home > 2005 > September

Social Machines

9/15/2005 By

For a great overview of why I’m so excited about social software, a.ka. social machines, see Wade Roush’s article, Social Machines from the MIT Technology Review. The conversation is continued at continuousblog.net.

As advanced as our PCs and our other information gadgets have grown, we never really learned to love them. We’ve used them all these years only because they have made us more productive. But now that’s changing. When computing devices are always with us, helping us to be the social beings we are, time spent “on the computer” no longer feels like time taken away from real life. And it isn’t: cell phones, laptops, and the Web are rapidly becoming the best tools we have for staying connected to the people and ideas and activities that are important to us. The underlying hardware and software will never become invisible, but they will become less obtrusive, allowing us to focus our attention on the actual information being conveyed. Eventually, living in a world of continuous computing will be like wearing eyeglasses: the rims are always visible, but the wearer forgets she has them on–even though they’re the only things making the world clear.

Filed Under: Chapter 04: Social Software Industry, Chapter 12: Future of Social Software, Web 2.0 Industry

New Media & Entertainment Summit, NYC, Oct. 26-27

9/14/2005 By

I’ll be speaking at Oxford & York’s upcoming New Media & Entertainment Summit, New York, October 26-27, in association with Oxford University. I hope to see you there!

Here’s the advertisement:

Media, Communications & Technology Summit
New York City
The Union League Club of New York
38 East 37th Street
October 26-27, 2005.

The summit will commence with an early evening registration followed by a reception and keynote address. Please join us and a select group of senior executives from the communications, media, entertainment, and financial services sectors in a thoughtful dialogue on the forces affecting our most influential and competitive companies. To paraphrase the New York Times, the ruling media elite is quickly adapting the methodology and technology of the insurgency, attempting to co-opt something that was meant to tip them over. So far, the new technologies have been very sexy, but how will they become very profitable?

Our summit will explore the great hidden tech boom, how new media is transforming old media, revenue maximization for media and entertainment companies, improving the value of publishing businesses, media piracy, the hidden value of internal audit in addressing key business risks, how some telecommunication companies are leapfrogging competitors, how to promote the entrepreneurial spirit within large companies, and the state of technology and social change. Please visit www.oxford-york.com for additional program and registration details.

To highlight just a few speakers:

+ Chris Ahearn, President, Reuters Media

+ Donald A. Baer, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Development, and Head of New Media, Discovery Communications

+ Denmark West, Executive Vice President, Strategy and Business Development, MTV, Inc.

+ John Nendick, Americas Media & Entertainment Sector Leader, Ernst & Young LLP

+ Thomas Harrison, Chairman & CEO, Diversified Agency Services Group, and Author, INSTINCT

+ Jonathan Goodwin, Co-founder & CEO, LongAcre Partners

+ Jay Rosen, Author, PressThink, and former Chair, School of Journalism, New York University

+ David Teten, CEO, Nitron Advisors, and Co-Author, The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online

+ Sandy Pentland, Toshiba Professor of Media Arts & Sciences, MIT, The Media Laboratory

+ Robin Johnson, President of The Financial Times, Americas

+ Scott H. Frewing, Partner, Baker & McKenzie LLP

+ Cary Sherman, President and General Counsel, Recording Industry Association of America

+ Evan Williams, Co-founder and former CEO, Pyra Labs, the creators of Blogger, and Founder, Odeo

+ Thomas Hesse, President, Global Digital Business, Sony BMG Music

+ Paul Maidment, Editor, Forbes.com

+ Jeremy Zawodny, Chief Technical, Yahoo! Inc., and Author, High Performance MySQL

+ Thomas V. Ryan, Senior Vice President, Mobile & Digital Development, EMI Music

+ Anthony Hopwood, Peter Moores Dean, The Said Business School, Oxford University

Take the plunge and join us and our friends from Ernst & Young LLP, Yahoo! Search, the Financial Times, Forbes, and The Said Business School, Oxford University, at this forward-thinking conference.

RSVP:
www.oxford-york.com

Filed Under: Events

The Conversation is Real

9/14/2005 By

As I recently wrote in an earlier first technology brief, one of the key benefits to blogging is to “join the conversation”. Blogs are providing a new forum for people to communicate that consists of a much larger base of opinions and ideas. Popular bloggers are engaging and learning from their readers. They are participating in the larger conversation that is the blogosphere and weighing in on the subjects that the public and their readers want to know about.

A conversation is a two way street – at least a good conversation is. In blogging terms, that means that a successful blogger will need to do more than just write, they also need to read. Blogs that consist of someone yelling from a mountain top about how good a product or service is or about how smart they are, remove the quintessential element to blogging – interaction.

The conversation is real. It is not just a selling point to get you blogging. I’ll provide two really neat examples I recently came across in my daily scouring of the web:

  1. TechCrunch is becoming the source for Web 2.0 product updates. They are “dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing every newly launched web 2.0 business, product and service.”

    Just over a month ago, they profiled a new social bookmarking tool called BlinkList. BlinkList joins a number of other similar services including del.icio.us (the leading social bookmarking tool to this point), Furl, and Simpy, amongst others.

    After reading through the profile, I noticed that there were a total of three comments. One was from a Simpy representative, the next was Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, and the final was by Ozzy of Blinklist. The conversation is real.

  2. As TechCrunch is the Web 2.0 product source, Richard MacManus of Read / Write Web is the de-facto Web 2.0 knowledge source. Richard is in many ways the pioneer in setting up a framework to describe and understand Web 2.0.

    In his latest Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-up, Richard examines Web 2.0 in “the real world”, a new feature to his informative weekly summary. There he details a Web Ministry that is focusing on using the web to make “an eternal impact on the lives of individuals.”

    Of course, not long after that post went up, Rob, the author of that same Web Miinistry, commented on the Read / Write Web blog.

    David Teten commented to me: “Technologies like Pubsub make it easy for you to monitor in the blogosphere who’s talking about the subjects that most interest you (particularly your name!). One of the great advantages of online conversation is that you can have a conversation that transcends time and space limitations, while at the same time creating an instant community of people who share similiar interests, e.g., Blinklist and like technologies. That’s one of the advantages of blogs, as opposed to traditional walled vertical communities. Out of the enormous number of blogs, I can converse specifically with those people with whom I share interests, and I do not need to predefine with which people I share interests. If I only participate in a mailing list for graduates of my college, instead of using a blog, I’m much more restricted in the number of people I can build relationships with.”

These are just a couple of quick examples of showing that “the conversation is real”. There are many, many more. Feel free to share some of the examples you have seen by commenting below.

Filed Under: Chapter 04: Social Software Industry, Chapter 09: Blogging, Web 2.0 Industry, Web 2.0 Sites

What Is a Virtual Handshake?

9/12/2005 By

In my Virtual Handshake Network on Ryze, Lamar Morgan asked me to define “a virtual handshake”. This is a great question, and considering the many, many hours David Teten and I sent brainstorming titles (I think we came up with over 200 candidates), it seems appropriate to offer an explanation.

In a business context, the handshake is the universal hello/goodbye (OK, at least in most Western cultures). We shake hands when we first meet people. We shake hands when we first see them again, and usually when we part. When you think about it, almost all of our face-to-face business interaction with people we see infrequently, i.e., not our co-workers, is framed by handshakes.

Moving deeper into the metaphor, historically, the handshake was a gesture of trust. By placing my hand outstretched to you, rather than on my sword hilt, I’m signalling that I want to greet you, not kill you, and that I trust you to do the same. The latter part is particularly important — it’s not just that I am being peaceful/civil, it’s that I trust you to be, as well.

So more than just being a universal greeting, the handshake is a universal symbol of trust. It seems that many people feel that the most difficult aspect of virtual relationships is the matter of building trust, and since so much of our book is about how to build trust virtually, it seemed a particularly appropriate metaphor. What we try to do is show people how to frame their virtual interactions in ways that build trust.

Of course, we also liked the fact that “virtual handshake” is an oxymoron. Oxymorons tend to make people think, and tend to be memorable. We figure any time anyone spends more than half a second thinking about the title of our book, that’s a good thing.

Filed Under: Virtual Handshake Marketing

Getting a Feel for RSS

9/12/2005 By

One accepted definition of RSS is “Really Simple Syndication”. While not necessarily used in everyday language, the last word of RSS – “syndication” – should not be a foreign concept to people. What exactly is RSS?

Radio talk show hosts are often syndicated. Their shows are picked up by local radio stations, so that a host based in Los Angeles has airtime on a station in Orlando. Similarly, popular newspaper columnists are often syndicated – their columns are reprinted by a variety of local newspapers, making their writing often available to readers nationwide. From these examples, follows the first important element of syndication -

to magnify the effect of a thought or idea
by making it available to a much larger audience.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Chapter 04: Social Software Industry

Effective Online Forum Usage

9/12/2005 By

Steve Pavlina, who blogs on “personal development for smart people” (sounds like a tag line I could use) writes on Using Online Communities Effectively. This article reads like a micro-summary of “The Virtual Handshake”. For anyone who is an active user of online communities, it’s worth reviewing this.

Filed Under: Chapter 08: Social Network Sites / Virtual Communities, Tips

Guest blogger Ken Yarmosh of Technosight

9/12/2005 By

We are happy to report that Ken Yarmosh, the founder of Washington D.C. based TECHNOSIGHT, will be guest-blogging for the coming month on social software technology. Ken is passionate about helping less technically savvy users realize the power of social software. At TECHNOSIGHT, he assists businesses and organizations understand and utilize technology like blogs, RSS, and wikis.

During the next month, Ken will be covering some of the technical fundamentals of social software. He will attempt to clear up the confusion surrounding the web’s most commonly used buzz words – blogs, RSS, wikis, and content management systems. We hope you enjoy his contributions to The Virtual Handshake.

Filed Under: Chapter 04: Social Software Industry, Miscellaneous, Web 2.0 Industry

FastCompany book excerpt: 10 Steps to Leverage Online Networks

9/9/2005 By

FastCompany has just published an excerpt of our book on the ten basic steps necessary to take full advantage of online networks. The excerpt is called, Leveraging Your Links.

Years ago, when I interned for Procter & Gamble, we were told to never write a memo longer than one page. This excerpt is our book written on one page.

Filed Under: Chapter 24: Ten Simple Steps to Radically Improve Your, Virtual Handshake Marketing

Internet Radio Interview: Career Acceleration with Online Networks

9/5/2005 By

Peter Clayton, Senior Producer of Landed.fm, just posted a 27-minute podcast interview with me on the show, focused on how to use online networks for career acceleration, and particularly the job search. You can download the interview here.

Landed.fm is the first internet radio career show. To quote from their ‘about’ page:

“While just 3.4 million Americans subscribe to satellite radio, about 19 million listen to Internet radio each week, according to research firms Arbitron Inc. and Edison Media Research.”
Source: Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2004

“Internet radio is quietly emerging as a mass-market phenomenon that attracts tens of millions of consumers on a weekly basis. Mainstream radio advertisers and trackers of terrestrial radio airplay are starting to take note..”
Source: Billboard, June 26, 2004

In other words, regardless of your profession, internet radio is an increasingly important medium.

Filed Under: Blogging, Chapter 25: Finding a Job, Events, Virtual Handshake Marketing, Web 2.0 Sites

9/30 in New York: Enterprise Social Software & Tools: Business Blogs & Narratives

9/5/2005 By

Nitron Advisors is a corporate sponsor of this event:

Enterprise Social Software & Tools: Business Blogs & Narratives
– Friday, Sept 30, 2005 –
– 8:00am – 5:00pm, NYC –

AGENDA:

http://www.kmcluster.com/nyc/NYC_Fall_2005.htm

Enterprise Social Software & Tools: Business Blogs & Narratives is a Cluster experience in two parts. Part One is “Next Practices” — a deep dive of over 70 case studies of successful enterprise, corporate and institutional blogs, wikis and RSS.

Part Two is appearances and book signing by two of the most distinguished and globally recognized thought leaders on knowledge management, enterprise narratives and the rapidly changing nature of work, Steve Denning and Bill Jensen.

Both parts are described below.

The most immediate and practical social media are of course, blogs, wikis and Enterprise RSS. Many people are asking for independent, non-vendor, case-based advice on the best approaches to implementations, rules of the road, success stories and Next Practices.

Upon completion of Business Blogs: Next Practices you will –

  • Understand what critical competitive advantages blogs bring to business
  • Be able to assess the opportunities and risks of business blogs
  • Understand the uses of blogs for external and internal communication
  • Lead blog tactics for Personal Knowledge Management
  • Understand wikis and how they accelerate effective collaboration
  • Know how to get your blog at the top of the search engines
  • Understand the basics of Enterprise RSS how-to syndicate blogs
  • Define clear blogging objectives for your business
  • Be able to start a business blog with confidence

    • Organizational blogging can be challenging and risky to implement. It can also have a major and continuous impact to productivity and effectiveness.

    Blogs can greatly increasing the reach and richness of all knowledge-based business processes. Individuated social media can be instrumental in transforming employees into leaders. Effective blogs create sustained value.
    The best, least expensive way to learn how to lead your implementations is to ask the experts. It is FAR more cost effective to shape your approach through authentic conversation and case-based learning, than by costly trial and error.

    —————————————————————————-
    —-

    Part Two — Enterprise Narrative and What Really Matters

    Your event sponsors are delighted to announce that Steve Denning and Bill Jensen will join your Fall 2005 NYC KM Cluster in person.

    Steve Denning, globally recognized enterprise KM authority and storyteller extraordinaire, will lead conversations on the importance of narrative and his latest book, “The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative. http://www.stevedenning.com/

    Bill Jensen, of Simplicity and Work 2.0 fame, will discuss these principles and his latest work, “What is Your Life’s Work? — Answer the BIG Question About What Really Matters…and Reawaken the Passion for What You Do.”
    http://www.ourlifeswork.com/

    The social reorientation of knowledge work, productivity and innovation is accelerating rapidly. New tools and techniques are essential to competition and prosperity in these new professional and personal habitats. The work ecologies of the future require personal mastery of narrative and electronic technology. Maintaining and improving focus on what matters is critical.

    Blogs and the narratives they create are the keys to fundamental professional and personal advancements. Your Fall 2005 Cluster event provides the foundations and insights need to thrive in the 21st century’s knowledge-based environments.

    Participation is limited to optimize conversation and collaboration. All material, meals, refreshments and registration are included. All event participants receive a full license for an electronic copy of “Business
    Blogs: A Practical Guide,” and all of the important case studies, implementation guidelines and research.

    This action/research gathering provides the gentle on-ramp need to assure immediate and ongoing success with social media, narrative and discovering what really matters.

    Wi-Fi enabled laptops are recommended. A one year subscription to the Cluster SharePoint collaboration environment is also included. These workspaces contain all event memory, presentations, rosters, papers and other materials from the far-flung Cluster network.

    Cost: $349. RSVP

    Filed Under: Blogging, Chapter 09: Blogging, Events
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