has time to waste?
The implication is that reading blogs is wasting time, I suppose.
Pew Internet research has shown that every hour spent ont he Internet is an hour not spent watching TV. Robert Putnam pointed out in Bowling Alone that while most Americans feel they have no time to get involve in social actitivities -- like the Kiwanis, political activism or league bowling -- they still manage to watch a lot of TV. Over 4 hours per day in the US. This number has been steadily growing, and the more channels there are, the more people have been watching: at least until recently, since the rise of Internet 2.0.
Of course, I bet Graeme would make some convoluted argument about CEOs versus the rank-and-file -- but I don't buy into the whole corporate myth of the "Great Man" -- a subject for a different post.
6. Businesses already communicate well in various ways. And they don’t just do that willy-nilly. They carefully manage and account for their communications, especially those deemed to be “business records,” which includes e-mail and instant messaging. They must also comply with government regulations covering some of these forms of communications – archiving e-mail, for example – or face severe penalties and fines if they screw up. You’ll understand, then, why they’re not exactly clamoring for a new form.
Oh yeah, companies are in general doing a great job of communicating with their markets. I guess Graeme missed the Cluetrain, and isn't reading the wide range of writing about how business communications are desperately in need of rethinking, given the Internet and generational changes.
Anyway, the great majority will resist adoption of new innovations until all the risk is shaken out, courtesy of earlier adoptors. But don't try to tell me that those who move earlier don't gain an advantage: they do.
7. Businesses are advertisers, and advertisers don’t like blogs. Take it from an expert, Peter Horan, CEO of About.com (recently acquired by the New York Times Co.): “Advertisers don't want to advertise on someone's personal home page, they don't like advertising in forums, they don't like advertising in blogs. It's a media business. Media is about getting to critical mass and about getting advertiser support.” (From an excellent interview by Mark Glaser appearing on USC’s Online Journalism Review, in which Horan is also quick to point out that About.com’s business is not a blogging model, as many might think.)
Many blogs -- like those at Corante -- are not personal home pages. (Aren't home pages dead?) What advertisers want is cost-effective contact with qualified buyers. The plummeting percentages in analog media (see recent Chris Anderson post) demonstrate that people are defecting from print, TV, and radio, and going digital. Even digital media from traditional media outlets are dropping. So, no matter what people may say about what they want, ultimately they will go where the people are. If people want to read blogs, then advertisers will have to figure out how to advertise there, if they want to connect with people.
8. Business and politics don't mix well. If companies ever do politics, it's usually through their industry associations (which have lobbyists to play that game) while they do business. Only a tiny fraction of businesses employ their own lobbyists or government relations people. Most won't be online participating in endless chatter about what happened in today's city council meeting.
Ok, but I don't know what that has to do with blogs in general. It's a widespread misunderstanding -- based on the media frenzy at the national conventions last year -- that blogs are all about politics, but blogs can be about anything.
9. Business writing style and blogger style don’t even come close. Editing is the major missing ingredient in the latter. Most of the content of the blogosphere is badly lacking in proper usage, punctuation, organization and more. And there seems to be an unstated blogger’s creed of “Why say something in 100 words when you can say it in 1,200?” Once people see the alternative, they realize they actually do prefer copy that’s readable, coherent and to the point – puh-lease, to the point!
Spare me. The best bloggers are great writers, and basic business writing is in general soulless, superlative larded, and jingoistic. People in general want a point of view expressed in the first person: an authority expressing strong beliefs in lucid prose. Most business writing and journalism lasks those features: no True Voice.
10. Businesses have other ways of dealing with promoting their stances. The corporate communications and public relations profession is remarkably quiet in all the rah-rah hype of blogging. Here’s but one example of their lack of buy-in: the League of American Communications Professionals recently published a newsletter on the topic of “Converting a Corporate Cause to a Grassroots Campaign via the Web.” The b-word never even appeared.
The who? The American Marketing Association is running a national series of conferences on blogging (I will be speaking at one in NYC this June, for example), and the American Business Media association just held a meeting on the topic. There are scores of PR professionals blogging regularly, and recommending that their clients work to incorporate blogging into their media mix... as quickly as possible.
Well, a short rebuttal has become a long counterpoint. Graeme has run out all the classic parts of the Wet Blanket List: if this was important we'd be doing it already, there are better ways to do this, this is just the old stuff in new wrappings, the establishment (in this case, the old-line Communications folks) thinks this new stuff is dumb, etc. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions points out that the emergence of any new paradigm -- one that invalidates a previous worldview -- will be subjected to these sorts of attacks, independent of the actual issues that differentiate the new from the old. And, of course, those that espouse the new paradigm will be personally discredited and attacked by the establishment.
I don't know who Graeme Thickins is, or what he does, but he is playing the role here of an advocate of the Media Counter-Reformation. I expect that those arguing against blogging will get increasingly strident as more businesses adopt blogging as a core element of their communications plans, and the old ways start to fall down. Jobs will be lost, careers ended, and money that historically flowed through old line PR, communications firms, and media companies will find new channels into other pockets.
I am working on the Corante business plan with Hylton in Cambridge MA for the next two days, and it really takes me back to wander around Harvard Square. I grew up in Boston (Brookline High, '71; UMass Amherst '79), and worked here for the first ten years of my business life.
Tonight is really old home week: I will be participating in a MBA class at Boston University with Dave Evans (of our Online Dating Insider blog) about blogs, social software, and so on. I got my masters from BU (Computer Science '86) and taught there for five years or so as adjunct faculty. Ought to be fun; and we're planning to go to some pub nearby afterward.
I am happy to see that Businessweek's Tech Beat blog has been ported to a new blogging platform that supports trackbacks and comments, as Justin Hibbard reports. (Disclaimer: Businessweek is a client -- I was helping them with the new blog redesign.)
A number of people, including Scoble and David Berlind, wag their finger at Microsoft's Jeff Raikes for launching an antique-style web column instead of a blog: and no RSS? Scoble says people like this should be fired.
I just heard that Adobe is buying Macromedia for $3.4B. [Pointer from Clickable Culture] Maybe someone at Adobe will wake up to the fact that having Flash on 99%+ of connected desktops should lead to a Flash-based instant messaging network, and perhaps something like the Nerdvana client, instead of the ill-fated Central application?
Tom Zeller interviewed me last week for a piece that ran today in the NY Times, When the Blogger Blogs, Can the Employer Intervene?, which provides a good rehash of the Niall Kennedy mess at Technorati. The conclusion: your individual freedom of expression is likely to be squashed by the conformist pressures brought to bear by employers. He mentions that the EFT recently recommended a course of action: "Two weeks ago, the group published a tutorial on "how to blog safely," which included tips on avoiding getting fired. Chief among its recommendations: Blog anonymously." Great. Wonderful.
I have used literally thousands of communications tools over the past 20 years, and although there has been an increase in commmunication speed and media, we have yet to see the "nerdvana" of tools that I have dreamed about for so long.
I have long championed other media as inherently being better than email, such as instant messaging, so, as you can imagine, the tool I am dreaming out incorporates the basic metaphor of IM: the buddy list. But it goes beyond IM, as I will show you.
How can I so baldly state that other media are better than email, in such an absolute way? Simple. Email is designed as a lowest-common denominator communications system, where everyone is treated equally. All emails, more or less, are the same (leaving aside issues of rich text v HTML and so on, which is not the thrust of my argument), which is stupid. The reality is that my relationships with people -- whether I know them or not, how well I know them, and how involved we are at any given time in regular communication -- is foremost in my mind when involved in communications, and as a result, the various artifacts of communication should be treated differently based on the context for their existence.
Basically, email is pretty good at communicating with people when you don't know them well, or people you don't know at all. All you need is their email address and your emails will be treated pretty much like anybody else's. But as a result, email doesn't really do very much to help with the highest valued communication: communicating with the known. That's where the paradigm of buddies, and the gated communities of instant messaging networks excel.
But even technologies that I think are more useful in remaining in close contact with your circles of friends and colleagues don't necessarily work together very well, if at all. So I am forced to read and write emails in one tool (yes, I do email, despite my dislike for the medium), IMs in another (actually, two IM clients), and read blogs in yeat another. Coordinating appointments and to-dos that involve others is managed in yet another app. And an address book app is used as the repository of some of the information about people (like email address, IM handles, and phone numbers), while their blogs RSS feeds are stored elsewhere.
So, I decided to mockup an example of what a good unified client might offer someone like me, so I could sit in one tool all day long, choosing the appropriate communication, collaboration, or coordination channel based on the context.
The Nerdvana Client
Just for laughs, I have dubbed the mocked up client "Nerdvana" after the Dilbert strip where Dilbert proclaims, after he's cleaned up his PC's desktop, compacted his drive, and deleted unnecessary files, that he has reached "Nerdvana".
Basically, Nerdvana takes the IM concept of a buddy list and extends it to include all sorts of media. I have chosen to partition my world into three groups, Inner Circle (folks I interact with daily), Outer Circle (folks I interact with regularly), and The World (everyone else). This is largely for simplicity: there could be dozens of groups. And, oh, by the way, contacts can appear in multiple groups, and groups can include subgroups with no limits on level of nesting.
In the first image, I expanded only the Inner Circle -- note I did not include any icons to represent expand/contract because I am a lazy designer. I have a small number of contacts in this group, although in the real world my Inner Circle category is more like a dozen folks. Each contact has four numbers associated with them, which represent 'of interest' blog entries, emails, IMs, and appointments, respectively. By 'of interest' I mean whatever the preferences are currently set to: for example, I may have configured things to display unread blog entries, unread email, open IMs, and future appointments, to suggest only one reasonable group of settings.
Also note -- since this is all in the world of conjecture, so I can get whatever I want -- that the Nerdvana tool is extensible, so is possible to add on as many services as you'd like. For example, the IM service could expand to be Jabber, AIM, and Yahoo. Or completely different services could be included, like podcasts, to-do lists, geolocation, and web conferences. Presence is indicated by the green/yellow/red lights on the contacts.
In the second graphic I have expanded Greg Narain's content, and see various categories of communications going on.
In the third graphic, I have fully expanded Greg's content, showing the blog entry's title, the subject line of the emails, the title of the IM session, and the subject of the upcoming appointment. This is displayed two different ways, based on two different sets of preferences or different commands used to expand the content: with and without category headers.
Clicking on any of these fields could lead to extremely variable behavior, based on what sort of client you think Nerdvana should be.
In a open API sort of environment, clicking on any of Greg's content could lead to opening the appropriate tool of choice for that sort of interaction. So, for example, clicking on an email could lead to popping that email in Apple Mail (I am running OS X), and likewise, selecting the IM topic could pop the active IM session running in Fire (the multiheaded IM client I run to stay in contact with Jabber, Yahoo, and MSN users). Clicking on the blog entry could lead to either opening the entry in the browser or popping an RSS reader on my desktop, depending on configuration settings in Nerdvana.
In a totalitarian software world, Nerdava would include all the functionality needed: it would be an email client, RSS reader, IM solution, and calendar tool. But such tools are generally not best at any of the things they aspire to be, and wind up discarded as a result, because users want some cool feature in their mail or IM client, or just don't want to imagine dropping their chosen RSS reader.
Obviously, my preference is the former: for Nerdvana to act as a primary organizing interface for existing communication tools, taking the buddy list concept as the core principle for all communication strategy, and supporting cross tool integration.
For example, your IM solution might not support the concept of an appointed time to start an IM session, but with Nerdvana you can do so:
Define a time and a subject for an appointment, using the Nerdvana interface, but actually managed in your native calendar app, like iCal.
After it exists, select the appointment in Nerdvana, and create an association with some other sort of communication -- in this case an IM session.
When the appointment occurs, Nerdvana will create the pending IM session.
The same technique can used to link writing an email with an appointment, or queueing up future blog entries.
Alternatively, you could imagine a structure where important communication events -- such as long IM sessions, or time spent reading blog entries -- could automatically be journaled on your calendar, as a means of tracking time, or simply being able to use the calendar as a way to search back for communication activities and content on a timeline basis.
Conclusions
I have always maintained that if you are going to dream, dream big. So I have big hopes for Nerdvana. Maybe someone out there is trying to do something along these lines -- at least in part -- and if so, I want to hear about it. There is lots of innovation going on in the various specialized communication areas: better RSS readers, IM clients, and innumerable social networking apps. But I haven't seen much going on in bringing it all together, based on something like the buddy list metaphor.
I could also start in on how Nerdvana could play in an open social networking system -- where the aggregation of communication channels, like blogs, IM, email, with specialized services like Flickr, Last.fm, Plazes, and so on, for photos , music, and location -- could not only lead to multifaceted digital identities, but a coherent way of bringing together the disparate threads of identity into a manageable tool framework. This starts to look something like Mark Pincus has been looking into in his PeopleWeb thoughts. But I will leave that for the next installment of the Nerdvana series.
The Freesound Project - developed by the Music Technology Group as "a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds." Note, this is not songs. Sounds refers to audio snippets, samples, recordings, bleeps. This will help create a repository for audio research foundations and a place for interaction among sound artists. They are actively seeking new material. The database will be used in performances at this year's International Computer Music Conference.
I will be making a preposterously short trip to Paris a for the upcoming Les Blogs conference. A great group of people, and I am particularly eager to see various Europeans that I haven't seen in months (Euan Semple, Lee Bryant, Paolo Valdemarin, and Loic LeMeur), as well as various others who are making the trek (Joi Ito, Ross Mayfield, Halley Suitt, and Doc Searls, to name only a few). I am planning to record a True Voice show while there, and it looks like I will have no shortage of people to collar for that.
Joi Ito: Amicus Brief Asks for Legal Rights for Internet Journalists
Joi Ito mentions "The Stanford Center for Internet and Society filed an amicus brief today [12 April 2005] which I signed together with a number of others. Go CIS!
Amicus Brief Asks for Legal Rights for Internet Journalists
CIS filed an amicus brief today on behalf of The First Amendment Project, Internet journalists and bloggers and others asking the court in the Apple v. Does case to treat online publishers the same rights as their colleagues who publish in more traditional formats. Download file"
Yeah, like the right to jailed for refusing to disclose confidential informants, perhaps?
In its latest bid to make money on free Internet services, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Latest News about Microsoft is betting that consumers will be willing to use their instant messaging Latest News about instant messaging identities as billboards for products ranging from Sprite to Adidas sneakers.
The newest version of MSN Messenger instant messaging product, released late yesterday, allows consumers to download free backgrounds, pictures and other content tied to specific ad campaigns. The hope is that users will then share those downloads with other consumers -- providing another boost to advertisers, who pay Microsoft for the privilege.
Attracting Users
Blake Irving, a corporate vice president with Microsoft's MSN online unit, said the company hopes to attract users who are so taken by the advertising campaigns that they choose to associate themselves with the brand -- much like a person might buy a Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX) Latest News about Starbucks. coffee mug.
Yikes. I hate self-identity building through brand affiliation in the abstract, and in my IM client in specific.
That reminds me, I am going to do a mockup of what the perfect real-time desktop client should look like, in the hopes that someone out there will read it, and build it for me. Lord knows, I have explained the ideas to dozens of real-time technology companies, and to date no one has come close. Next week. I promise.
Chris Anderson at the Long Tail has enumerated the traditional media's meltdown:
Flat to Down to Way Down:
Music: sales last year were down 21% from their peak in 1999
Television: network TV's audience share has fallen by a third since 1985
Radio: listenership is at a 27-year low
Newspapers: circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating
Magazines: total circulation peaked in 2000 and is now back to 1994 levels (but a few premier titles are bucking the trend!) [Interesting -- I have been spending a lot of time with major publishing companies recently, who are trying hard to get their minds bent around blogging.]
Books: sales growth is lagging the economy as whole
Up:
Movies: 2004 was another record year, both for theaters and DVDs
Videogames: even in the last year of this generation of consoles, sales hit a new record
Web: online ads will grow 30% this year, breaking $10 billion (5.4% of all advertising)
Note: all the digital media are growing, while analog media are dying. Print, radio, and television moguls continue to not get it, and in a typical McLuhanesque landgrab will find that their entire media world will become content in the new, bigger media space.
The long tail argues that there is still a lot to be made of that content, but the ones that will be making the money -- and the channel that it will be streaming through -- will be the digital moguls, not today's analog media companies.
Google Local has gone mobile. You will now be able to access Google map searches from your XHTML-friendly mobile phone. This expands the Google presence in both the information services area, as well as in the mobile application arena. As Tris Hussey notes, "All Google has to do now is offer RSS feeds on searches and they will seriously win out over Yahoo, MSN, and others." Link thanks to Tris of Wireless Jobs.
Holy smokes... I previously posted an Xtreme podcasting story. This update caught me by surprise... read the following and find the audio report below...
We received another message from my Italian mountaineer friend Lorenzo Gariano today. He and his team, who are intending to climb Everest via the north col in late May, are trapped in Katmandu, indirectly due to action by Maoist guerillas. The city's bus drivers are refusing to take them to Base Camp without armed escort.
[UPDATE: "In a chat with one of the climbers in Kathmandu, ExplorersWeb has learned the details of the Maoist attack involving two Russian climbers en route from Kathmandu to the border town of Nyamare Saturday.". See also BBC article 'Meeting Nepal's Maoists' for more background.]
A new version of MSN Messenger has been released. Upgraded features in version 7 include a more holistic approach to all MSN features - integrating search with video with voice with MSN Spaces and upgraded personalization. Some personalization includes the ability to choose ads as backgrounds - a way to be associated with a brand style. Advertising, overall, is more aggressive: age/location targeting and new text link additions. The new release aims to enhance the "richness" of the online experience. Also includes in the new release are some safeguards against IM worms.
A photo-based game called Bickr has emerged around the photo sharing Flickr.
Bickr takes advantage of the community aspects of Flickr, by encouraging individuals to take pictures and enter them into a contest using Flickr's tagging system - you could have a contest around any tag, from "cats" to "winterwonderland." Tagging as a social phenomenon in action.
bickr uses flickr's tagging system as the basis to identify group affiliations, associate image(s) with game(s), and discover group commonalities and differences by tag(s).
bickr groups are those interested in finding commonalities and differences from within and between groups and establishing image based dialogue between different communities.
bickr will succeed because people love to take photos. More importantly, people love to share photos. bickr harnesses an individual's desire to share imagery to effect group interaction.
I think it's a great way to take advantage of Flickr's tagging and grouping systems. It's a seamless way to integrate into a widely disparate group based upon a common interest in the contest at hand. And it might be just that little push needed for some people to really get into Digital Photography or to start participating in online communities. Really interesting development.
The Head Lemur at Raving Lunacy has posted an entry called ROFLMFAO (can someone tell me what the acronym means?), where he noted that Marqui is sponsoring Corante's Feedfest. His comments:
Looks like Marq and I may be having this debate in public sometime in the next month. Alex Williams, Corante's Managing Director for Events told me that Marqui wants to sponsor such an event. An interesting moral dilemma: Corante will be getting paid by Marqui to promote a debate on the pros and cons of Marquiism. Is this one of those Jesuitical compromises, where we are putting the end before the means?
My view is that I don't see how in the long run this ad campaign will help Marqui: they will have to have a long, long tail to get away from the negative tang of all this rancorous contention about their marketing strategy.
I guess, though, the implication is that Corante should have turned down Marqui's sponsorship? I have always maintained that Marquiism is self-defeating for Marqui, and that bloggers shouldn't do it because they will damage their personal credibility. That doesn't mean that Marqui shouldn't have the right to participate in traditional advertising or event sponsorship, even if we are on different sides of the Marquiism controversy. I am not so narrow-minded to bar entry to those whose opinions differ from mine. Let controversy thrive. I would be happy to have Marqui as a conventional sponsor of Get Real, for example, although I wouldn't agree to talk about Marqui.
I once owned a great t-shirt, now long in tatters -- white, with big red letters, stating "Stamp Out Dangerous Ideas" -- which I believed was obvious irony. However, every time I wore it, at least two or three people would give me the thumbs up, or say something like "Right on!" Just because I think Marqui is wrong doesn't mean I will try to suppress their attempts to make the case for Marquiism.
Once again (for the millionth time): I believe that Marqui is going down the wrong path paying bloggers to talk about Marqui. It's not illegal, but the bloggers involved are squandering their hard-earned (and quickly dissipated) social capital and authority. In the long run, Marqui is not building its brand, but just gaining a strange reputation. But I won't try to block their opportunities to make their case, or to try to sell their products.
[Update: Just noticed this comment on Raving Lunacy from Janet Johnson of Marqui:
Believe me, as the debate unfolded, the irony of our sponsorship of the feedfest event where we were bashed for paying bloggers to blog was not lost on me.
Thanks for getting it, too. Nicely put.
Janet doesn't get it. We won't bar Marqui from the world of open discourse on the issue, and we won't say "we won't take your filthy money." In fact, we hope Marqui continues to participate in more conventional forms of sponsorship.]
[Another update: Ed Simmnett clued me in to the acronym: Rolling On The Floor Laughing My F*cking Ass Off (ROFLMFAO).]
Interesting to hear a VC analyst's take on Del.icio.us: [from alarm:clock] "Classic guy-in-a-room venture. Schachter has been running this as a side project, with no stated intention of making money. Rather, he reaps the karmic rewards of creating a nice Web tool and clearly draws the adulation of many Web 2.0 geeks. We think he's wise to emerge from his bedroom - a little investment can go a long way in the current market, as can a loyal user base."
As the site (complete with RSS/Podcast feed of Lorenzo's audio reports) indicates: "Adventurer Lorenzo Gariano is part of a ten-man collaborative expedition between 7summits.com and the 7summits club from Russia, led by Alex Abramov and Harry Kikstra, to the North Face of Everest this April and May. Follow his progress through his audio blog and GPS position reports on these pages."
Peter Scott's Centre for New Media at The Open University's Knowledge Media Institute, and in particular his technical/media team of Chris Valentine, Jon Linney, and Kevin Quick, have worked with Lorenzo on various events like this over the years. Lorenzo first came to our attention in his 'other life' as the guy who looked after the plants at the Knowledge Media Institute! We found out that he was a serious mountaineer, who was engaged in a Seven Summits quest (highest peak on each continent, of which this will be his fifth), and decided to explore the role of innovative, user-friendly consumer-ready technologies both to bring his experience live to the masses and also to help publicize his quest.
The Matterhorn climb featured the UK's first mobile cameraphone, which Lorenzo used to take pictures at safe moments during his climb, and his Lhotse climb included an audioblog segment. During the current climb, GPS positioning will enable us to track his location, and satellite phone audio reports get stored on the site and also embedded in an RSS feed for podcast enthusiasts to listen to at their convenience.
The technology behind the current event is described by Kevin Quick, in an email to me this evening, as follows:
"Basically a batch file runs on Chris [Valentine]'s computer which takes the wav and uses a command line utility to convert the wav files to mp3 - the batch file then copies the mp3 onto [our audio server machine], where the appropriate ID3 tags are added ... - this includes embedding an image in the mp3 (i.e. what you will see on the photo ipod - this is a logo of the web site banner by default, but will dynamically be changed to a photo if one is added to the site associated with that particular phone call). PHP dynamically generates the RSS feed for the podcast - So the whole process from phone call to podcast is automated from beginning to end."
Jupiter Research stats: "28% of teens keep blogs, the Web logs that are fast becoming a prominent alternative source of news and commentary, while only 16% of adults do the same." (reported here).
Edelman and Intelliseek have released a report (see here) that warns the corporate types to get hip to the blogosphere, or all us fringe lunatics will out you.
[The report] urges firms "to respond quickly, with the facts and with respect" to unfavourable comments made on blogs. Above all, firms should never lie because "those in the 'blogosphere' will find out and humiliate you".
Key blunders by firms include making unfounded criticism against bloggers, pretending to be someone you are not and paying people to write kind things about your firm.
When approaching bloggers to attempt to get publicity, correspondence must be: short; snappy; relevant; fit the tone of the site; and never an obvious advertisement. Useful information such as website links and offers to answer questions are also popular among bloggers.
I am not so sure about the "short; snappy" idea. I would rather that it was crafted to meet the sensibilities of my blog.
The report highlights Mazda's BR (Blog Relations) disaster:
One of the worst examples of an attempt to engage with bloggers, highlighted in the study, was a move by Mazda last year to gain publicity via blogging for its Mazda 3. Blogs, purportedly from anonymous bloggers, were found to be sponsored by advertisers working for Mazda.
Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Intelliseek, said: "Mazda totally ignored the importance of transparency. Corporate blogs are OK, but they must be labelled and identified as such.
"Bloggers are savvy, inherently sceptical, defensive of their medium and able to sniff out imposters quickly."
[Pointer from Ben Silverman, who states "I haven't read the report yet, but probably will once I have some time and I'm bored out of my skull."]
Doug Kaye has announced that IT Conversations is going "open source" -- meaning that the contributions of the community toward IT Conversations projects is welcomed. JD Lasica has a posting that includes the announcement, originally sent by email.
There's only one person on earth who can write a letter beginning like this:
As you may recall, in 1986, I created “Prayer For World Peace,” a one-hour live TV broadcast for Pope John Paul II that I also produced and directed. The program was viewed by a billion people worldwide. I had directed Live Aid and Sport Aid for Bob Geldof and that made me cocky enough to present the Vatican with the largest satellite telecast of the time.
And there's only one person I know of who would be the recipient of such a lettter. The letter author is Tony Verna, and the recipient is Joi Ito who has blogged the whole letter. A must-read if you're either into large-scale synchronous media or want to read some timely and fond memories of Pope John Paul II, from a somewhat different perspective.
Verna routinely did stuff that was orders of magnitude bigger than anything anyone else ever thought of.... oh, and at least a decade earlier. Was this 'social TV', or what I like to think of as 'synchronous social software'? You bet it was, and long before anyone had either thought of such terminology or dreamed that it was technically possible! OK, it's not the same mode of operation as the current concept of IM-ing your fellow soap-viewers, but consider the strong social bonding and media-centric vision which were the driving forces behind much of Verna's work, as indicated by this excerpt from his letter:
In addition to the hundred plus cameras I had stationed around the globe, I arranged for the congregations (live on monitors) to greet the Holy Father, before and after reciting the rosary with him.
Whew... unbelievable! Verna had the vision, skill, guts and attitude to pull this off, and it appears from his letter that Pope John Paul II had the good sense, grace, and shared vision to facilitate this spectacular large-scale synchronous social event. Go read the rest [of Verna's letter]...
I was reminded a couple of days ago about some thoughts I've had for a while now regarding Flickr and social networking. So, here is what got me back on this topic. I posted a few pictures to Flickr and then used Flickr's great blogging tools to add some to my personal blog. Now, many people who read my personal blog are also in my Contacts set on Flickr - so, people who see my pictures on Flickr are also likely to see them on the blog. The odd thing is this: people comment more often on Flickr to the same pictures that appear on my blog - even when the pictures are more contextualized when placed within a blog post. So, why is this? What makes Flickr so much more condusive to interaction?
There has been a lot of hype about how great Flickr is as a photo sharing tool... it's easy to use, has a great interface, shows you recent uploads from your friends and everyone, and produces easy to follow slideshows. There's been just as much talk of Flickr for its popularity with bloggers - what more could you ask for than direct upload to your blog and a script generator for various sizes of your photo. I dug around a little on searches such as "Flickr social networking" etc, but found very little. A ton on the fact that it's great for social networking, but nobody was really asking why.
One hypothesis is that it is more about mutual contacts. I can see who my friends are friends with and so forth. Over time, we tend to form clusters, each person interacting in a more intertwined fashion. I've seen it happen. But it still does not explain why these bloggers are commenting on my Flickr set and not my blog. I am missing part of the explanation somewhere.
Ok, what else makes Flickr unique? Obviously something - enough for Yahoo to take notice and purchase Flickr. Given this acquisition and the release of Yahoo 360, it would appear that community is the pillar behind these decisions. It would seem that, aside from offering the most comprehensive technological photo sharing tool out there, Flickr has created a cohesive community. A blog is social networking - so is Flickr. And yet they differ - the community structure is different.
One crucial difference between blogs and Flickr may be the cornerstone to this mystery. With Flickr, you have the ability to add notes, comments, and tags to photos. On Flickr, you can add a comment to any part of the photo; you can also tag a photo (yours or someone else's) to assign it to that keyword category. Since the tags are searchable, your photos are always coming up and being viewed by others - no matter when you took it. So, people are interacting with the photo in a way not otherwise possible. This creates an ongoing conversation about the photo and the fluidity of its meaning, constantly revising where it belongs in the taxonomy. And, perhaps as importantly, this interaction amongst the Flickr community gives one a sense of contributing to an overall archive of shared experiences.
Google recently announced that they too are entering the video indexing/search business, in competition with the likes of Yahoo! and HP Labs. As a recent article notes:
Like Google's recent library project scanning volumes of books, the company's video ambitions highlight its broad plans to digitize the world's content and make it searchable. It also foreshadows a heated race with rivals Yahoo and Microsoft to be the de facto service for finding information wherever it resides: television, the Internet, cell phones or other convergence devices.
I've often wondered why video was the next indexed platform, however. Sure, video killed the radio star, but then again audio came first. It seems like we've barely mastered the audio techniques, audio recognition, and things of that like but we're skipping over our roots.
I'd venture that indexing video is potentially easier than indexing audio. Why? Reading image patterns is possible already. Video, in its most empirical state, is a series of images with a possible audio track underneath. Video has the other benefit that it is often closed-captioned for a variety of audiences. is this why video is being indexed first?
Certainly, I don't think that the current podcasting rage would be enough fuel to drive better audio indexing. But isn't there a ton of audio out there that needs to be indexed still - including the audio embedded in video?
AOL Red rolling out blog space to capture the lucrative teen market that is currently being served by LiveJournal and Xanga. With their subscriber base, they are sure to make a dent.
when teens are asked to choose whether they prefer to share their innermost feelings with their parents or a blog, they are split with roughly half (51%) selecting their parents and 49% choosing a blog... AOL's RED service offers a refreshing way to create a blog in a 'velvet rope' environment and gives teens and parents the option to choose between different levels of privacy, ranging from private, semi-private and public... Once the level of privacy is determined, teens can then create and design their blogs' style, color, layout and other features such as the ability to post polls, news, and other personal content.
The most recent poll over at Messaging Pipeline has found that people are taking action to make their IM systems more secure. Nearly 24% of those polled have moved instant messaging services to secure private enterprise systems.
IM has become the latest hole in the security dike surrounding corporate networks, and that's no surprise because while the public systems, including AOL's Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger, are popular and easy to use, they're as good as nothing when it comes to security of your networks. In fact they're not even that good because they have no way to protect you from worm attacks. the emerging new class of spam for instant messaging called "spim," and of course the phishing attacks that have "discovered" instant messaging.
This comes not too long after I talked about the rising threat of IM Phishing - apparently, I am not the only one noticing the rising in spim. And it's good that action is being taken. Still, 24% is a small number when it comes to being secure, especially in the corporate setting. In addition, 22% of those polled have eliminated IM as the security solution, and this is perhaps the wrong move.
As the article noted, IM has really amazing business benefits. It allows you another level of interaction in the business environment. Virtual meetings, group meetings, or just quick and seamless Q&A with co-workers comes along with the use of IMs in the corporate setting. I also think it is great for team-building; I have noted that just being able to chat with my coworkers online has helped us build a more cohesive team overall.
Presence-based messaging, including instant messaging, is on the rise. But systems have to be secure in order for their benefits to be fully realized and the growing number of private systems shown by our survey addresses that problem. The cost of those solutions is apparently less of an objection than it was nearly a year ago when we did a similar survey.
That's a good thing, and one that will make the next year or two very interesting as various presence technologies and security systems that protect them emerge.
THE NEW VISIONARIES: REBOOTING THE WEB
[Starting in January!]
BEHIND THE SCENES sponsored by GoToMeeting
› 24 Dec 2005: Behind The Scenes [next episode - postponed for Transit strike]
› 30 Nov 2005: Behind The Scenes at Behind The Scenes
PODCASTING ON WINDOWS sponsored by GoToMeeting
› 29 Oct 2005: Video Podcasting
› 20 Oct 2005: Online Services
› 3 Oct 2005:
Basically, email is pretty good at communicating with people when you don't know them well, or people you don't know at all. All you need is their email address and your emails will be treated pretty much like anybody else's. But as a result, email doesn't really do very much to help with the highest valued communication: communicating with the known
Also note -- since this is all in the world of conjecture, so I can get whatever I want -- that the Nerdvana tool is extensible, so is possible to add on as many services as you'd like. For example, the IM service could expand to be Jabber, AIM, and Yahoo. Or completely different services could be included, like podcasts, to-do lists, geolocation, and web conferences. Presence is indicated by the green/yellow/red lights on the contacts.
