Archive for June, 2008

Very excited, after years of hearing good things about it, to be attending BlogHer this year in San Francisco. I’ll be in town July 17-23. For a woman in social media, this conference is a big deal. It’s arguably the equivalent of SXSW for networking, empowerment, community and inspiration among all manner of women in social media.

Unfortunately PodCamp Boston is that same weekend.

PodCamps are among the most inspiring, fun and community-focused tech events I’ve ever attended. If you can go to one, you should. Though I can’t attend, I’m paying for “my” registration, to support the event and letting the organizers put that to use as they choose. Are you in Boston July 19-20? Register here.

It’s incredibly difficult for event planners to pick the best dates to suit venue, budget and attendees. That PodCamp organizers did not schedule to avoid conflict with BlogHer is a bummer, but really not that big of a deal. What made me sad was PodCamp’s response to the scheduling conflict.

When the PodCamp date was announced, I and other female PodCamp fans immediately pointed out the conflict. The response was a bit abrupt, but not unreasonable. PodCamp did not want to schedule in the fall or close to the Podcasting and New Media Expo, and the BlogHer dates had not been checked. Fair enough. But.

Once known, the conflict was not shared with other PodCamp organizers. There was no discussion or group decision made by the organizers to go ahead despite it. That sent a poor message. It implied that the organizer doesn’t “get” BlogHer’s significance or consider it important enough to merit discussion. PodCamp also never acknowledged publicly that while unfortunate, the choice had to be made not to avoid the conflict.

In our world of transparency, conversation and consensus-building, it’s important to at least listen to the concerns, decide as an organizing body, and acknowledge that a choice had to be made. An organization can address concerns like this quite easily if it chooses to. You can mention it in your blog and explain why. You can creatively embrace the conflict by encouraging remote collaboration during both events. BlogHer has a big Second Life component, why not reach out to that?

When I brought my concerns about this conflict up privately with the organizers many weeks ago, and mentioned I would blog it at some point, there was a second opportunity to creatively engage with the scheduling conflict. While my concerns were taken seriously and discussed fairly, there was still no public acknowledgement of the conflict. There was still no creative effort at outreach.

PodCamp is an awesome organization. I have close personal affection for all of the organizers, and adore what they have done for women (and men of course) in social media. They are an exemplary crew. But, gosh…

I post because I hope this can be discussed productively. I empathize with the organizing stress my friends are under. But it would be uncool of me not to raise this point merely because of my personal feelings about the team.

What are your thoughts? Does a scheduling conflict with the biggest women’s social media conference merit some public comment or creative outreach on the part of the organizers?

As I jot this post my Gmail has outright coded (it’s unresponsive and throwing DNS errors. let’s call it “GFail,” shall we?), Twitter has been staggering for days, and today is the first day my “Remember the Milk” (task management) application has correctly integrated with my Gmail inbox all week. I’m re-starting Firefox to see if the Gmail problem is originating with me or going on outside of my system “in the cloud.”

Nothing to do with my MacBook and browser, but 15 hours worth of SMS Tweets sent last night have disappeared from my Twitter stream altogether (or never made it in), while at least one tweet posted at least 160 times in a friend’s stream.

So at the moment I’m frustrated by the downtime downside of all this “computing in the cloud” (conducting your daily work with online files, applications and services that you access through your browser). It’s a false frustration in some ways, because local applications and file storage go down too. And for a small business owner, it’s worse when they do because you’re the only one who can rally resources to fix them. But my experience this week reminds me how totally dependent my business is on a working browser. At least with the many glitches I’m experiencing I’m secure in the knowledge that 1) I am not alone and 2) someone is trying to fix them.

Tho come to think of it, I still don’t know whether this is a local connectivity problem with my new Time Capsule rig. Connectivity seems fine with certain applications, and falls to its knees with others. So, I am excited I can work from anywhere, but that also means that sometimes I can work from nowhere. Ipe.

How to Change the World: Slideshare Announces “World’s Best Presentation Contest”

Calling a slide deck “a presentation” is a big pet peeve, but I REALLY enjoyed the results of this contest last year. It brought the excellent work of Scott Schwertly and Ethos3 to my attention.

Seen (or have) a deck you think absolutely rocks? Enter it before July 31st.

Hit my review copy of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell today and went straight to (Chapter) 11: The Groundswell Inside Your Company.

Through nice storytelling, Li and Bernoff trace three case studies of internal social media rollouts: Best Buy’s Drupal-based Blue Shirt Nation, wikis at Avenue A/Razorfish, Organic and Intel and Bell Canada’s ID-ah idea exchange and voting marketplace. The value of such deployments is that:

they tap the power of the groundswell of ideas among the people who best how your business runs, your employees

Blue Shirt Nation surprised Best Buy in the degree to which it enabled “employees to help each other,” they write “they power and speed of the groundswell within companies (is) the ability for people to find what they need from each other.” Most of the value comes because it fosters management’s relationships with employees and employees relationships with each other.

Key objectives Blue Shirt Nation accomplishes:

• listening: “with employees, listening can turn rapidly into problem solving.”
• talking: “post policy changes where everyone can read them and see how they’re playing in Peoria”
• energizing: “amplifies (an enthusiastic employee’s) voice across the entire Best Buy employee bases. She spreads her positive thinking and advice, which has an impact on stores everywhere.”
• supporting: “employees can find the support they need from around the company”
• embracing: “community turned out to be a way to surface both ideas and great talent”

An anecdote in the wiki case study quotes Clark Kokich on a post about his favorite guitar solo, “this post didn’t serve any specific business purpose, but it was an opportunity [for our employees] to be connected to the leadership. You can do this with a few people over a beer, but how do you accomplish that with a whole company?” Wikis as collaboration tools have also become communications channels, allowing a “virtual equivalent to management by walking around.” At Organic they learned that “people’s business process revolved around knowing each other and, more important, around the work that each person did.”

For Rex Lee, director of collaboration services at Bell Canada, a votable internal “ideas exchange” helped him prioritize and determine which ideas from his 40,000-strong employee base to act upon. Forrester’s workplace collaboration analyst Rob Koplowitz makes the point “don’t bring collaboration tools inside if your company’s not ready for it,” because management objectives were an important part of ID-ah’s success.

Bernoff and Li round out the chapter with some strategies for nurturing the internal groundswell. Archetypal roles like evangelists, Inactives and rebels play their parts, and it’s important that participation be made easy and desirable, not strong-armed. They point out that “companies need to be ready to fail often, fail early and most important, fail cheaply.” Culture, relationships and simple ground rules set the stage for the success or failure of internal initiatives, but also, “it sure helps if the social technologies have an executive or two behind them.”

Ed. note: if you’re new to microblogging and Twitter, please feel free to just mark this post as read, ignore the email, move on to the next post, etc. It’s from a comment I left on a “Friendfeed and Twitter, where are we going with all this?” post on www.stoweboyd.com

Boy, I’d love to know some of the answers behind these questions. We’ve all talked for a long time about the relationships and “cast of characters” on Twitter being another reason “we” “won’t” leave (haven’t left).

But another thing I don’t hear a whole bunch about, when these FriendFeed-Twitter-Plurk(PLURK?!)-Pownce-Jaiku angst-a-thons come up, is the Twitter ecosystem. It seems to me that’s a big part of Twitter’s competitive edge and utility. No matter how cool the upstarts are, are they interoperable with Twitter’s “accessories” the many applications Twitter now feeds and is fed from?

On a regular basis on Twitter I use: Seesmic, Qik, Utterz, Summize, Tweetscan, Terraminds, TwitterBerry, Twhirl, is.gd, Tweetburner, Jott, TwitterFone, [Twittergram], Foxy/Twittytunes, Tweeterboard, Hashtags, Tweme, Rememberthemilk and Xpensr. Those last two are my favorite new use of Twitter: as a convenient, centralized “command line” to get data into my applications.

There are dozens and dozens of 3rd party applications that work with and through Twitter, not to mention the various bots (everything from mindfulness chimes to mainstream media news alerts to pr0n links) that have been created. I can think offhand of dozens of custom scripts, hacks, web and desktop and mobile clients, widgets and more that friends use. There are probably thousands of things “living” in Twitter world. There’s also a tremendous circulatory system of RSS feeds going into and out of Twitter streams and tying in other platforms like blogs and Facebook.

Can all this stuff be adapted to feed off of (and into) other APIs quickly and easily, should the momentum shift to another service? I’m not techie enough to answer that. But it seems to be a somewhat formidable barrier to entry, even at this embryonic stage.

Of course, Twhirl has been adapted to work with FriendFeed as well as Twitter, so perhaps it’s quite simple. Perhaps.

Seriously… PLURK?

This is awesome because if you know me, you KNOW I don’t know a G-D thing about developing, coding or, for that matter, following directions.

YET,

Using NewsGator Editor’s Desk (they are a client) I just hacked together a very awkward-looking but interesting little widget AND made it into a Facebook application. It’s an ugly* little alpha-proto-pre-prototype, but it took me less than an hour with no previous experience.

This widget is showing you the two most “popular” items from each of 6 of my feeds: Pistachio Consulting, Twitter, Flickr, Brainsieve, Qik and YouTube. The popularity data is limited because it is keying off the behavior of anyone using any NewsGator RSS tool to read any of these feeds. In the case of PistachioConsulting.com that means 22 users. The other feeds have fewer - or no - subscribers. But still.

It’s also a Facebook application, should you care to install a funky-lookin box of my content on your Facebook page. (NOTE: I haven’t had anyone test this out yet. I have no idea how it will look or work. YMMV. Don’t Drink & Drive)

But this is PRECISELY what I was getting at last November when I launched Brainsieve. I wanted a way to pull together “best of” content (as defined by how people interact with the content, not what I thought was cool) from anywhere that I was “broadcasting.” I wanted to put it all in one place, and I wanted it to self-editorialize. Meaning, “observe” audience interest and self-select the pieces that are most interacted with.

I realize that FriendFeed, SocialThing and any number of web presence aggregators also come close to the Brainsieve model, but here’s the point: a totally non-technical layperson built this and made it into a Facebook Application. For that matter, the widget above can be lifted and put anywhere. So this nontech chick not only built the tool, but the tool itself self-replicates. UPDATE: It also permits you to email and rate each individual item…

How ya like them apples? I’m impressed. What could you build?

*Believe me, there are way more configuration/beautification options here, I was just going for a quick proof-of-concept.

UPDATE: The Facebook application itself is not the point. Unless you’re an avid fan, or, say, my mother, you probably don’t need a widget displaying the “best of” what I have published on 6 of my RSS feeds. It could be prettified into a “Pistachio Channel” by which you could consume only the most popular things that I post, instead of trying to follow me a ton of different places, or drowning in a “Lifestream” that sends you every item I ever publish. It’s a “sampler.” The ability to read attention data (was the item read, emailed, shared, bookmarked, rated etc?) and sort the RSS feed accordingly is really hot though.

What’s amazing is that I can’t code my way out of a box. There was No. Coding. Work. Whatsoever to build this. Yet you can grab and re-publish the widget, email any item in it to a friend, rate any of the items, subscribe as a Facebook App, etc. etc.

Put differently, you can take ANY RSS feeds, combine them how you like (by popularity or date, # of items per feed, etc.) build a widget and convert that into a Facebook Application without ANY coding ability.