01.14.10
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CWSE Roundup – 8 Jan 10

Things got a bit mental before Christmas, as they are wont to do, so I didn’t have the time to do my planned weekly round up of posts over on The Social Enterprise. I blogged throughout the Christmas period – magickally, it would seem, given I was in Lanzarote for a week! So here’s a belated overview of what I’ve been banging on about since, er, 27th November:

The decline of empire
When provided a choice, do people choose?
ATA: Who are your favourite social media bloggers?
The other Two Cultures
Why does a blog look like a blog?

Notes of caution and notes of hope
Google’s real-time search ups the misTweet ante
Incentives in social media
danah boyd and digital anthropology
Professionalism

Metrics, Part 1: The webstats legacy
Instapaper: Managing your ‘To Read’ list
Saatchi and Saatchi get it horribly wrong for Toyota
Metrics, Part 2: Are we measuring the right things?
Let’s just not build teams

Metrics, Part 3: What are your success criteria?
The power of ecosystems
Developing etiquette
Metrics, Part 4: Subjective measurements
How fanboys see operating systems

Newsflash! RSS still not dead: Story at 11.
What makes a website successful?
Why we should care about information overload
Social semantics
The importance of voice

Twitter announces bylines
ATA: What’s a good framework for innovation?
The cost of IT failure
Avatars, faces and the socialisation of enterprise software
How to ruin your community

Which both explains why I’ve been a little bit quiet here and gives you something that hopefully makes up for that quiet.

01.14.10
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David Carr on Twitter

There’s a lot of stuff written about Twitter and most of it rubbish, but every now and again I read something that really sums Twitter up nicely. This piece by David Carr in the New York Times is one of those great articles that talks very clearly about why Twitter is both useful and important, but without flipping out in gushing hyperbole. It’s the sort of thing that I’ll keep in my arsenal of articles to show people who want to understand social media.

01.13.10
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Experimenting with Kachingle

In April last year I wrote about a start-up called Kachingle for The Guardian. I explained Kachingle thusly:

After registering with Kachingle, users decide on a maximum monthly donation, currently set at $5 (£3.50). When they see something they like, they simply click on the Kachingle “medallion” to initiate a donation. Kachingle tracks their reading habits, tots up how many times they visit each favoured site and divvies up the money proportionally at the end of the month.

It’s equally simple for site owners, who just need a PayPal account and a snippet of code to display the Kachingle medallion. The revenue split gives content providers 80% of the donations, with the rest covering Kachingle’s costs and PayPal fees.

I’ve been quietly keeping an eye on Kachingle to see when they would launch and was excited to get an email from Bill Lazar, Kachingle’s Marketing Engineer, last week saying that they were ready for beta testers to come on board. They will be launching properly in early February.

I think Kachingle is a really interesting idea, and I’m very excited to have the opportunity to test it out. That’s the medallion, up there in the top of the right-hand sidebar. All you need to sign up with Kachingle is a PayPal account and a spare $5 a month (although you can spend more if you want to). That works out at £3.07 per month, which even in a recession I think I can spare!

Kachingle sits very nicely with my recent decision to buy as many hand-crafted present for Christmas as I could. In an economic downturn it is more important than ever to support small businesses and I really like the fact that the vast majority of the money I spend on sites like Folksy go to the person who made the item I’ve bought.

But Kachingle is not just a way that I might earn a little spare change, it also gives me a way to support others. I’m hoping that over the course of the next few months, bloggers I enjoy will be able to join up and let me show them my appreciation.

If you want to sign up as a Kachingler or as a Site Owner, get in touch with Kachingle’s beta programme. And, of course, let me know what you think in the comments!

01.13.10
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links for 2010-01-13

  • Nokia tries to reinvent itself: Bears at the door | The Economist
    Kevin: Anyone watching the mobile industry knows that Nokia is facing renewed competition. The comparison's with Apple slightly overlook the computer giant's diversified portfolio. However, it's worth noting that Apple went from zero to 17% in just a few years, and that's after many in the mobile strongholds of Europe dismissed the American upstart out of hand. But the figures are illustrative, even if they need some caveats. "Nokia beats Apple in annual sales ($57 billion versus $37 billion) and market share in smart-phones (39% versus 17%), but it is much less profitable. In fact, Nokia’s share of industry profits fell from 64% in 2007 to 32% in 2009—not much more than Apple’s and less than RIM’s, according to Brian Modoff, an analyst with Deutsche Bank. Small wonder that Nokia’s market capitalisation is barely a quarter of Apple’s."
    (tags: apple nokia mobile)
01.13.10
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Giving ourselves space to create

There are lots of reasons why letting people blog behind (or in front of) the firewall is a good idea, but one of the key benefits to blogging is how easy it makes thoughtfulness and creativity.

In his blog post Stress, creativity and confabulation, Johnnie Moore shares some of the insights he’s gleaned from Keith Sawyer’s book, Group Genius:

Keith’s work also emphasises how we deceive ourselves about leaps of insight, assigning credit for apparently sudden bursts of insight to a variety of causes. Closer examination shows that our minds actually build towards ideas in a process of slow, often unconscious, accretion.

Blogging is one of those ways that we can accrete the little thoughts we need to help us come up with the crucial ideas we need to do our jobs better. It also allows us to share our ideas with our peers who can add their own extensions and refinements, growing our kernel into something bigger and better. Blogging makes explicit the natural idea formation process and through that makes the process itself as valuable as the end product.

It’s not true that we are more creative under pressure, or that big ideas come from flashes of insight, or that the lone genius is only one capable of great invention. Just as its a myth that art requires madness, so it is a myth that creativity needs pinpoint moments of brilliance. Better to provide people with the space and time to participate in an ongoing process of creativity than try to coral it in a brainstorming session.

01.12.10
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Two thoughts

Couple of thoughts from Euan Semple that are really worth considering in the context of social media behind the firewall. Firstly:

Social media relies on people having the temerity to say what they think and others having the decency to listen.

And secondly:

With a blog you have more reason to think. Having an outlet for your ideas makes you take them more seriously. Even if you never publish the posts, taking your ideas seriously and thinking harder about them is a good thing.

If you write a half decent blog post you will make someone else think. You may make them think you are wrong or you may make them think you are right but you will make them think.

These thoughts trigger two key questions:

  • Can your people say what they think?
  • Do they have the time and space to do that thinking?

Just a thought.

01.11.10
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links for 2010-01-11