continuous partial attention

Roller Coaster Mashup

From what I can tell, Spunlogic is one of the more fun tech companies in Atlanta.  They're also grokking social media!  I attended an AiMA meeting this past week on Branding 2.0, and Spunlogic employees were everywhere!  My general impression of everyone I've met at the company is that they're all young (at heart even), hip, and loving what they're doing! It seems that they're also diving into Second Life, which puts them ahead of the curve when it comes to Atlanta presence in the Metaverse! 

In any case, Jeff Hillmire of Spunlogic has been working on putting together an exciting event that he's just passed off to Sherry to market.  Naturally, she's started by putting together a blog for this event.

So, what happens when you take a bunch of marketing people, and a bunch of technology people, and let them loose in a theme park?  It's a Roller Coaster Mashup!

From the first post:

"As the world of marketing and the world of technology continues to collide, we need to embrace and get to know each other. What better way to get to know someone than to be smashed up next to them on a roller coaster ride, right?

So, Jeff has reserved a night at Six Flags on September 28, 2007 from 6 pm to midnight for all of the marketing and technology professionals in GA to get together for a night of fun, networking and letting loose."

I'm really excited about this!  Not only is this a great opportunity for people to get to know one another in Georgia's technology industry, it's going to be interesting to see the role social media is going to play.  Anybody want to create a social network for this?

Jeff Haynie's using rollercoastermashup as the technorati tag, so I'll follow suit.  Blog about this event and send it to all the marketing and technology geeks in your life!  Let's see how fast we can spread the word and get to 3000 attendees!

And don't forget to register early, and often!!

Starting the week off right

Ever feel like you wake up on Monday morning wondering where last week went?  Yeah.  It was one of those weeks.  When you know you've been productive, but it feels like you have nothing to show for it because your actual productivity has nothing to do with the goals you set forth the week previous.  Lot's of mind-numbing surprises last week.

What really kills me is the feeling of guilt I'm experiencing.  Last week was filled with all sorts of things that needed to get done (such as taxes,) and yet I feel guilty for not getting anything done.

I'm going to file this one under the 'setting my expectations for myself too high and without regard to the reality of things that need to get done' folder.

On the plus side, my environmental science course totally 0wnz!  Despite being slightly more of a time sink then I had anticipated, it's giving me the chance to revisit all sorts of material I've bookmarked on WorldChanging.com throughout the past few years.  I'm probably going to turn a few of my weekly assignments into blog posts.

Unlike last week, I felt the need to start this week off right.  By blogging!  And now back to work.

Taking an Environmental Science course!

It's the middle of the Spring Semester, and I thought I'd celebrate getting half way through Calculus 1 by taking on a whole new course! That's right, I've decided to add an intensive 8 week course to my plate.  What course you ask?  Environmental Science!

I never thought I'd take this course (especially considering I'm more into the hard sciences such as physics,microbiology, etc.)  However, there seems to be a bit of a convergence point here.

A) Finally knowing what direction I want take my life, I want to expedite working towards that annoyingly necessary undergrad degree.

B) Recently watching An Inconvenient Truth has rekindled my sense of urgency in the need to preserve the environment.  I want to do something about it.  Given how little I know about the topic, the best thing I can do is learn about the issues.

C) Blackboard/WebCT as the current state of the art in web course tools is a sad state of affairs for oh so many reasons.  Universities need to move towards more open systems that take into account everything we're learning about and through social media and how the very nature of knowledge is moving towards being distributed across the network. Unfortunately, I have very little hands on experience with Blackboard/WebCT.  I need to learn more about how such systems are being used and what they're limitations are before I can join the conversation about how we can start moving academia towards a 21st century learning environment.

So, in addition to my traditional pen and paper classroom based Calculus class, I'll be starting an accredited online course on environmental science this week.  Wahoo!  How's that for synergy?

Twittering a Podcast together

Via Twitter, I just found out that Jerry Paffendorf and John Swords are having lunch with Jamais Cascio and Ethan Zuckerman.  John's going to be podcasting the conversation.  Naturally, I had to chime in with a request!

I called up Jerry to see if he could get Jamais and Ethan talking about Recovery 2.0.  Jerry asked if I could send him a link.  So I quickly put together this del.icio.us page and twittered it back: http://del.icio.us/tmoenk/recovery2conversation

I can't wait to hear how the podcast comes out!

Recovery 2.0 is a conversation that a small section of the blogosphere was engaged in post-katrina, that kinda tapered off about a year and a half ago.  The question it asks is how can we apply what we know from web 2.0 and social media to help in disaster recovery and relief efforts?  Obviously, top down efforts aren't enough, so what bottom-up structures can we put in place to empower individuals in disaster situations.  I think it's an important conversation to have and I'd love to see it resurrected!

Twitter Summary and Analysis

Just came across a number of great blog posts about Twitter.  Even if you're not all that interested in Twitter, or have already made up your mind about it, there's some great perspective here about how Twitter fits into the spectrum of social media.

Ross Mayfield starts off by talking about how Twitter's adoption has exploded this past month amongst the tech community.  He summarizes the service pretty well, I think coining the term "continuous partial presence" which fits it pretty well.

A passage I particularly liked:

"Anil Dash
was spot-on to highlight "The sign of success in social software is when your community does something you didn't expect."  A couple of weeks ago it became a convention to start messages with @username as a way of saying something to someone visible to everyone.  Within the limited affordances of the tool, people started to use it not only
for presence, but a kind of shouting at the party conversation.  Further, when you see an to someone who isn't in your social network, you find yourself inclined to go see who it is or add them if they are a friend who just joined.  This kind of social discovery goes beyond seeing friend lists on profiles, aids network structure and quickens adoption."

The Creating Passionate Users blog starts off with a graphic that indicates just how screwed we are.  I lol'ed when I saw this because my immediate first thought last week when I signed up and started exploring was that Twitter is going to be the primary catalyst for the next tech crash!  Every A and B list blogger, web entrepreneur, and high profile developer I can think of seems to be on Twitter and have at least twenty friends.  That screeching sound you hear right now?  Productivity screeching to a halt!  Definitely check out this blog post talking about the attention economics of Twitter.

Some notes on how people use Twitter, and some of the privacy issues that asynchronous conversation bring up.

Technorati Tags: twitter, attention, attention economics

Notes on Twitter, relationships, and the remote SXSW experience

About a week and a half ago I succumbed to peer pressure and signed up for Twitter.  Rather then go into summary mode like I usually do, I'm just going to link to the blogosphere's conversation about it and take a few notes.

It's noisy!  Not every message I receive (actually, almost none) is relevant to anything in my life right now and it can be a bit of a distraction at times... but I like the sense of presence it gives everyone on my Twitter friends list.  I've been connecting with people I haven't talked to in months.  There are a number of people I like to consider close friends that I've reconnected with via Twitter.  I haven't been in Second Life much for the past year, and it's great finally having a new common context with these people again.  Despite the fact that it's a very thin connection, there's an emotional component that I haven't quite experienced with other social media.  It's not just text messaging, it's not instant messaging, it's not blogging.. it's something in between all these.  The fact that I feel emotionally reconnected to friends I'm not able to interact with every day anymore makes Twitter feel valuable.  Now to get family members signed up to see what that's like...

Emotional ties aside, a number of people on my friends list are people I haven't yet gotten the chance to know well.  Twitter is an interesting look into their lives, and it's also interesting to see how they use the service.  One person in particular has been intriguing me.  We're only slightly acquainted with one another (we met and I think spoke a total of two times at SoCon07 last month), so other then the fact that we know a bunch of people in common, Twitter really defines the majority of our relationship at this point in time.  This is interesting.  I'm thinking we should try and meet up over lunch or something.  Your thoughts Coty? :)

Asynchronous conversations are jarring.  It feels a little uncomfortable Twittering about things only relevant to a cross section of my network.  The inherent noisiness of the channel seems to be part of the social agreement however.  Twitter has a number of potentially conflicting different types of value at once.  Something tells me that there's a bit of an attention/information supply and demand balancing act that we're all having to figure out for the first time.

I made a comment on Shelby's blog about this.  Twitter has made me an unwitting participant at SXSW interactive.  This has been a busy week here on the home front, and yet I've been aware of people in my network flying to Austin, checking into hotels, attending events, and connecting.  This awareness has fed back into my interactions with other people I interact with via other types of social meda.  I've been literally networking people I know together at SXSW with the basic knowledge Twitter has given me of the ground situation. Without even paying much attention to SXSW, I know I have presence there.  This has been the best conference I've participated in, but haven't actually attended!

This is most interesting of all.  Twitter seems to have created a bit of a social media nervous system amongst those attending SXSW.  This past week, Twitterers seem to have been polarized into two categories: those attending SXSW, and those wishing they were (and wishing that the former group would shut up about it!)  Given my experience of being pulled into the conference experience, I'm wondering if anyone else outside of Austin has had similar experiences this past week.


Technorati Tags: twitter, sxsw, social media

Atlanta NetSquared Meetup information

Edit 3/6/2007: I mistyped the date on this post, and Sherry just picked up on it.  Amusingly enough, this has turned into a great example of misinformation propegating across the web, as Sherry only caught the mistake after posting it on her blog.  Oops!  My bad, as they say.  :)

This blog post is the official announcement of a new Meetup in the Atlanta area.  The zeroth meeting of the Atlanta NetSquared Meetup will be happening on March 7th 13th at 7pm.  Event information and rsvp here: http://netsquared.meetup.com/8/ 

This meetup is part of NetSquared's series of NetTuesday events that are currently being held in San Francisco, Houston, and Washington DC.  My goal in bringing this event to Atlanta is to start a discussion on how social media/web 2.0 technology can be used to empower people to make great things happen.  Social change is the name of the game!

From the NetSquared about page:

Our mission is to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations.There's a whole new generation of online tools available – tools that make it easier than ever before to collaborate, share information and mobilize support. These tools include blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasting, and more. Some people describe them as "Web 2.0"; we call them the social web, because their power comes from the relationships they enable.

I'm really excited about this and am hoping to create a forum where a diverse group of social changemakers, non-profit employees, volunteers, and members of Atlanta's growing social media community can come together to network, collaborate, and learn about the practical application of emerging online tools for social change.

More information about the larger NetSquared community can be found here. 

Technorati Tags: net2, atlanta, meetup, social media, social change, nonprofit