October 2009
Seth Godin Misunderstands Dunbar's Number, And...
Seth Godin recently wrote a post which hinges on Dunbar’s Number. Seth started out by misstating what Dunbar’s Number is, and then goes off the rails, predictably:
[via Dunbar’s Number isn’t just a number, it’s the law]
Dunbar’s number is 150.
And he’s not compromising, no matter how much you whine about it.
Dunbar postulated that the typical...
Social Business, The Movie: My 10 Minutes Of Fame...
Lists At Last
It’s almost a letdown to get access to Twitter lists at this point, since people are starting to gripe about them.
Conversations on 10 Minute Sprint Talk on Social...
It warms my hard old heart to see this sort of response to my 10 minute talk at 140 Characters this week:
6 tags
Social Business: 10 Minute Sprint From 140...
My slides and notes from today’s talk at 140 Characters Conference in LA. It was a ten minute sprint, so I didn’t get to elaborate the various points very deeply.]
I want to paint a quick picture of what I believe we will see emerge over the next five to ten years, as the impacts of real-time social tools and the emerging web culture trickle through into business.
Today we are...
A Writing Revolution § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
A Writing Revolution § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM.
To quantify our changing reading and writing habits, we plotted the number of published authors per year, since 1400, for books and more recent social media (blogs, Facebook, and Twitter). This is the first published graph of the history of authorship. We found that the number of published authors per year increased nearly tenfold every century for ...
Facebook Doesn't Care What You Think, Worms
Facebook is just a social phenomenon to me, since I stopped using it months ago. One interesting aspect of the Facebook mess is the contempt the company seems to have for it’s user community. Witness the most recent fooforaw regrading the new UI just rolled out:
[via The New, New, New Facebook: Hundreds of Thousands Organize in Protest by Adam Ostrow]
Facebook didn’t give much warning...
8 tags
The Naming Of Things: Social Business
I guess the Dachis folks are getting some push back on the use of the ‘social business’ and ‘social business design’ handles to characterize the impacts of social tools on business.
[via Defining Social Business Design: Style vs. Substance by Peter Kim]
For the most part, people understand that we’re talking about what’s on the horizon for business....
2 tags
Small Talk Is Big Again
A piece in the NYTimes about real-time search, yields this one liner.
[via Ping - How High Will Real-Time Search Fly? - NYTimes.com by Miguel Helft]
Google wants the Twitter data primarily because its mission is to be comprehensive: Google wants to organize all of the world’s information, including the Web’s fleeting real-time conversations.
But real-time conversations aren’t...
links for 2009-10-24
Dear WSJ: To Avoid Google Disease, Please Put A Condom On Your Content Danny Sullivan decontructs Robert Thompson’s ‘promiscuity’ remaks at Web 2.0 Summit. (tags: Media&Journalism google wsj robertthompson)
Steven Levy Talks Microsyntax, But Doesn't Use The...
In a recent piece at Wired, Steven Levy talks about the microsyntactic conventions that make Twitter what it is:
[via Mob Rule! How Users Took Over Twitter]
Twitter’s evolution spawned a new grammar, and the Twitter community created many of the conventions now integral to the service. This includes hashtags (marked with a # symbol) and the @ prefix before a username. Companies using...
James Governor on Social Media Expertise
[James Governor’s Monkchips » Critical Mass: Bringing Physics to Social Network Pablum]
We make a virtue of ignorance. How many so called “social media experts” have read any network theory? We think we’re so smart. How may social media experts have any understanding of statistical physics? Probably a vanishingly small proportion. But science can teach us a lot if we engage with...
Thymer Has Some Fun
I was looking at a neat-looking task manager/time tracker called Thymer, and I like the way they have a little fun with the signup:
links for 2009-10-19
The Media Equation - What Would It Take to Support a Newsroom? - NYTimes.com David Carr doesn’t take the Downie report recommendations very seriously. Are newspapers too big to fail? (tags: thedeathofnewspapers)
Nokia Is Lost
A recent NY Times piece about Nokia underscores how lost the company seems to be:
[Nokia Struggles to Regain Market Share in U.S. by Kevin O’Brien]
Nokia, the Finnish company that is the world’s biggest maker of mobile phones, is an undisputed powerhouse in Europe, Asia and Latin America, with market shares regularly topping 30 percent.
Nokia’s new products include the Nokia...
links for 2009-10-18
The Public Editor - Fairness and the Accused - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com The NY Times finds itself, once again, on the far side of its own policies on quoting anonymous sources. Isn’t this exactly what eidtorial journalism is supposed to be a check against? (tags: Media&Journalism AnonymousSources editorial)
The Rule of High School
Seth seems unmoved by Twitter, or maybe doesn’t like the ‘cool kids’ that seem to jam its hallways.
[via Seth’s Blog: The Rule of High School]
Any sufficiently overheated industry will eventually resemble high school. High school is filled with insecurity, social climbing, backbiting, false friends, faux achievements, high drama and not much content. Much of this...
Fair To Everyone
It seems almost innocuous, a toss-off line at the end of a Public Editor piece by Clark Hoyt in the NY Times, dealing with questions about quoting anonymous sources:
The Public Editor - Fairness and the Accused - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.
A newspaper is obliged to be fair to everyone.
However, this statement sheds light on one of the fundamental points of contention regarding the social...
Chris Pirillo on Twitter
[via Top 5 Twitter Trends to Watch Right Now]
“Twitter is a great place to tell the world what you’re thinking before you’ve had a chance to think about it.” - Chris Pirillo
The Death Of Email: What Does Dead Mean, Exactly?
Over at the Enterprise 2.0 blog, I write about The Death Of Email: What Does Dead Mean, Exactly?.
There has been a great deal of discussion about email recently. I think the proximate cause is the arrival of Google Wave, which is being heralded like the coronation of royalty. (I will leave a review of Wave to another venue, since the introductory video from Google is 85 minutes.) But the rise...
Wired Doesn't Know Print Is Dead?
The winding down of the Condé Nast magazine empire is showing some strange thinking at Wired, which is supposed to be all about the future. Shouldn’t they being doubling down on the web as ad revenues in print are collapsing? But the company is laying off resources working on the web side.
[via Unwiring Wired by Ryan Tate]
But it’s not lost on some Wired.com insiders that the...
links for 2009-10-16
Google Wave. Huh. What Is It Good For? - Techtonic Shifts Blog - Newsweek.com
SPAM Apologist PRNewser Is On The Wrong Side
Was pinged by @daveyarmon that Joe Ciarallo of PRNewser had riffed on my recent post about Cision’s spam business which Chris Kenton first howled about:
[via PR Spam Can Be Annoying, But It’s Not Illegal]
Blogger and technologist Stowe Boyd has some harsh words for media list and monitoring company Cision. He likens the company to “spam mafia” and cites the case...
links for 2009-10-15
MediaPost Publications News Corp.: Google News Lives Off ‘Sweat Of Our Brow’ 10/14/2009 Wendy Davis points ou that if News Corp and SP want no aggregators or search engines linking to them, they can just turn them off.
For Power Sharers, Google Docs Now Lets You Share Folders And Upload In Bulk Google goes after Sharepoint?
The New Technorati: Real-Time Influence
A recent tweet by Dave winer made me realize I had completely missed Technorati launching a new strategy.
Dave tweeted this:
davewiner: In the new scheme Technorati rates my blog a 0 on a scale of 1 to 1000. Gulp. http://r2.ly/pe2g
I went and looked: /Message now has an authority of 592, which is not bad. And it looks like a whole lot of blogs that had been higher ranked have tumbled...
Chris Kenton Uncovers Spam Mafia
I got an email from Chris Kenton, describing some seriously unethical, and perhaps illegal, behavior at Cision, the folks behind The Media Map. Apparently, Chris receive spam sent to an email account he has never given out for any marketing purpose. He backtracked, and a contact at the company that sent it admitted that they had acquired it from Cision. A VP at Cision agreed that they had...
links for 2009-10-13
Guardian gagging order sparks Twitter frenzy - politics.co.uk Kafkaesque gag orders on Britian’s press (tags: Media&Journalism uk guardian)
Editorial - Truth in Advertising, Offline or Online - NYTimes.com NY Times points out that ‘deceiving consumers has long been illegal’ and should be so on blogs. Hear, hear.
Why Email No Longer Rules Jessica Vascellaro’s...
2 tags
The Future Of Money: Jamais Cascio
Jamais Cascio is one of the world’s leading futurists, and spared me some time a few weeks ago to talk about money, especially alternative cash.
Some highlights:
Jamais starts by stating that “All money is a fantasy,” and then sets the stage for the problem for local, alternative money: you have to get a critical mass of people to agree in a new fantasy.
He points out...
Supernova Using All My Metaphors
I am getting a perverse pleasure out of the metaphor storm coming from the upcoming Supernova.
First, a few weeks ago, I saw that the conference will be having a “Flow Roundtable”, a term that I have been associating with streaming applications for years. I inquired, and I am not invited to participate.
Today, Chris Carfi sent out a promotional email talking about “The Web...
Keeping Track Of Random Things: Springpad,...
I am not tremendously organized. I am what is called a ‘scruffy’ when it comes to personal organization:
[via 3 Life Meta Hacks: Erosion, Streams, And Piles]
Scruffies don’t organize everything: they are “data-driven”, using their environment to channel their work, like the piles of things I leave on my desk to which I will eventually turn my attention, or...
links for 2009-10-12
Designing social interfaces at Web Directions South 2009 @ Mediajunkie
Christian Cumlish slides
Joel Spolsky on Wifi At Conferences
Why does the wifi at conferences always suck? Joel Spolsky knows and tells all:
[via The “WiFi At Conferences” Problem - Joel on Software]
At the smaller conferences, the ones with, say, 300-1000 people, the trouble is that internet access is something of a black box. If you’re a conference organizer, your first priority is finding a space—any space—because there usually aren’t a lot of...
3 tags
The Future Of Money: Joe Edelman and Groundcrew
After a month off the project, because of the press of other work, I am back to The Future Of Money. In this episode, I speak with Joe Edelman about his Groundcrew project, intended to help the coordination of community activities, including ‘an economy of gifts, sharing and neighborly aid.’
From the website:
Short Project Description
Groundcrew is web/mobile software that ...
Management Lies
In his final column in the Observer on Management, Simon Caulkin suggests that the past decade’s excesses have led to a wholesale failure in management:
[Simon Caulkin: Farewell, with a last word on the blunder years | Business | The Observer]
When I joined the paper in 1993, the brief was to make visible and discussable something that was intangible, taken for granted, and, for...
links for 2009-10-11
Alex Payne - So You’re Moving to San Francisco Alex describes why he will leave SF when he can. Me, I’m leaving for these and more complex reasons. He’s so in the tech bubble and the world of food and art, he never mentions California’s political mess, or the desertification going on. He’s the sort of person he is warning us about: “oung white men with...
Sidekick Pulls A Magnolia
[via Sidekick™ - T-Mobile Forums]
Updated: 10/10/2009 12:35 PM PDT
T-MOBILE AND MICROSOFT/DANGER STATUS UPDATE ON SIDEKICK DATA DISRUPTION
Dear valued T-Mobile Sidekick customers:
T-Mobile and the Sidekick data services provider, Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, are reaching out to express our apologies regarding the recent Sidekick data service disruption.
We appreciate your...
links for 2009-10-10
Is “Social Enterprise Software” An Oxymoron? Fred Wilson on Dachis Group’s formation
Publish2 Wins An Online Journalism Award
Publish2 and two other companies were honored with awards from the Online Journalism Foundation:
[via Publish2, My Ballard and Gotham Gazette recognized with inaugural Online Journalism Awards]
A collection of linking tools that enables journalists to complement their original reporting, a hyperlocal site covering a Seattle neighborhood and a small site that covers a big city were the...
1 tag
Twitter Antihype From Lee Dryburgh
I am not attending the upcoming EComm conference, but it looks like Lee Dryburgh has really stuck his head into the Google Wave Koolaid punch bowl.
[via email]
Organiser Message
During the past few months, I’ve received growing requests for opinions on Twitter. However I’ve been taking the position for sometime now that my role is to help the communications innovation community grow and for it...
Twitter Is Partially Hosed
I have fallen into a Twitter rabbit hole.
For the past few hours I have not been getting the status updates of the 900+ folks that I am following:
Meanwhile, when I check if these folks have been tweeting, they have.
So, for some reason, Twitter is blocking tweets from reaching me. But not @mentions, which I seem to be getting. And my pal Andre (@andrerib) tells me he is seeing my...
links for 2009-10-08
Op-Ed Contributor - Blogged and Sold - NYTimes.com Choire Sicha sends up the FTC regulations on blogging and product endorsement
Blogging Killed Gourmet, Says Christopher Kimball
Condé Nast closed down a bunch of magazines recently, and Gourmet was one of the group. It closes with a groan, like an old house settling, and commentators who are looking for a villain in this drama have many to chose from. Christopher Kimball blames blogging:
[via Gourmet to All That]
The shuttering of Gourmet reminds us that in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a...
Recovery.gov Cover Up: Contractor Redacts Twitter...
The mess that is boiling out of the Obama administration’s Recovery.gov website is laughable, considering the transparency and openness that Obama pledged to create.
Propublica is all over this:
[via Obama Administration Redacts Contract Details for Recovery.gov by Christopher Flavelle].
Back in July, a software company named Smartronix [1] landed an $18 million contract to build a...
The Downside Of URL Shorteners And One Answer
The recent announcement by Pierre Far at Cli.gs that the company would be shutting down its URL shortening service raises questions about the viability of this sort of company.
As Far said,
Short URLs are a feature, and are definitely not a business on their own. This assertion is fact in my mind given what I’m seeing in the market and what my customers and users are saying. There comes a...
It’s Time To Hide The Noise
It’s Time To Hide The Noise.
it’s time to write a big fat post about catch and throw — filters v publics — in scaling communications and signals.
links for 2009-10-04
Knight Foundation rethinks its stance on for-profit deals Nieman Journalism Lab “Everyblock won a $1,100,000 grant from the Knight Foundation in 2007 to build its innovative platform for aggregating local news and information. Two years later, soon after the Knight grant had expired, founder Adrian Holovaty announced that MSNBC had acquired EveryBlock. The sale raised questions...
Different Kinds Of Twitterers: What's The Right...
I have been thinking a great deal about the application of the open follower model (a la Twitter) to the emerging social business. My intuitive sense has been that there are many ways that people use Twitter, and these could be discovered by various kinds of statistical analysis, but otherwise the truth of what is going on may be concealed by the buzz of many people talking all at once.
...
links for 2009-10-03
Glympse - Share Your Where “Glympse is a groundbreaking new way to share your location with anyone for a specified period of time using patent-pending GlympseWatch!22 timer.” (tags: Technology geolocation mobile)
Webbmedia Group | Resources Amy Webb’s 10 Tech Trends Talk at ONA 2009 resources, links and guides for Amy Webb’s “10 Tech Trends” talk at the...
Infodemics
In a 2007 study on global risks, a group working on behalf of the World Economic Forum identified a collection of highly interconnected risk factors, and explored various scenarios in which these factors often influenced each other and in some cases amplified the effects of others.
The scenarios worked through are chilling, such as a world pandemic which leads to heightened militarism and ...
links for 2009-10-02
Study Reveals Two Types of Twitter Users “In a study of Twitter, a microblogging service used by millions of people from high school students to national elected officials, Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase found that 80 percent of regular users are “meformers,” people who use the platform to post updates on their everyday activities, social lives, feelings, thoughts and emotions. The...
