Monthly Archives: July 2008

07.05.08
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Going Solo Leeds announced

I shall be reprising my talk on how to draw a healthy line between work and play at Steph Booth‘s Going Solo conference in Leeds on 12 September. Registration is now open, but don’t delay – the first 25 tickets will be going at the early bird rate of £150, and some have already gone. Once they run out, the normal price is £220.

If you’re a freelance, or are thinking of starting out on your own, then Going Solo will be invaluable – it has a great atmosphere and some stonking speakers! So go straight to registration, do not pass go, and pick up an early bird ticket whilst they are still around.

07.05.08
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Talking social media with Peter Shankman

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Michael O’Connor Clarke, a long-time friend of Suw who I only recently had the pleasure of meeting, provided a virtual introduction to Peter Shankman. Peter was on a whirlwind trip to London and wanted to meet some people to talk about social media. Peter wants to help PR and journalists have a better working relationship in the age of blogging, vlogging, Twittering and social networks.

We walked down the road from The Guardian to St Paul’s Cathedral, and Peter pulled out his Flip video camera. He asked me about where to get some lunch, the differences between social media in the US and Europe (and lots of differences between European countries) and cats. Well, the conversation veered off onto cats largely because of Suw’s (I have only written one post) side project, Kits and Mortar. I think Suw and I should start keeping a blog list of most irrelevant PR pitches we get by way of Kits and Mortar.

And as I mention in the chat with Peter, ‘social media press releases’ need to be more than a normal press release done with an old school mail merge from a list of bloggers. Social media is personal media, and if you spend just a few seconds finding a post that somehow relates to your product, you’re going to be more successful. Peter also caught up with video blogging David Brain, CEO of Edelman Europe so he got both the journalist’s view and a PR view during his visit to London.

I had a fun time chatting with Peter. But hey man, you said I wascorn fed? Just checked on that definition: “large and often muscular, but lacking in intelligence, refinement or sophistication”. Am I really that muscular?

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07.05.08
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links for 2008-07-05

07.03.08
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07.03.08
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Why Identi.ca needs to look further afield than open source

There’s been a lot of buzz in the Twittersphere this morning – well, when Twitter behaves, that is – about a new Twitter-like service, Identi.ca. Launched yesterday, Identi.ca takes the Twitter idea and open sources it, and that alone makes it worth keeping an eye on not just because we can soon expect a world full of Identi.ca installations, but also because it means that business will be able to take the code and run it behind the firewall, finally bringing Twitter-like ambient intimacy to enterprise. (If any businesses are brave enough to experiment, that is!)

In my view, though, being open source isn’t going to be enough of a draw for most people. Even if you assume that the service will turn out to be stable, reliable, richly featured, able to easily import contact lists, and attracts the interest of third party clients like Twitterific and Twhirl, that still won’t be enough to draw people away from Twitter, unless Twitter catastrophically fails. Yes, Twitter’s having significant and annoying problems, but it’s important not to underestimate just how apathetic users can be when it comes to migrating from one social system to another.

What Identi.ca needs to do is to become a cross between Ping.fm, which allows you to posts to multiple social networks, and FriendFeed, which aggregates your output from a variety of tools such as Twitter, Flickr, and Del.icio.us… but with bells on. We need a ‘write once, post anywhere’ system, combined with an ‘aggregate and de-dupe’ system, so that we can all become tool agnostic. Such a system wouldn’t care where you wrote your update, it would distribute it to all the tools you use, and it would aggregate back responses from all your friends, regardless of which system they used at the time.

I think there are two key parts to such a service: De-duping will be essential if such a system is going to be at all usable. If you post the same message to Twitter, FriendFeed, Plurk and Jaiku, then I don’t want to see it showing up four times in my aggregated feed. Friend list management and grouping is going to be the other key issues. The tedious thing about Identi.ca – or any other such service – is recreating my Twitter friend list, or at least some part of the Twitter/Identi.ca friend lists Venn diagram. This is possibly where something like OpenSocial might come in very handy.

I doubt that such a tool would be simple, and relying on other people’s APIs creates multiple points of failure, but the nice thing would be that if I am posting to all ‘microblogging’ platforms and aggregating them all back again, it won’t matter if one tool goes down for a bit. If Twitter dies, but my update has gone to FriendFeed too, and then pushed back out to my friend’s account that they happen to access via Jaiku, who cares that one route in that network was out of action for a bit? On the other hand, if Identi.ca were to becomes that WOPA-AADD system, then you are rather creating a single point of failure… unless, of course, people were to run multiple installations as nodes in a Skype-like network, which would be possible with open source code. Just a thought.

Whilst I doubt that I’ll be deserting Twitter any time soon, if Identi.ca moves in the right direction it could really make a big difference to how we maintain our online presence.

07.01.08
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Newsknitter: Knitting together the daily news agenda

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Ebru Kurbak / Mahir M. Yavuz: Newsknitter

It’s another day where I’m looking for ways to visualise huge bits of information for a project that I’m working on, and I stumbled upon the Newsknitter project.

News Knitter is a data visualization project which focuses on knitted garments as an alternative medium to visualize large scale data. ….

News Knitter converts information gathered from the daily political news into clothing. Live news feed from the Internet that is broadcasted within 24 hours or a particular period is analyzed, filtered and converted into a unique visual pattern for a knitted sweater.

It’s the brainchild of Turkish artists Ebru Kurbak and Mahir Yavuz. From the Generator.x website and conference:

The Newsknitter web site does not indicate whether custom garments will eventually be for sale, even though it would seem an obvious extension of the project. Too bad the daily news typically makes for a grim way to commemorate one’s birthday or other significant date.

It reminds me of CNN headline T-shirts, but this is much, much cooler. With such products easier to make, it’s odd that news organisations aren’t thinking more about interesting products based on their information. Oh well, back to looking for data visualisations.

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07.01.08
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links for 2008-07-01

07.01.08
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First Fruitful Seminar a success; three more in the pipeline

I’m delighted to say that the first Fruitful Seminar on the adoption of social media in enterprise, Making Social Tools Ubiquitous, last Friday was a bit of a hit! I had a fabulous time, and I got some great feedback on the day, so I’m looking forward to running it again. Quite a few people said that they were interested in coming but couldn’t make it that particular day, so I am going to repeat the same seminar, probably on 10th September. Put the date in your diary and keep an eye out for the registration page to go live!

I am also going to run two other seminars in September. One will be on The Email Problem: Email used to be a fantastically useful communications tool, but in recent years it has become more of a burden, with people struggling to read and respond to all of the email they receive. Some companies have tried “No Email Days”, but these put off the problem, they don’t solve it. If, however, you start to examine email as a psychological problem instead of a technological one, different solutions become apparent. This seminar, The Email Problem And How To Solve It will take an innovative look at email and the different ways that social media can reduce its use.

This leaves me with a slot free, and I’d like to put my seminar ideas to a popular vote. These are the options:

1. Social Media in Internal Communications: How can internal comms and HR departments use social media to help them effectively communicate with their constituency? How can you ensure that people have the information they need, when they need it? And how do you engage with your constituency and collect meaningful feedback?

2. Giving It Away – Open IP in Business: You’ve got some intellectual property, but how do you maximise its value to your business? Can giving it away actually earn you money? What is ‘Creative Commons’ and how do you choose a licence?

3. Using Social Tools in Journalism: Forget old-school arguments about bloggers vs. journalism – reality is much more interesting than that! How can you use social tools to organise your own information and help yourself work more efficiently? How can you engage with your audience using social tools? And how do you run a networked journalism project? (Maybe, just maybe, I might be able to persuade a famous journo-blogger to help me present this one!)

So…

And don’t forget, Lloyd Davis’ seminar, Mastering Social Media, is on 16 July and still has some places left, so sign up soon!