While I was only able to catch three sessions, each would have been worth the trip on it’s own. All three were led by dynamic, engaging, even charismatic presenters who clearly know their stuff and know the Podcamp audience.

First up was Dave Wieneke (@usefularts) on the “Seven Sins of Digital Innovation,” aka “Stuff that F*#@s up your work, and what the hell can be done about it.”

Dave invited the assembled crowd to co-present, opening up a discussion about how projects go wrong, how to manage change in organizations, how to build buy-in, the dreaded ROI, and how to build sustainable digital strategies. Lots of great quotable moments here, many can be found in Dave’s own Storify recap).

Universidad de Morón (from Wikipedia entry, cc-by-sa license)

Second, was Chris Brogan on Google+ (with guest assistance from Christopher S. Penn running the laptop). I’d just seen Chris talk about why folks should be on Google+ during the Inbound Marketing summit a few weeks back in Boston, so many of the themes in this talk were the same. Why are so many in digital marketing / social media collectively whining about having to learn a new network? Did they really forget orkut, friendster, and myspace? Are they still rocking an @aol.com email address, and a compuserve dial up account?

Chris has become a superstar but still manages to make himself so accessible that everyone thinks he’s their good friend – that’s a skill. (And I don’t mean that as a criticism – he’s authentically interested in everyone he meets in a way that seems entirely natural to him – and he listens, and remembers things you’ve said).

Finally (before I ran off to lunch) I caught Tamsen McMahon‘s (@tamadear) talk about standing out in a bell curve world.

While “personal branding” topics can devolve into hokey admonitions to “be yourself,” McMahon was funny, compelling, and insightful. She used real, understandable, and approachable examples, including reality tv for humor and local social media celebs for color and context. She’s used labels for herself like “intellectual magpie” and “personal cartography“: simple, clear, suggestive, but also entirely unique. (Almost feels like personal branding via google bomb, but those were generally meaningless phrases where hers actually make sense and suggest what she does and is).

I left Podcamp feeling energized, enthusiastic, and smarter than I’d gone in. Not bad for 3 hours on a Saturday morning.

Here’s the schedule (which they haven’t yet published except as a google doc):

My friend Dave Wieneke will be presenting Saturday am on “The 7 Deadly Sins of Business Innovation” and again Sunday afternoon on “Applying Digital Strategy Across your Business.”

As though that weren’t enough reason to attend, other speakers will include Chris Brogan and Christopher S. Penn (the original founders of Podcamp Boston) as well as a who’s who of Boston’s digerati.

Will I see you there?

The Fail Whale in Legos - Photo by Bjarne Panduro Tveskov - http://www.flickr.com/photos/tveskov/3387394098/

The 140 Characters Conference in Boston yesterday started off with three strikes against it, in my mind:

1. No coffee. I’ve greatly cut back on my own caffeine addiction, but who starts a conference at 9am on a Tuesday and doesn’t serve coffee?
2. No wifi. Well, there was Wifi, but I couldn’t ever get on any of the available networks.
3. No power. Well, there was power in the building, but the power cops facilities people from the venue would not allow attendees to plug in to the wall outlets, as the cords crossing the aisle represented some kind of hazard.

That’s a steep uphill climb for any conference to overcome, but it turned out to be well worth it. The saving grace was not just Boston’s always active, engaging, welcoming, and supportive social media community (as embodied in folks like @pistachio, Chris Brogan, C.C. Chapman, CS Penn, and way too many more to name them all) but also excellent editorial curation and content pacing.

Favorite panels for me included “Investing in the real-time web” with @bijan, @leaddog99, and @ScottKirsner – which got best quote of the day:

(This was from an article quoting a “Silicon Valley Investor type” – and got the best laugh of the day, despite the fact that the whole conference was witness to the strength of the “Real Time Web” broadly and the tremendous impact of Twitter in particular – including local startup oneforty ).

Also excellent were panels on the “real time news” phenomenon (@universalhub, @dabeard, @mleccese, @kordmiller, and @tmcenroe – with counterpoint later from Jeff Cutler on the difference between “citizen journalism” and “citizen reporting”), a panel on the impact of real-time and social on Health, and a music panel matching @amandapalmer with @matthewebel, @spinaltap, and @cyberpr. Although no music was planned, an impromptu version of the Sesame Street theme on iPad did occur, taking advantage of the talent on the panel.

Christopher S. Penn happily scrapped the talk listed on the schedule – a likely valuable but a bit sleepy “How To Measure Internet Marketing ROI in the era of the Real-Time Web” – and instead geeked out on comic superheros, arguing that the real time web gives all of us super powers and reminding us all that “with great power comes great responsibility.”

The crowd also heard @dewittn‘s story of being one of the disappeared children of El Salvador, and the story of @andydixn, YouthTurns.com, and social media barn raising in Nashville.

Ultimately it felt a bit like Twitter itself: sipping from a fire hose, sampling from a veritable flood of interesting talented people driven by both mission and entrepreneurial spirit to leverage the tools the internet provides (including but not limited to Twitter) to make their mark on the world. The trick being to connect with those folks and carry the conversation on beyond the conference, beyond the twitter-stream and into real projects. (But isn’t that the real trick of any conference?).

Check out the full schedule and as expected tons of coverage via twitter under the hashtag #140conf.

Hard to fit the talk into 30 minutes with time for questions and roadmap – there’s so much more I want WPBook to do – hopefully I can find the time soon.

I also took the opportunity, naturally, to promote WordCamp Boston, coming January 23rd. See you there?

Looking forward to watching sessions the rest of today and volunteering this afternoon / tomorrow. If you’re here, stop me and say hello.

My talk is one of the Saturday Sessions in the Beginning Developer track. (Hopefully not a rating of my development skills as evidenced by the plugin’s code, but reflecting the intended audience).

Here’s a quick blurb:

You Got Your WordPress in My Facebook!: Developing WPBook. WPBook is a plugin that enables users to turn their self-hosted WordPress blog into a Facebook application. Full web posts are viewable within the Facebook context, including embedded multimedia. Users can comment using their Facebook identity, and comments (and comment threads) are shared between Facebook users and regular blog readers. WPBook uses a deceptively simple set of actions and filters, along with the Facebook API, to create a relatively high degree of integration. In this talk I’ll go over the basics of how WPBook works, the current challenges in terms of meeting user requests, and some of the solutions currently in development.

WordCamp NYC looks to be an amazing production: good location, large crowd, and a solid group of speakers, including a Sunday keynote from Matt Mullenweg himself. Tickets are still available but I would not be at all surprised to see this sell out, so register now.

I’m also leading the organization for the first-ever WordCamp Boston, on January 23rd, 2010. We’ll be hosted at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development center, which is a fantastic venue right in Kendall Square.

Tickets aren’t on sale yet, but there is an announcements google group if you want to be notified when they do go on sale, and an organizers google group if you want to help put the event together. There’s also a design contest for the logo (enter by November 11th please!). I expect to open a call for speakers shortly.

Given all the interest I’ve seen and heard around Boston from end-users, SEO and affiliate marketing folks, developers, and businesses small and large in WordPress as a platform (including .com and .org), I suspect WordCamp Boston will sell out as well – so sign up for the announcements list if you think you’d like to attend.

1. Paul Gillin: “The Future of Media is: Small, Aggregated, Inclusive, Community-driven, Conversational, Fast, Flexible, Experimental.”

2. New from the PCF: Video WTF?

First, a great presentation given by Paul Gillin at the Inbound Marketing Summit yesterday. Covered very quickly with dense references the shifts in mainstream media:

Second, Video WTF?, a great new site from the Participatory Culture Foundation (who also bring us Miro and and Make Internet TV) which will be helpful to those of you (us?) who are making the future of media:

VideoWTF: Questions and Answers About Video Production, Video Camera, Editing, Publishing, and et cetera

Now BarCamp Boston 4 is coming up this April 25th and 26th at the Stata Center at MIT. Although ultimately the topics discussed are determined by who shows up, odds are that free and open source software, social media, voting, government transparency, robotics, hardware and software hacking, startups, and all kinds of topics related to openness, the web, and business will be common.

BarCamp Boston 4

I definitely plan to be there and I’d encourage you to register and attend, whether you’re a veteran or a n00b to the unconference world. It’s a fantastic opportunity to have a real conversation, in the absence of hugely expensive registration fees or overbearing sponsors.

It’s Thursday, December 4th, from 3:30-5:00pm. The panelists will be:

• Nate Aune of Jazkarta (Plone / Zope / Python)
• Elie Auvray of Jahia
• Michael Wechner of Wyona (Lenya, Yanel, Yulup)

Here’s the description from the official program:

There are many open source content management solutions available today, reflecting a wide variety of capabilities and costs, and organizations of all types are more willing than ever to consider them in place of, or along side commercial CMSs. This session will look at some of the pros and cons of deploying open source content management systems in terms of licensing, costs, maintenance, and functionality to help you determine if they are an appropriate option for your organization.

In addition to all of that, I also hope we’ll talk about how the adoption landscape is or isn’t changing for open source in the CMS space, innovation and standards compliance in open source CMS, and how open source projects can make user adoption easier or more effective.

What questions would you like to ask this group of speakers? How do you see the landscape changing for open source projects in the content management space?

The Boston chapter of the Interaction Design Association is hosting a night of short talks – I imagine something like Pecha Kucha or Ignite! – this Thursday (June 26th, 2008) 6pm-9pm at Bentley College. RSVP required

Planned speakers:

• Juhan Sonin: Design and Open Source Software
• Jeremy Merle: Designing in an Agile Environment
• Ian Muir: Designer-Developer collaboration
• Jesse Beach: HTML5 Heads Up
• Jared Spool: What’s the Best Way to Compare Multiple Design Alternatives?
• Christa Houlahan: Search, Beyond the Box
• Matt McKeon: Many Eyes, Visualisation in the hands of the people.
• Michael Hawley: Next Generation Interaction Paradigms
• Kris Engdahl: Using Reality Maps for Task Analysis

Looking forward to it – hopefully I’ll be able to blog a bit about some of the presentations.

It’s part of the larger Glassfish project, and uses Apache Shindig as an OpenSocial container – they demo’d OpenSocial widgets running inside Drupal and MediaWiki – all running inside a Java Application Server.

Video:

This could be a compelling option for those looking to run their own open social containers. It isn’t available in source code form yet, but you can sign up here to be notified when it is available.

Here’s his slides via slideshare:

| View | Upload your own

Most of Vander Wal’s focus was on relatively minor improvements which can be made to the user experience (interface and context) of such services which have dramatic impacts on leverage: both in the sense of increasing use and in the sense of making that usage more useful. (Maybe too many words with use at the root there, but I think you get the meaning).

For example, providing what he called “Easy Tagging” which simplifies the choices available to the user, increasingly the likelihood of action.

At slide 35, he begins to get into what I think is the best part – pointing out where the tools are “too simple” – where their feature set isn’t the one most likely to lead to effective use by the most users. Stemming, an awareness of the danger of single tags, recognition of co-occurrence of tags, inline help and context setting, as well as an awareness by the tagging application of the social environment in which the user operates, all can lead to a more effective tagging experience.

I’d love to see an open source implementation take the lead here on implementing Vander Wal’s recommendations. Time to revisit the idea of Scuttle as a Drupal module, ready for deployment in an intranet context, integrated with user info, profile, and taxonomy at some level? Anyone working on this already?

Last night was the third Ignite Boston, at Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square. Ignite is an O’Reilly Media sponsored series of events in various cities around the US. Lots of O’Reilly authors, editors, and various Friends Of O’Reilly gather to talk about tech stuff and generally geek out.

Highlights of the evening (for me):

• Juhan Sonin on Interface Design Tenets – looking to create a Strunk & White equivalent pocket reference for interface/interaction designers. (There’s a wiki just getting started)
• Benjamin Mako Hill talking about Selectricity, a free and open source framework for managing elections / polls etc. Also can be used freely as a hosted offering.
• Craig Freifeld talking about Health Map, which is a visual mashup of emerging disease reports – a sort of crowdsourced (though they use mainstream news reports) epidemic tracker.
• Jesse Vincent‘s Web 2.0 is Sharecropping, a quasi-rant about the limitations inherent in not owning your own tools.
• Lucy Mendel talking about Buy It Like You Mean It, which is a non-profit organization aimed at bringing rich information to consumers at the point of purchase about the social impacts of the products they are considering: environmental concerns, labor relationships, etc. They’re starting with the chocolate industry and she mentioned their impending launch party at Taza Chocolate in Somerville next Tuesday.

There were lots of lightning talks – so not being on my highlights list doesn’t mean the others weren’t good, just that they didn’t resonate with me as much.

Lowlights: The “keynote” speakers were excepted from the 5 minute lightning talk rule. I think that’s a mistake – not that what they had to say wasn’t valuable, but both were just too long for the crowd and the environment. Standing in a hot, crowded pub is not conducive to listening to a lengthy talk on a subject which may or may not even be relevant to you.

Also, unfortunately, Fish Fishman’s planned “5 minute mixed reality magic routine using Second Life and the Ignite audience” didn’t materialize. Always difficult to do any kind of live demo requiring connectivity in an unpredictable environment – I was looking forward to that one, if only for the “I’ve not seen that before” aspect.

Thanks are due to Microsoft for the free (as in beer) beer, though I don’t know that one-drink-ticket-per-pre-registered-attendee is exactly what I was expecting from such a large sponsor. I thought the open bars of the bubble-era Internet were back, but I guess folks are being more cautious this time around. O’Reilly also raffled off tons of books, through out shirts, and the like.

Looking forward to more Ignite events in Boston down the road.

Here’s the presentation file: WordPress to Facebook and Back (Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license)

As always, you can get the latest code here, or see it in action on Facebook.

I found it was very difficult to do a 30 minute presentation here – 45 would have been better, and an hour would have been perfect. I should have spent more time focused on three key aspects: the core WordPress plugin API, the Facebook API, and the bigger picture of how they relate to each other.

That way I could have shown, for example, the WordPress loop and how that works, and some of the Facebook PHP client, and how a user’s request goes through Facebook to your WordPress blog and back to their browser.

I’ll try to set a bit more context in my Twitter talk later today, though 30 minutes will be a challenge there as well.

From my blog at Optaros.com: “Enterprise 2.0 Free Conference Pass”

At the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this June, I will be moderating a panel on Open Source Platforms.

The panel will be Thursday, June 12th, at 8:30am.

Here’s the session description:

Community and collaboration pervade open source. It’s no surprise therefore that there are a number of open source platforms which are not only capable of delivering Enterprise 2.0, but are delivering it with innovation, flexibility, and agility. This session covers several, including (but not limited to) Alfresco, Drupal, and Ringside Networks.

Participating on the panel with me will be:

• Bob Bickel, Founder and CEO of Ringside Networks
• Dr. Ian Howells, CMO of Alfresco
• Jeff Whatcott, VP of Marketing at Acquia

Thanks to the conference organizers, I have one free full conference pass to give away. (Full conference pass is $1895 currently and $2095 if you register on site).

To get the pass, contact me. I will choose at random from those who contact me by the end of day Sunday, 5/11.

I also have a number of discount codes which you can use to get a free demo pavillion pass – which gets you in to the demo pavillion as well as “selected keynotes and sponsored sessions” – or $100 off a full registration.

Presenting were:

• Stever Robbins, consultant/executive coach and host of the Get-It-Done Guy Podcast
• Aaron Strout, VP of new media at Mzinga.
• Todd Defren, principal at SHIFT Communications
• Chris Brogan, VP of strategy & technology at CrossTech Media

As is typical for SMB in Boston (not sure if this is true elsewhere) the event was well covered with lifestreamers, video bloggers, podcasters, and plain old bloggers in attendance – I’ve collected some of the links below. The most surprising and interesting to me (since I had already met, read the blogs of, and follow on twitter Aaron, Todd, and Chris) was Stever, who handed out a four-page printout of the Ten Great Cultural Career Lies. It’s good stuff – things I wish a career coach had told me a decade ago.

Here’s video of Stever’s presentation, via Qik, from CoBrandit:

Related:

• Boston Social Media Breakfast covers “Hiring/Getting Hired in a 2.0 World”
• Tweet Your Way to a Job
• Social Media Breakfast 7
• Hiring in a 2.0 World

In case you’ve been somehow able to escape the increasing presence of *camps, BarCamp is one of the earliest and one of the best. It was on the occasion of BarCamp Boston (the original) that I started blogging, though to be fair you shouldn’t hold them responsible for that.

Here’s an hCalendar microformat of the event info:

Read more about BarCamp, view schedules, and learn how you can participate, by visiting the wiki at http://2008.barcampboston.org/.

Pecha Kuch is coming up on April 10th, 8pm, at Harvard Graduate School for Design.

I’m hoping to make it over there after Our World Digitized at MIT

Drupalcon Boston 2008 takes place from March 3, 2008 to March 6, 2008 at the Boston Convention and Expo Center. There will also be a Drupal Code Sprint on March 7 at the Stata Center at MIT in Cambridge.

Drupalcon is the twice-yearly gathering of Drupalers to learn about, discuss & advance Drupal, and to network with other Drupal community members. With sessions targeted at everyone from novice to expert attendees, Drupalcon is where you go to advance your understanding and use of Drupal.

Note: Deadline is Today, Feb 11th, for submitting proposals.

AIIM Expo will be held at the same time and location, and Drupalcon attendees can visit the AIIM Expo Hall. For full access to AIIM Expo, separate registration is required.

Tracks & Sessions:

• Marketing and business
• Design and user experience
• Site building
• Community and core
• Showcase and case study contest

Review the conference program and submit your own session proposal.

Conference Events:

• Job fair
• Industry networking
• Conference Social at FELT

Cost & Registration:
The cost to attend Drupalcon Boston is $195. This covers four full days of intensive sessions and tutorials, networking and social events, lunch and a t-shirt.

To register for Drupalcon, sign-up at http://boston2008.drupalcon.org.

Sponsorship:
Affordable sponsorship packages are available for companies who would like to show their support of the Drupal Association and receive visibility in front of hundreds of Drupal developers and enthusiasts. To learn more about sponsorships visit http://boston2008.drupalcon.org.

Tuesday night Mike Krigsman (twitter.com/mkrigsman) organized a “tweetup” at the Boston Beer Works in the Fenway. I won’t try to list all the attendees, but a few notes on folks I talked to:

• Silona (twitter.com/silona) was in town from Austin (League of Technical Voters, Transparent Federal Budget, We Are All Actors)
• Met Laura “Pistachio” Fitton (twitter.com/pistachio) – now I won’t be just another face in the crowd of her ~1500 twitter followers
• Met David Fisher (twitter.com/tibbon) who works with Nate at Jazkarta
• Nathan Burke (BlogString, twitter.com/?), who works with Michelle at MatchMine
• Met Jack Vinson (twitter.com/jackvinson) from Aspen Technology, who lives in the Boston area despite his Twitter account saying he is in Evanston IL.

I also met Dan Bricklin, which is really a brush with greatness. (No offense to my fellow tweetup attendees, but dude basically invented the spreadsheet).

Not bad for a tweetup on Super Tuesday (also Mardi Gras, aka Fat Tuesday), in not so great Boston weather. Apologies in advance if I left anyone out – I did have to run out early to catch a train.

Last night (wednesday) was the February BostonPHP meeting, on “Choosing a FOSS License for your project.”

Karen Copenhaver and Ira Heffan presented, but it was less about formal presentation and was really a conversation with the whole group – we talked about different classes of licenses and degrees of reciprocity they encourage/require, GPLv3 versus Affero GPLv3, CPAL, etc. The audio was recorded and will probably turn up as a podcast shortly.

After the meeting Mark Withington, Ira Heffan, Greg Rundlett and I went out for drinks and talked about life, the universe, and everything. ;)

Tonight, I’m headed to the North Shore Web Geek Meetup in Newburyport – although this means missing out on Silona’s presentation to the Berkman Thursday Blog Group.

Sheesh. So much to do, so little time. Good to see a vibrant local community.

First, it never works with the Google Maps “My Location” feature. Here’s all I get:

On top of that, I’m still getting the occasional moment where my cellphone decides it is the future.

This morning my phone briefly thought it was 2009:

Seems to be related to a cell tower somewhere in the vicinity of Chelsea / Everett – just North of the Tobin bridge.

Am I the only one seeing this?

It includes yours truly (0:42 through about 1:20) babbling on about distributed social networking and the DiSo project. (I didn’t really go prepped to give the elevator pitch for DiSo, but I think I covered the concept ok – maybe more social network portability in general than that project in particular).

Now, I took the question very much in the context of “social media” and the topic of conversation that morning, and did not go for solving things like the war in Iraq, global warming, or ending poverty on the planet. But that doesn’t mean I’m shallow, just focused.

I finally got time to watch it on the train on the way to New York last week. It was well worth the wait, and I’d really encourage you to go watch it if you’re interested in social networks or youth culture in the U.S. Danah got a lot of press earlier this year for her post/essay on social class issues in MySpace and Facebook, to some of which she’s also written a response.

Fast forward through all the room introductions (sorry to those who were in the room, but I don’t think that makes for interesting viewing to one who wasn’t there) and get to the core of the discussion.

Here are my quick notes on the bits I found most interesting – these are really more like raw search engine terms that will hopefully connect people to the video than cohesive notes (see also Ethan Zuckerman’s much more complete notes):
–

What Web 2.0 is really about is the shift from a sociality organized around topics toward a sociality organized around friendships / relationships – people who I know.

Early adopters of social network sites were self-defined geeks, freaks, and queers. Tech savvy youth, alternative youth seeking places to gather without prejudice.

Friendster became more mainstream quickly – which drove out fringe users. Friendster went about trying to make people behave by canceling accounts. But not all the users wanted to play by the rules – fakesters existed for good reason – ie, the Harvard U fakester (this was before you could identify groups — the Harvard U fakester profile was used to connect people in an ad hoc group). They killed people who were playing around, but in the process they killed lots of good profiles too.

MySpace – planned as a Friendster clone, but more loose with rules. Indie Rock folks were targeted as an audience, in part because they had been kicked off Friendster. Some of the key features that are still on MySpace came from this era – the individual profile URL for example. http://myspace.com/bandname. The first set of users were musically inclined – tracking bands. First emergence of code in MySpace forums – MySpace knew within 24hrs of it occuring that people were pasting html and javascript in the forums but chose to allow it. “Copy/paste literacy” – someone else’s term. Leads to some interesting stuff, since people didn’t really know what they were copying and pasting.

danah’s using “social network” site as opposed to “social networking” – focus on a place where people write into being their social network – not use it to meet new people.

Basic characteristics of Social Network sites:

• -Profile (inherited from dating sites)
• Friends (not the same as friends in the offline world)
• Public comments (saying things very publically about other people) – started as testimonials on Friendster but got turned into communicative space. (Table salt and pepper fakesters writing to each other). (66% of comments on Facebook are on the wall, not via private messages)

How are network publics different than the kinds of publics “we” grew up with:

1. They’re Persistent. They stick around.
2. They’re Searchable. You can find things. So can your parents.
3. They Offer Replicability – copy and paste from one space to another. Negroponte’s digital bits come to life. This is one of the best ways to bully – copy and paste conversation from IM and edit.
4. They Have Invisible audiences – you don’t know who is watching. These are mediated spaces.

It’s a question of context. Context sets expectations (formal and informal). Context used to come from topic – socialization on usenet of what is ontopic and offtopic. Example alt.tasteless and cat recipes, cat shaving, cat skinning, etc. By the time the boom was over, there is no more “like minds effect” on the internet and conflict is certain.

Joshua M – No Sense of Place – Stoky Carmichael and the issue of how to go on TV – how could he speak a neutral voice? He chose, and ever since we think of black power as anti-white.

This generation in growing up with celebrity style publics – where everyone can be famous among 15 people, but now know which 15.

Depression era – Labor Unions, Compulsory education at High School level (14-18) gets created, in part as a way of keeping laborers out of the workplace. Keep kids away from labor organizers and out of the workplace – leads to age segregation. This is also where a new kind of bullying occurs because of the lack of older folk. “Teenager” itself is a 1941 creation.

(In some ways the whole pedophilia issue is about the anxiety of teenagers knowing adults – why is this such a megatopic right now?)

Children’s Society in Britain is tracking this issue of fear – no real correspondence in the US.

Playdates – one version of the kind of control now being exercised.

Young People are turning to these network publics in part because they have no actual public to go to.

Why do people write public comments? In large part because the defaults are public. But also because there is a visibility issue – you need to be seen commenting, you get replies, etc.

On MySpace, to get rid of comments, they just delete the person, which deletes their comments.

The difference between the profile with 30 friends versus 900 friends is a question of what imagined audience is. Facebook’s “private” setting means just my friends – which is not admissions officers and law enforcement.

There are two audiences youth don’t want:

1. People with direct power over them.
2. People who want to prey on them – the more realistic fear here is less sexual predators than spammers and marketers.

How do they avoid them?

• - Artificial walls / lies.
• Demand the way the world should be – get out. No mom’s allowed, etc. This is where the “public” gets difficult – we want to be public but only to people like us, not to parents or teachers.
• Ostrich. Pretend that if we can’t see the invisible audience they don’t exist.

This is the way they have to socialize – it isn’t necessarily the most optimal way, but often the only accessible way.

Cellphones – totally locked down – this is interesting because users prefer the online social network because those aren’t locked down. Email is for talking to parents.

One of the reasons social networks outside the US are more profile oriented – because here we pay to recieve SMS – elsewhere people use SMS to communicate and the network just for the profile.

—

Ethan – one of the analogies you use is the Mall – which is part public but also very private – which makes them interesting legal cases. But all these social network sites are similarly partially public and owned by private companies. Do the youth your studying care? Are they aware of that commercialization?

db – I wish. It’s actually very accepted. “If its got ads on it it will be free forever” They are so used to being blasted by ads they don’t think twice about it.

Class dynamics on MySpace/Facebook – working class, marginalized kids (freaks, music kids, etc) are on mysapce – college-bound, “good” kids are on Facebook – this plays out in part between different schools, between different neighborhoods in schools, etc. The military banned MySpace but not Facebook – they banned what soldiers are using not what officers are using. REcruitment is done via myspace – and youth talking bad abotu the war may be what’s behind that block.

Cultural aesthetics – facebook seems less commercial because it looks modern and controlled, as opposed to myspace’s wackiness. MySpace is still about bling – and it is ok for the ads to match that aesthetic.

The difference between having Tommy Hilfinger written across it and knowing what a Prada bag is.

The youth don’t know a public that is not commercial.

—

What is this evolving into?

db – the tech industry is obsessed with Web 3.0, and immersion, and 2nd life and WOW.

I think the next level will be mobile. I think the question is can we do it – given the way mobile is structured in the US.

Growth and fragmentation cycle – investors require infinite growth but that doesn’t necessarily match what is best for the community.

Facebook is gaining the older audience but losing the younger audience. They ran into this even when college students were upset that they added high school students.

Cluster effects – you need entire groups to participate. Not everyone created their own sites – people share passwords and check each others messages, and play with each other – they don’t want secure “my site, my password” stuff. People create profiles for their friends who can’t or don’t.

–

What about youth subcultures who *are* reacting negatively to the commercialism of the culture? What about networks that are using these technologies to organize against this? Other possibilities exist.

I’ve been working on this as well – on the edges – in order to look at what is next you need to look at the edges not the center.

db – I’m just not seeing it among high school students – I wish that I was, but I’m not.

What about the possibilities of temporary autonomous zones – there is power in these.

db – but people build social cues into these environments. WoW is one of the few exceptions where guilds for example are age diverse. Otherwise people are signaling their age / class / gender / race in all kinds of ways.

The challenge is that what is at teh edges is not what becomes mainstream – things get modified on their way to the mainstream and lose imuch of their edge in the process.

Kids are told that all adult strangers are bad and evil. Kids are afaird to talk to me, even though I’ve got berkely.edu all over. I don’t know how to break that in the online world.

—

The adults are just not doing a good job navigating the future for you – you need to become the navigators for them. Hawaiin political movement – charting hawaii’s future.

–

What about Gender?

db – It’s amazing how many of the boy’s profiles were created by their girlfiends in part in order to be the first in the top eight. None of it is really surprising which is why I haven’t written much of it up.

Boys are much more likely to collect strangers, more likely to friend porn divas, etc.

Homophilly? (Birds of a feather stick together) – Homophilia? It is clear that people are more likely to meet people that are like them – the more you have in common the more likely you are to become better friends.

Interaction with people unlike you – social network sites are helping reinforce this, but it is the absence of real public experiementation in the first place. We’re losing that across the board not just in social networks. In fact social networks *may* enable more interaction in unexpected ways.

Pew research – the 7% who are not online, 75% of them don’t want to be online.

—

Parent info sharing – this is really being driven by 30s parents having kids later. I’m not seeing real activity among teen parents that is different than other teens use. Not really seeing a teen parents group rising up.

—

So what do we do?

db – well, for one thing there is the defensive – bills to ban these sites in congress in various forms.

Education – help people get literate about how to use these sites and how to manage them. Innuit morality play – how would you feel it? Why do x rather than y?

In terms of law, the number one request is to stay away – so much of the legal intervention is around sexual predators – if we’re going to do something let’s actually enforce the laws about sexual predators rather than talking about the danger.

We need digital street outreach – the equivalent of clean needles and condoms distributed to youth.

IT would be great to have a street outreach online – people just hanging out talking to kids at risk looking for attention (but this runs up against the stranger danger problem in that youth won’t talk to adults).

Ethan – the bingo for today is Paris Hilton, Needle exchange, and Jerry Fallwell.

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danah’s also become a Berkman Fellow for the 2007/2008 school year, so hopefully we’ll get more opportunities to follow her research.

(Quick Summary: there’s more value in more commentary and analysis, less in transcription).

My own liveblogging from Enterprise 2.0 was inspired by many useful liveblogs I’ve read from events – especially David Wienberger (who is able to liveblog while participating as a panelist and chatting on backchannel IRC). Noting the presence of power strips in the seating areas and a working, stable wifi network (as opposed to SXSW), it just made sense to me to share the notes I was taking.

But then a comment by Andrew McAfee made me think more critically after the fact than I had at the time.

McAfee notes:

Finally, I used to think that short talks at conferences were low-pressure events, since they’d be heard by relatively few people and remembered by even fewer. A quick Google blog search, however, brings up about 30 blog posts commenting on my keynote. These will persist unless their posters take them down, and will add to the Internet’s record of my work. This is more than a bit scary for me as a speaker, but for me as a conference attendee this is great news; it means that the overall quality of talks will go up. No one wants to be examined from that many angles and found lacking.

(Just FYI – McAfee’s keynote is also freely available online in video from Altus – to me that would be even scarrier than the blogger’s reaction).

This got me to thinking, about liveblogging in particular, and asking a number of questions I probably should have thought more about a few weeks back:

• What’s the proper etiquette for liveblogging, other than sitting in the back and typing as quietly as possible?
• Does one need permission to liveblog a conference keynote? What about a conference panel session?
• Would that be permission from the speaker(s)? the conference organizer(s)? both?
• What’s the difference between blogging about an event – summaries, excerpts, and commentary – and liveblogging an event? Is it just the time difference, or the percentage of the event covered?
• Does liveblogging get in the way of more substantive commentary?

First, a bit of background on some of the controversies about Liveblogging. I can’t claim to have seen all the various threads on the topics, but here are some highlights.

Shel Israel, co-author of Naked Conversations, liveblogged at the New Communications Forum March 08 of 2007: New Comm Forum–Winner & Sinners.

Steve Crecenzo, seeing Shel’s post, reacted by posting in the comments:

You know, I would rate the lunch panel as the worst session I saw at the conference, and I was on it!

But your “live blogging” of it was even worse. Maybe you ought to just stop typing for a second, listen to what’s being said, and THEN go back to your room and blog using your notes.

Steve also posted, on his own blog: The problem with “live blogging” and the “blogosphere”.

It’s a long post, but worth reading for its critique of live blogging (as well as a good picture of how conference panels can be put together and how they sometimes fall apart):

As people sit and “live blog” speakers and events, and get a whole bunch of shit wrong but publish it anyway, isn’t that a little dangerous? Especially when the person doing the “live blogging” is a very respected person who has the power to influence a lot of people?

The comments to the post include a pretty good cross section of pro/con on live blogging, perhaps a bit tilted to the con side.

Shel Holtz’s response, Live blogging: a new fact of life, sympathizes with Steve but ultimately disagrees:

The fact is, live blogging has become a core component of many conferences and events, especially those dealing with technology and social media.

Holtz argues that, rather than yet another sign of the decline of thought, this new fact of life is a good thing:

The difference between what live blogging really is and what Steve perceives it to be is dramatic. Steve sees it as reporting, and inaccuracies in the reporting leave misinformation on the public record. But blogs are far less about reporting than they are about conversation. Personally, I see live blogging as a service. As someone who cannot attend a conference (or a session at a conference), the ability to read the post about it offers me insights I would not otherwise have been privy to.

Paul Waldman, on the other hand, asks “Is it just me, or does liveblogging really, really suck?” (Tell us how you really feel, Paul):

I appreciate the value of up-to-the-minute information as much as anyone. But I can’t ever recall reading a liveblog of anything and coming away feeling like I learned something. I mean no offense to my colleagues who have liveblogged at one time or another, but I have to question whether the activity has any value at all.

Similarly, Allen Jenkins argues that Liveblogging is for irritating snots . . . real men take a Moleskine:

And here is the greatest shame: livebloggers tend to be the smartest, savviest people in the room. The people best able to absorb a presentation on Day One at a conference, absorb two on Day Two, and another on Day Three and weave all of their thinking into one excellent article or blog post. But what do we get? Off the cuff blog posts and “tweets” that they, let me call it, should be ashamed of. I will not name names, but I read the liveblogging of many colleagues from conferences I cannot go to: folks, take notes instead. Reflect. Talk to the other attendees. Then write your posts. You will be doing the world and your own reputations a big favor.

Seth Godin also weighs in on the side of the “is this really useful?” camp:

On closer inspection, it doesn’t work particularly well. I mean, not only was I there, but I was speaking, yet I can’t make sense at all of the posts. That’s because most people don’t take notes to be read. They take notes to write them. The act of writing things down triggers different areas of our brain, it focuses attention, it makes it easier to remember things. You can read your blog notes later and say, “yeah, I remember that slide…” But for an outsider who’s not there, the amount of information that’s imparted is small indeed.

Angelo Fernando wonders, in the context of setting up a conference, what the conference organizer’s role in this should be: “should there be some guidelines conference organizers should set?”

So between all these posts, and their comment threads, you can see a few basic camps emerging.

Some argue liveblogging is inherently bad, because it:

• Encourages those in the audience to pay more attention to their own notetaking and posting to their blog than the live speakers or fellow audience members
• Allows poor notetakers to post inaccurate summaries of events, potentially harming reputations needlessly or without real context to add value
• Dilutes the value of attending the events live, or selling access to conference proceedings and such – material to which the liveblogger does not have copyright clearance
• Gets in the way of deeper thinking – about, absorbing, reflecting, and then posting about the event offers more opportunity to add value than the relatively immediate (and unmediated) coverage of liveblogging

Those who argue in support of liveblogging point out that liveblogging:

• Provides a service to those unable to attend the event, capturing some of the “feel” of the event
• Is conversational, like blogs in general, and therefore should not be held to the same critique as journalistic reports of the same event would be. Liveblogging declares itself partial, incomplete, informal – therefore the audience understands these are not edited or formalized conclusions
• Creates an opportunity for people to react, correct, and respond to what was said
• Contributes to the worth of the event, by giving it more attention – paying organizers back in free publicity more than it costs them in exclusive content

My own experience was rather mixed. I definitely saw some value in exposing the content to folks who were not there – great increase in traffic, some good comments, and an uptick in subscribers – but those are just benefits to me. Did others benefit from my liveblogging? It’s hard to speak for anonymous readers – I did get some positive feedback from readers who appreciated the effort and the content, but I don’t know how many found it a flood of useless raw notes – useless but not annoying enough to complain about.

On the negative side, I did get the feeling that it interfered with my conference experience in a few ways.

First, the simple logistics of always getting to a power strip, getting onto the conference network, and starting the shell of a blog post into which to write ties you up right at the moment where you should most be talking to other attendees. You lose that 5 minutes right before a session begins or after one ends. It isn’t a lot of time, but it is key time – I could actually feel a bit disconnected from other conference goers due to managing the laptop. (Am I using the laptop or is it using me as a source of movement and constant power?)

Second, the sheer effort involved in trying to do a good job of liveblogging – capturing well what was being said – meant that by the end of the day I was far too tired of the experience to post any reflective thoughts. In my experience at least, liveblogging meant that I was not able to write more value-added blog posts in which I summarized, drew conclusions across panels, argued for a different interpretation or approach, and so on. (This wasn’t helped by the 1.5hr commute to the conference each morning and home each night, or the fact that I was also manning the Optaros sponsor booth when it was open, and doing other work – not complaining, just saying it made for some really long days and probably sapped my ability to make cohesive arguments).

Third, I found myself stuck in trying to cover everything – as though I was somehow letting someone down if I didn’t liveblog on e of the sessions. Why shouldn’t I only cover sessions I found interesting and insightful? Do I need to spend my time liveblogging a vendor sales pitch? I felt that it actually increased my urge to make snarky comments. Not that there’s anything wrong with well developed, constructive criticism – but I don’t want to focus on snippy comments interjected in the middle of someone’s presentation. Seems juvenile at best. (Ok, I don’t think I was that bad – but I could see how people could get caught up in the opportunity to say something funny for humor’s sake rather than as a sustained thoughtful critique).

So would I liveblog again?

I certainly will continue to blog about conferences I attend, and capture notes on presentations, keynotes, and panels I find interesting. But I don’t know that I will liveblog in quite the same way.

For me it’s less about the permissions issue (though I will certainly keep an eye out for what is explicitly allowed and disallowed at various conferences – as a speaker and as an attendee) then it is about the opportunity to add value, not just record transcripts.

Even if I do find myself with the urge to share my notes from a conference, I’d want to make sure that it is not interfering with my ability to engage the folks around me and that I’m preserving time and energy to actually reflect on the event, not just transcribe it.

While there may be value in sharing relatively unprocessed notes – for some occasions – I don’t think it is worth the effort, when compared to synthesizing, analyzing, arguing about, and engaging the material rather than just transmitting it.

In short: more commentary and analysis, less transcription.

What do you think? Should bloggers get permission before posting about conferences? Does this apply to all bloggers or just liveblogging?

Two side notes:

The funniest reaction I saw was a quip in the comments of a liveblog of Bruce Sterling’s rant from SXSW: “liveblogging is for sissies. when you’re cutting edge, someone else liveblogs it for you.”

Alice Marwick liveblogged from a workshop on “Ethical Surveillance” – the irony of which is not lost on her: “I’m going to selectively blog some of the sessions, since I didn’t bother to get anyone’s permission for this. Would this count as micro-surveillance? I wonder.” Is liveblogging a form of surveillance? What if you identify people in the audience asking questions?

Good references on liveblogging (more about how to do it well than whether to do it or not):

• Liveblogging post mortem (from July of 2005!)
• Live Blogging Best Practices (June 2006)
• Liveblog your next event
• Tips for Conference Blogging (a three part series)

Marketing 2.0 – the Beauty comes from the inside

Someone else was going to speak this am, but we were asked to do this session via twitter this morning. So if you have thought twitter didn’t have value – it can.

Some broad thoughts to begin the conversation:

- If you love your customers, set them free – ask them for as little information as possible, and let them engage when they want to. Red Hat example – webinars without forced registration – participants went up dramatically and so did leads! Don’t make people register at all if you can.

- Assume that they are as smart as you think you are. It is ok to give customers lots of choices.

- Transparency: Be honest, open, straightforward. The more the better. CoreMedia tracks their bugs in an open format. Contrasts Sun versus Cisco in terms of how difficult it is for employees to blog – not saying one is right and the other wrong, but the aggressive nature of Sun’s approach (anyone can blog – all you need to do is register and check a box which says you’ve read the policy) is very interesting.

- Self-service – let customers find what they can, without having to call you.

- Anti-marketing – be willing to live with less customer information – the information people willingly give when they contact you is so much more valuable than whatever you require.

- Websites – Your website should assume your customers are smarter than you think, and you put yourself in their shoes, you can make your site more relevant.

Dr. Willms Buhse:

Focus on authentic, personal messages – not a careful honed marketing message.

Be open for feedback – participate in the dialogue.

Change your role as VP of Marketing into Artist Management – your employees are the artists and your role is to help them to be popular.

Whatever perception your customers have – say thank you. Even if you disagree!

Collaboration in Marketing = Gather Feedback

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Discussion:
The closer you can get the customer to the people who actually build/manufacture/design whatever it is you do the better. You want to get customers to the subject matter experts.

Get employees involved, get customers closer to the experts, use PR for more formal official announcements.

Audience questions:
Collaborating with our customers – should we be incenting customers to participate – tshirts, ipods, whatever.

Can be a good idea – the main currency to use is reputation – let other users rate content contributed, gather their contributions in a profile, etc – reputation is the primary currency that matters in many of these contexts.

Audience comment – this isn’t marketing 2.0 but unmarketing. How do you help a marketing team understand the value of this, if your marketing team isn’t aligned with this vision. (Resembles the challenges in bottom up emergent collaboration in a top down command and control environment).

Audience Question: What about transparency in a professional services firm versus confidentiality or concerns about proprietary methodology, etc.

The most important thing is reputation for execution – ability to do good work consistently. Transparency will help you with that.

—

Speaker – Sam Weber, VP Technical Services, KnowNow

Customer story – large outsourcing company and the challenges they face in keeping over 40,000 employees in 120 countries up to speed.

Roughly 30 intranets, portals, and knowledge bases, over 1000 internal blogs – the challenge is how to distribute information in such a mess.

Agenda:

• Information management gap
• The solution
• Customer examples
• Enterprise options
• Q&A

[Sounds a bit more like a pitch than I was expecting this morning . . . didn't even get my grande soy latte this morning, so I may just be less receptive, or more snarky, depending on your perception.]

Problem is information overload – within and without the firewall.

Status quo: Insuffienct. Email is overused, static portals are broken, search isn’t the answer. [What's a static portal? A portal not built on KnowNow's technology? I think "static" and "portal" don't go together.]

[This makes at least twice now that I am seeing the same slides a second time in three days - these same slides were part of the "Launch Pad" presentation form KnowNow.[

The solution: Bridge the Information Gap through Syndication (RSS) in the Enterprise. We call this Live Information Management.

Step 1: Access and monitor all information sources.

Step 2: Automate relevancy.

Step 3: Push relevant information to employees, customers, partners

Step 4: Capture user behavior

Technology - the "Enterprise Syndication Server" [provided by someone like KnowNow, one assumes] in the middle takes all the feeds from within and without, aggregates, filters, finds relevancy, and delivers back to users, via RSS.

In order to effectively leverage RSS within the enterprise, here’s what we’ve found to be the minimum requirements:

• Monitor many if not all sources inside and outside the enterprise
• Match content to users based on relevancy
• Leverage network effects
• Deliver information to users as available
• Provide enterprise security and management
• Enable end-user personalization and control

Customer stories: Wells Fargo, an unnamed bank,

Audience question: Why is it better, in this case, to send out an alert about something which has occured as an RSS feed rather than an email?

Answer: first, we alert a lot of ways – desktop widget, feed reader, portal – there’s lots of ways to do this. Ultimately what we heard was that the alerts via email were frustrating to users because it was just another email in a series.

Options for the Enterpise:

1. Wait for major vendors to offer RSS. (2-5 years)

2. Stick with status quo (email as main information sharing and distrubution tool)

3. Implement and Enterprise Syndication Solution

While viewing these pictures, hum the tune to “Do You Know the Way to San José” – the version in my head is Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but you may have an earlier version.

150 years of continued success leads to some long history and some deep pockets of legacy. We can’t just throw up wikis and blogs and say now we’re enterprise 2.0.

Don – how do we get started?

Ross – first, figure out what you’re already doing. We’ve had years of bottom up, and often there are experts inside the company already. What if you take the unofficial projects and bless them with official leadership – this can make it truly transformative. Share control in order to create value.

Joe – we’ve been very conscious about experimentation – about having multiple lines in the water. What are the upsides / downsides of suite products, or waiting for the large vendors to enter the space, versus best of breed or multiple best of breeeds. The idea is to make many small bets.

An experiment – social network. Yes, we want one – but the challenge is that people want to use the network to find experts but don’t necessarily want to be found as an expert. You have to also experiment with your culture, and how these tools and techniques will play in your environment.

Kim – I think about SpikeSource itself – a company really run by email, and getting not just the engineers to use the wiki but *all* the users. In order to participate in certain things you gotta do it via the wiki – carrot and stick.

Joe – Can I share a mistake? A mistake I made was to go after email – wow, wouldn’t you love to get rid of your email? It was painful coming down off the other side of that mountain. Even if that is your goal, keep that in small internal voice not as the primary goal.

Don – a plan with a client who wanted to start with the CEO and top 200 executives. Bad idea. Start with a pilot, with an easier barrier. In the case of the LA Times, don’t start with editorial – start with something like community activities – either there is a play at the local high school at 8pm or there isn’t – factually verifiable stuff would be an easier place to start.

Don – what about challenges? (Ross mentioned freeriders, Kim talked about enterprise barriers, Joe mentioned culture fit). What are the real challenges?

Ross – this room is full of real people dealing with this in a practical sense – PR team, legal team, brand police – a lot of the challenge is finding proof stories or success stories that are safe and difficult to disagree with, then building on those successes. Not that different than starting other kinds of projects, except that you’re going to get more volunteers. Maybe start with a quiet pilot.

Joe – And don’t deploy it. It is an adoption. Turn it on and set it free in the ecosystem, not deploy it enterprise-wide. You really have to find the right first project – you get this new shiny tool and man if everything doesn’t look like a nail when you’ve got that hammer. But you have to take time and go slow enough to locate the right opportunity.

Kim – In the last year it really seems to me this has settled in. When I’m talkign to executives the problem has shifted from “what is web 2.0″ to “how do I get it working in my enterprise” – from “what is a wiki” to “lets talk about wiki proliferation and how I control that.”

Don – How do you collaborate with control – isn’t that an oxymoron?

Kim – it does sound like it but there are ways it works. Leveraging existing wikis by gradually moving people to a standard platform – it isn’t about shutting down the bottom up innovation which has occured but about bringing people together on a standard platform.

Ross – there is a shift in good IT departments that is moving from Control to Foster – it isn’t just about controlling and restraining innovation – it’s also about finding the right way that central IT can foster usage of these tools.

Joe – you’re right. It isn’t about standardize, simplify, shut down – its about making innovation possible, about supporting and enabling the enterprise to win. Part of that is helping people locate the right tool for the right purpose.

Audience question: We’ve heard a lot in the last few days about bottoms up adoption – but if there isn’t an enterprise strategy for this (involving IT, HR, Operations, and everyone) – it can’t be pure decentralization. This isn’t just IT’s concern but the Enterprise’s concern.

Don – good transition into a closing though. Leadership – you have to provide enough leadership to cause this to happen versus you have to get out of the way and let it happen – these two thoughts can be conflicting or cause cognitive dissonance.

Ross – I still think to a large extent IT’s role is to get out of the way and let users create business change through collaboration. You have to enable the employees for this to be powerful and empowering.

Kim – I agree, but at the same time you need central IT involved so that you don’t create islands of information. I’d like to see IT grow into the mode of leadership around these technologies, not reverting to the role of naysayer or the one who rejects these tools.

Joe – I definitely think there is a need for IT to get out of the way. Adopting standards based, lightweight, manageable and flexible tools – minimizes those problems of data islands and such – if each implementation is open and extensible it will be easier to connect them. We started with the IT group deliberately – here is our chance to stand up and be a shining example of what is possible.

Don- closing thought: there is a new paradigm emerging, centered on collaboration. This is going to happen and you need to be ready to lead it or be left behind.

[Full disclosure - Procter & Gamble are an Optaros client and SpikeSource is an Optaros partner]

Web 2.0 is real, has real benefits which are clear.

What are the Enterprise concerns?

• Cost of point solutions
• Security and Compliance
• Import of data from existing systems, and exporting to other data destinations

Overcoming the obstacles: SuiteTwo.

Forrester’s conclusion about integrated suites – respondents prefer to get software from a single vendor.

[Editorial note: Puppies are cute, too. Asking the question the way Forrester did could never lead to any other conclusion - see my other blog post on that point.]

Suite Two, Spike Ignited, Spike Net – products from SpikeSource makes available to help enterprises reach Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 while overcoming their objections.

Benefits – open, extensible platform, well integrated with rich metadata.

Example SuiteTwo customer: Clearswift

CEO level decision – Jon Lee – example of how these technologies are starting to come top down not just bottom up.

International professional recruiting consultantcy. Need to share information about jobs and prospects in trying to match them to each other.

Fully integrated suite of web 2.0 applications. Highly extensible and flexible. Collaborate with control.

Enterprises are made up of people.

In building enterprise software, we’ve screwed up several ways. First, we’ve designed software for buyers, not users.

We’ve also tried to push structure and complexity into the tools – taking it out of the social network and trying to put it in the software. This makes it really easy for others to replicate, and hard for your users to embrace.

Instead what we should do is allow the complexity to live in the social network, in the human realm, and leave the tools much more open and simple.

Power law of participation – low threshold to high engagement – depth of engagement rises as you get closer to core. Some folks will just freeride and listen – some folks will get much more deeply involved. We need to think about the whole spectrum, not just the active users.

Read / Favorite / Tag / Comment / Subscribe / Share / Network / Write / Refactor / Collaborate / Moderate / Lead

(Mitch Kapor on Collective Intelligence / Collaborative Intelligence and the difference between them)

Recognizing I’m doing a 10 minute thing I’m going to dive into practicality.

What to wiki? Depends on your goals.

The four Ps: Process, Practice, Projects, People.

The hardest part is to get agreement on the goal. Start with a group of people and try to define a goal.

Potential goals:

• Wikipedia inside
• Editable intranet
• Small group communication / email replacement

Or, start with with Practices – not best practices (too formal) but practices – just getting people to write down and share what they are doing – FAQs, Glossaries – you will get “happy accidents” – a link to a page I never thought existed, but find someone has already created.

Sidebar: check out politicopia.com – wikis which allow debate around various bills with user participation.

Or, start with a Project. This is the classic technical case – which is not a bad place to start so long as you start at the beginning, not throwing a wiki at a project at the end or even in the middle.

Lastly, what about starting with Processes – this is perhaps the most complicated piece. Exception handling – what is the actual process we are supposed to be following. Is this really process?

Large computer manufacturer example – call center for business processes – they check to see if there is a script available, if not, they go into the wiki – they’ve gone from 20 clicks to find info down to 4.

Today we launched WikiWidgets as a small feature – including a mechanism for doing really complex editing in a very simple fashion. Also SocialCalc 1.1 released today.

With that I will stop so that we have more time.

Tapscott

Happy to be here. Flew in late last night – but hey, sleep is overrated.

I totally believe there are fundamential shifts underway: from closed hierarchy to the open networked enterprise.

(Which is from my 1992 book – paradigm shift).

We started, in response to some of my debates with Nick Carr, a syndicated project: “Winning with the Enterprise 2.0″ – one of the summary reports has been made available on the enterprise 2.0 conference site.

Four drivers for change:

1. Web 2.0
2. The Net Generation
3. The Social Revolution
4. The Economic Revolution

Old web was html, new web is xml.

Kids who have grown up net enabled – see Growing up Digital – it isn’t even technology to them, it is like air. Baby boom echo. Instead of a generation gap we have a generation lap.

World Conference of IT panel last year – video at www.newparadigm.com.

Four startling new principles for running a company:

1. Peering
2. Being Open
3. Sharing
4. Acting Globally

What are the new business models for future:

1. Peer pioneers – Linux, MySQL, but also in financial services
2. Ideagoras – like Innocentive Network
3. Prosumers
4. The New Alexandrians: The Sharing of Science
5. Open Platforms and APIs
6. The Global Plant Floor (Mass Collaboration)
7. The Wiki Workplace

Final thought: This is a paradigm shift.

Paradigm shifts are almost always recieved with coolness if not worse. Those with vested interests will fight change. The shift demands such a different view of things that established leaders are often last to be won over.
(Marilyn Ferguson?)