continuous partial attention

A Bloggy Problem

I'm a bit perturbed.  For some strange reason, my blogs main page doesn't show the titles to my blog posts.

It started the other day after adding and subtracting widgets from my Typepad template, but I don't understand how what I was doing would cause my page to start rendering posts without the the subject headers.

If anyone has any clue about what's going on with my blog and possibly how to fix it, let me know!

Update 3:25pm: Thanks to Sherry for finding a simple solution to this problem!  It seems that our relationship has taken a sudden u-turn with me being on the receiving side of tech support.  I don't know how I feel about this... but I'm going to go with pride.  Otherwise, I might get it.

my.barackobama.com

New numbers haven't come out yet, but as of February 13, there were over 70,000 user accounts on my.barackobama.com.  I imagine that by now, there are well over 100,000. To follow up on my last post, I decided that I would explore the core function of Barack Obama's social networking site: by actually attending a meetup.

Here is the organizing page.  Here are the photos I took at the event.

I enjoyed going to this event because it gave me some perspective on how social networking is going to be impacting the political process.  First off, I noticed that many of the people there were meeting face to face for the first time, but already knew each other through my.barackobama.com.  For at least a few, this was the first time they had actually met someone in person that they'd first had contact with online.  A few mentioned that they had never joined a social networking site such as MySpace or Facebook.  Interesting.

The main purpose of this meeting was to start connecting people interested in supporting Barack Obama's run for office.  While this meeting was mainly focused on introduction, many were already asking about what they can do to help.  Going around the room, there seemed to be a common theme in between the different motivations for attending this event: Everyone seemed to resonate with Barack Obama's message of finding a new politics.  Someone made the comment that Obama's message is very reminiscent of John F. Kennedy and his famous "Ask not what your country can do for you..." speech. 

Listening to everyone and their stories, it struck me just how many people that Obama is inspiring into becoming politically active for the first time.  Through the inspired use of social media in his campaign from the get go, he's also enabling a large number of people to become politically active extremely early in the election cycle.

We live in interesting times indeed.

Currently, my main criticism of my.barackobama.com is that it doesn't have a clear focus with regard to action.  What it does well is enable communities to form, but beyond that, local leadership is still needed to figure out what the next steps are.  Luckily it seems that there is experienced leadership available here in the form of Georgia for Obama, but I have to wonder what kind of opportunity is lost in communities where there is no such experience. 

By being the first candidate to come out with a social networking site tied to a campaign, it's pretty much guaranteed (to be frank) that this new application of social software is going to suck compared to what this space is going to look like in the future.  I'm sure what effect it would have in this particular election cycle, but I'm convinced that the first candidate who figures out the sweet spot in creating a viral social networking site that enables communities to form and then further helps them mobilize into action is going to have a major impact on the future of political process and democracy.

Questions and Answers

I'm planning on starting up a NetSquared group here in Atlanta in the next few months.  This isn't an official announcement or anything, just an officially casual mention of something I'm working on that will have an official announcement later on.  ;) 

Anyways, Gina Cardazone  of ComputMentor/TechSoup sent me a few questions, and I thought I'd share my answers to them:

What do you see as the the greatest examples, challenges and/or opportunities for people and organizations in Atlanta who wish to use the social web for social change?

Atlanta is a bit of a strange creature in terms of the relationship between it's big business and it's nonprofits.  To put it simply, Atlanta loves it's nonprofits, and it shows through the sheer number of organizations of every size that exist within the city!  Because of the geographic dispersal (among many other factors) however, there isn't as much connectivity and support for the non-profit community with regards to technology as I think most feel there needs to be.

What would you see as the benefit or ultimate goal of hosting a NetSquared Group in Atlanta?

Atlanta is just now beginning to wake up to and join the new social media/web 2.0 environment.  People are beginning to blog, gather together, and talk about how everything going on the web is impacting our lives, and we're now beginning to see a strong Atlanta cluster form on the blogosphere.  The education curve is still long and always growing, and my goal is to help bring the non-profit community forward and connect them with the technology community so that all our do-gooders, idealists, and troublemakers are able to more effectively bring about the change they wish to see in the world.  :)

Google Apps for Nonprofits?

Google has just launched a premium version of Google Apps for your Domain, now including Google Docs and Spreadsheets!  The full scale assault on Microsoft Office has begun!  This is huge for a number reasons, of which I won't get into now.  Go read a blog or something.

I have just one criticism.  They have three different plans: free, premium, and then a free plan tailored towards Universities.  Soo.. where's the non-profit plan?  And where's the marketing towards non-profits?

Non-profits, (especially small nonprofits) stand to gain immensely from Google Apps as it will enable them to set up an IT infrastructure complete with email, group calendaring, VoIP, document creation and collaboration, and basic web presence with just a few clicks!  This cuts out the cost for expensive software, hardware, consultants, expensive IT staff, etc.

Google should be targeting non-profits with their new offering.  If done right, Google could also create exposure for such non-profits thusly increasing exposure for it's own products.    Perhaps they'll start working towards this when Jotspot is (one day) integrated into this service.

If Google doesn't start showing love to non-profits, I just might install AdBlock in protest!  ;)


Technorati Tags: nonprofit, np, google, web 2.0

musings on climate change, cyberpunk, and the social web

Last week I finally sat down to watch An Inconvenient Truth with my family. I'd been meaning to since before its theatrical debut, but I hadn't made it a priority. 

Perhaps I should have.

I've been sold on the topic of global warming since I was in elementary school.  I had the good fortune of being part of the TAG (Talented And Gifted) program there which put me in a classroom with a number of other children who had diverse intellectual interests (no doubt instilled in them by their parents) once a week.  This is where I first heard about climate change from a few other students (whale saving, tree hugging, nine year olds whom I had the biggest crushes on and admired greatly), and it began to figure prominently as a topic of conversation for the often student guided class.  To be frank, it scared me.  And I filed it in the back of my head as something to act on in the future.

Looking back, I'm beginning to draw some lines between early exposure to such ideas, and my later interests.  As a sci-fi fan, I've always been fascinated by cyberpunks seemingly dystopian post-apocolyptic futures.  (I say seemingly, because cyberpunk isn't as much a dystopion vision as much as an anarchist utopian vision.)  For myself, cyberpunk speaks to the resiliency of the human race.  It speaks of hope for our continues survival in the face of cataclysm and tragedy caused by our careless advancement into a technologically advanced race.  In these scenarios, humanity is often propelled into such futures by economic forces with little regard to what makes us truly human.  It's only after the apparent apocalypse that people discover their humanity through technology, and fight to regain shreds of a world they once took for granted.

I think this is also why the game Chrono Trigger had such a huge impact on my development.  Time-travel being the major mechanic in the story, the consequences of individual actions throughout history were very apparent as you progressed.  Often, these individual actions had global consequences.  In the fictional world Chrono Trigger takes place in, time travel is a god-given gift which grants the protagonists the ability to understand why the world ends up in the dying state it is in the year 2300.  Unfortunately for us, we don't have the luxury to go back in time and fix our mistakes.

We do however have mathematical models which help us extrapolate what our future might look like, and things aren't looking so good right now.  Hindsight may be 20/20, but what's that saying about deaf ears...?

Following the industrial revolution, technology has gotten a bad rap for being dehumanizing.  Technology isn't dehumanizing, humans are dehumanizing.  Technology represents the epitome of what we are and what we can be at any given moment.

So the question we should ask now is, how can we utilize our technology to start trying to fix problems such as climate change?  It starts with finding our humanity; finding our humanity reflected back at us through our technology, and most importantly, finding the our humanity in others.

No one's really talking about it, but there's a major philosophical phase shift that the internet and social media is bringing about in our collective subconscious'. Following the industrial revolution, technology was thought of as dehumanizing.  Now, we're starting to see that it's becoming potentially re-humanizing.  We're connecting in new ways like never before.  Doing things collectively like never before.

Watching An Inconvenient Truth, our situation seemed hopeless.  But then looking out at the vast net, I'm suddenly filled with lots of hope.

Social Media and 2008

As a social media consultant/geek, this has been an exciting week in politics!  It started the morning of SoCon07, during which time Barack Obama announced to the world that he was running for President of the United states.  I think his message is exactly what's needed today.  People do need to get involved.  What goes on in Washington shouldn't be driven by petty politics.  etc, and so on.  He is exactly the kind of candidate we need in order to get past this challenging time period.  Now, I'm not sure if he's the right person for the job, but I think his candidacy is most definitely needed in order to refocus the current political discourse. 

What's so interesting about him from a social media perspective?  Well, when he announced his candidacy, he also unveiled a social networking site to  go along with it.  Within days, thousands of people signed up.  All around the US people have been holding meetups all week to talk about Barack Obama and change.  Locally, over nearly people signed up for a meeting that was capped at around 50 or so people.  This is a campaign that has started like none other, and citizen media is going to play an even bigger role then ever before in an election (At least in the United States).

And so, Barack Obama has already set part of the tone for this election cycle.  Remember blogging politicians where such a novelty in the 2004 election?  That was nothing.  This time around, most candidates should have blogs (whether or not they understand how to best utilize the medium or not) and many candidates are already picking up on the use of podcasts and streaming video. 
If they haven't started already, most of the major candidates should now be scrambling to create social networking services for their campaigns.  This is a huge space right now that I'm sure a number of companies have anticipated demand for this election cycle, and we should be hearing about companies coming out of stealth offering social network building tools to campaigns in the next few weeks and months.

Whether or not you are into Barack Obama or not, you should take some time to check out his website.  What's going on is bigger then any individual candidate and could signal a change in the way engaged citizens participate in civic processes.

I have alot to say on this topic, so expect to hear more about this as time goes on.

Social Network Fatigue? Not quite.

Tony writes that "Social Network Fatigue is a Red Herring" in response to Jon Udell and Tim O'Reilly.

While I don't entirely agree with the statement made in his subject line, he makes some very valid points. In my opinion, social network fatigue isn't exactly the problem being observed, it's having different parts of ones social network fragmented over a number of services.  I'm guessing any slowdown in growth and adoption of new social networks would be accounted for by one being satisfied and sufficiently networked within a single or group of services. 

Again, we must remember that people are the network, and if there is a slowdown in adoption of social networking services it's likely due to redundancy and lack of value added.  People aren't actually getting tired of connecting, but it's difficult to connect with everyone in your social network when it's spread around a number of services.  A similar effect can be observed within 'groups' within a social network.  At a certain point, joining groups isn't about connecting within the group, but creating lists of interests and affiliations for people to see.  What's going on in those groups merely becomes background noise.

I totally agree that services that cater to niche interests are the next big area.  Looking at them as social networking sites in and of themselves is the wrong perspective however.  The next generation of services looks to be features that can be added to other networks.  These services add value and enable new kinds of interaction to already established networks in established services.  What does this look like?  Widgets, for one.  I have a widget for this blog on my MySpace page, as well as a widget with my Last.fm music list.  Totally different social networks, adding value to each other and connecting the people I know to other parts of my social identity online.  This begins to decrease the friction I feel about my social network being fragmented over multiple web services.

Conclusions:

• Social networks are made of people, not software. (Oft repeated, but it still needs some drilling in all our heads)
• Social networks are increasingly becoming just a standard feature for web services; web services that are increasingly being mashed up.
• Social network fatigue isn't the only thing going on here! I'm not tired of connecting, I'm tired of not being able to easily connect different parts of my social network together without having to ask them to change their habits and join my particular selection of services.

SoCon07 and Crowdvine

Something that made SoCon07 as amazing an experience as it was (in my opinion) was the social network that Tony Stubblebine created for us through his new service Crowdvine.

The SoCon07 social networking site was set up on Crowdvine before the conference and word was sent out for people to start joining.  As someone who likes to prep before each conference I go to, this was indispensable as I was able to make a list of people I wanted to introduce myself to over the course of the weekend.  It also gave us the opportunity to begin to connect and really begin the conference before any of us met face to face.

During the conference, I had the opportunity to control the big screen in the main auditorium.  My job (besides flipping through the slides during Leonard's talk) was to facilitate the discussion during the unconference portions of the demiconference by pulling up relevant information on the screen as the conversation progressed.  I've done this for a few conferences in the past which is most likely why got stuck with the job here.  Little did I know that Crowdvine would make this experience totally different from the others.

Whereas my past experiences were hectic and a bit scattered in trying to find relevant info to put up on the screen during conversation, having access to the social networking site made this process easy.  Every time someone stood up and was given the microphone, I would put their profile up on the screen for everyone to see.  Often, l would click on the links to their blogs which gave further insight into who it was that we as a group were communicating with.  For the most part, relevant web pages to the discussion were clicks away rather then google searches away, and the people stayed central to the whole experience.  I'm not sure about everyone else, but I derived alot of value from this!

This is yet another example of the power of social media.  Crowdvine enabled us to begin the conference early, and afterwords it is allowing us to continue the conversation.  It is more then just a social network, it also aggregates everyone's blogs!  This has enabled me to add two feeds to my rss feed reader: the blog posts for everyone who attended SoCon07 and joined the social network, as well as the blog posts for every one of the people I friended (and am still in the process of friending).  These two rss feeds immediately represent the continuation of the conference, and the connections I am making.  As discussion on the conference itself starts to taper down in the days and weeks ahead, I can just delete these two rss feeds and add my friends and new colleagues to my rss feed reader proper.

I'd like to thank Tony for testing out his new tool on us!  Not only has it significantly cut down on my post-conference rss clutter, but it made SoCon07 a new discussion point for what the conference (and unconference) experience should be like in the 21st century.

SoCon07: We have sociogenesis!

SoCon07 has come and gone, and I'm already feeling that change is in the air!  I remember when I met Sherry a little over a year ago, we were discussing how far behind the curve Atlanta was in understanding and taking part in some of the most important social changes that are occurring today due to social media and web 2.0 (or whatever the heck you want to call it.)  Fast forward a year, and the seeds are finally in place for Atlanta to finally start taking part in what many (myself included) are calling a revolution in communications and our ability to act collectively.  Atlanta is starting to show up on the radar, and this next year will most definitely be the year of social media for this city.

I make this claim not because of any buzz, but because of the connectivity I saw happening at SoCon.  Big media mingling with budding citizen journalists, marketers and bloggers comparing notes, not to mention all the new "friend" connections that have been created between people.  What does all this mean?  We have sociogenesis!  The creation of new social clusters.  This is good because more interconnectivity in any network means more opportunity and growth. 

This is why social media is so significant.  Instead of having to discover and connect with people who have common interests the old fashioned way, we can now grow our networks to learn and make things happen like never before!

For Atlanta, going from a city with many unconnected individuals understanding social media, to a diverse social network of people learning about, advocating, and integrating social media into their lives, is extremely significant. 

I think Atlanta is going to experience a boom in the next two years.  I wonder what form it will take.

Here is where it is starting.

Blockbuster vs Netflix

The other night, also known to some as family movie night, I was at Blockbuster checking out when they told me about Blockbuster Total Access which is their answer to Netflix. As I'd only half an hour before suggested to my family that we should try the Netflix thing out sometime, I figured, why not?

So I signed up for a two week trial of Blockbuster Total Access on the Dell laptop they had in the store.  When I got home (after movie night actually) I decided to check out the web interface like any other good web 2.0 junkie consultant would.  Naturally, I also had to sign up for a two week trial of Netflix to compare.

Conclusion?   It seems Blockbuster, unable to compete with Netflix otherwise, has decided to provide the same exact service.  The key differentiator?  They throw in free blockbuster rentals form the store.  Instead of having to first return a movie via the mail before my next batch can come in, I can just take them to the closest Blockbuster and satisfy my impatient lust for movies that same day. Blockbuster has succeeded in creating an offering that rivals Netflix in nearly every way and then some.  Score one for Blockbuster!

Within an hour, I'd decided to stick with Netflix.

So what made me cancel my free two week trial of Blockbuster Total Access?  That's right.  The web interface.  While very similar to Netflix, there was one blaring problem:  It wasn't fun!  One of the key features of both services is the collection of meta-data through the end user's rating of movies.  Whereas Blockbuster would take me to the profile page of each movie I rate, I could go down a page with 30 or so movies and rate them in less then ten seconds with Netflix.  First of all, if I've rated the movie, I obviously know enough about it that I don't need to see any additional info on it.  Secondly, rating movies quickly became a game in Netflix!  Before the night was out, I'd rated nearly 300 movies, and Netflix now has around 2000 recommendations that it's algorithm says match my rather eclectic tastes.  I could barely rate twenty movies through Blockbuster before getting frustrated. 

The lesson to be learned here?  If you want to collect better data on your users, make your service more addictive!  Netflix is more game-like in that it rewards people for creating meta-data rather then turning it into a chore.

There is also a second hidden lesson: If you ask your soon to be former users why they are leaving your service, give them more then 255 characters to explain themselves!! I spent five whole minutes writing out my reasons, only to find there was no space for it! 

I would have been glad to try out their service again when their site has improves but the 255 character limit in the feedback box adds injury to insult.  and makes me question if they were actually sincere in asking why I was opting out of the two week trial.  If anyone from Blockbuster reads this post, feel free to contact me if you'd like some real feedback.  I'm a 22 year old male who's increasingly finding himself consuming content of all types off the web.  Bottom line, I'm your target demographic.

Score one for Netflix: You appeal more directly to the gamer in me by better incentivizing your meta-data collection process.

Getting back in the game

So I've been gone for a bit. The past few months of my life have seen some shifts in my life. First off, I've gone back to school. After a year and a half of exploring the tech industry and trying to figure out where we are all going, I feel I've learned enough about the new information/attention economy to go back and do it right. I'll be taking all the lessons about social learning I've learned from the web these past few years and applying them to how I approach academia this time around.

From the months of November through January, I held my first retail position. (*Gasp!* Say it isn't true Tim, a 'real' job?!) It was an absolutely amazing experience working for Apple Inc.: what was once Apple Computer Inc. once upon a time when I first started out. I learned a bit about work ethic (namely how to better segment my time), but more so I learned about how more consistent income leads to a clarity of mind I'd never experienced before. Go figure.

So now I have all these different pieces and experiences behind me, where is my life headed? Should I continue to go the entrepreneurial route? How about the academic route? My parents seem to like that idea. And then there's the option working a 'real' job: a job wherein the role and responsibilities required have been previously determined within an already existing and self-sustaining system.

Perhaps the most important lesson I've learned the past few months is that I put too much pressure on myself.

Here's a question I've never asked myself: Why can't I have everything?

Oh, hell. It's worth a try. School, work, extracurricular entrepreneurial ventures? Bring it on. What's the worst that can happen?

I'm throwing my hat in! I'm getting back in the game.