Entries Tagged 'Communications' ↓

A blogging friend of mine, Yvonne LaRose asked me an interesting set of questions on Facebook. I wrote her back first thing this morning and then I thought it made sense to publish my answers. Who know, maybe you’ll find the content interesting as well.

Yvonne asked about what I thought about Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 and if I had any new terms I might be able to tell her about. I offered enterprise mashup and bacn . Bacn because it’s timely and relevant and enterprise mashups because that’s what I’ve been working on for the past four months (more to follow on this later).

Hi Yvonne,
Sure I’ll give it a go!

I think web 2.0 has been beaten to death. In memes, articles, and white papers it has been defined in a great number of ways. For me web 2.0 is about interactivity. Web 1.0 was about publishing and getting offline stuff online. Web 2.0 was about empowering individuals and adding conversation. In my opinion this brought *people* in to computers and the Internet for the first time in a meaningful way.

Web 3.0 is very up in the air as to what will shake out. Many refer to this as the semantic web, a place where a much richer tagging and classification of underlying data will drive greater access to content. Think enabling technology. I think all the technical stuff that underlies web 3.0 is very cool but the focus should be about humanizing the web, or humanizing technology.

I think that what is happening with web 3.0 has a chance of doing this. To me, I’ve always been a geek and a technologist but I feel now my mission and use of this technology is here for the purpose of connecting US - we the people! Just like Facebook did for this exchange between you and I Yvonne. A bunch of 1’s and 0’s in programming made it all possible to execute but a person and a group of people made things like blogs, messaging clients and Facebook. For these reasons I beleive we are living in a renaissance.

New terms: hmmm.
As you say, mashup is a really good one.

How about enterprise mashup! I just completed a four month project on enterprise mashups (company mashups for profit). It’s about combining multiple data and or web functionality to produce something. At the very least a useful aggregation of stuff on the web but if done well, a solution or tool that is better than the sum of its parts.

Example: You want to build a site for collectible baseball cards. You build a mashup that collects classifieds information from eBay, Craigslist and forty different speciality sites that sell collectible baseball cards. You put it all together in a new online database and design a user-friendly search engine to sit on top of it. Then you get fancy and add a shopping cart that lets your site users buy baseball cards from any of those sites through your own new easy-to-use baseball card shopping site. You get the data by using mashup tools to scrape the web sites you want the information from. Scraping is no different than Google robots (bots) crawling sites to check for changes so they can be indexed in the search engine.

One more? Bacn. That’s pronounced bacon.

“Bacn is a new problem now plaguing our email inboxes. Putting it simply, Bacn is email you receive that isn’t spam… And isn’t personal mail. It’s the middle class of email. It’s notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It’s the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.”

Now, I think since I’ve done all this work early on a Sunday morning I’ll go publish my reply on a blog somewhere - maybe someone else will find it useful. Hopefully you got some little thing from all my blather!

Cheers Yvonne and thanks for writing.
- Jules

Technorati Tags: bacn, web 2.0, web 3.0, the semantic web, mashup, mashups, enterprise mashups

I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a book for a while (an autobiographical novel) and it’s up towards the top of my list of things I’m worried I’ll never get to. How about you? I’d venture a guess that amongst our readers a brilliant book or two is distinctly possible. Cameron Moll, of Authentic Boredom an acclaimed designer, blogger, and pretty damn interesting person has a post today covering what it takes to publish your own book.

Let’s just stop and acknowledge the good fortune we all share today. If WE SO DESIRE, and IF WE WORK OUR ASSES OFF, we CAN publish our own book. Or produce and distribute our own music. Or make our own movies. We are living in a renaissance. But no one said it was easy being da Vinci.

Reading Cameron’s post about making his new book Mobile Web Design reminded me a lot of how difficult blogging can be.

And for inspiration? Begin with the first step I suppose. Then add a measure of fortitude, inspiration, sweat equity and resilience and you should arrive safely at your destination. Maybe…

Technorati Tags: mobile web design, books, writing, publishing, user generated content, user generated media

That it all. This profound moment in blogging has been brought to you by EXCELER8ion. Have a nice day.

How would you complete our headline?

Blogs themselves cannot transcend borders or cultures but people can, and people are. People are creating blogs at the rate of 100,000 every day and Technorati is now tracking 57 million blogs overall. And people are because blogging is a multi-mode communications medium where you can use the written word, graphics, audio, video and animation to connect and tickle the senses and synapses of your fans, friends, community, customers, partners, vendors, readers, associates, peers, professionals, associations, someone please stop me!. People are because blogs let you connect with other people from all walks of life, anyplace, anytime, in any subject, and in most any modality. As long as you’ve got a way to participate (including consumption and simple commenting) you’ve got a place at the table. Good ideas and content still trump status or position in the ‘real world’ and anyone can become a someone with an important voice. If blogging was about nothing more than reading and writing it would be powerful. I would never underestimate the power of the written word, but the thing is, you have to get people to read for it to have any effect! Without the kicker of other presentation formats like podcasting and video blogging, blogging would lack the pop culture appeal to become a super mass medium like T.V.

Blogs are borderless

I’m always happy to experience another example of how blogs can help us traverse borders and cultural differences in life - even languages. I have found that the more people you interact with, the richer your life becomes. There’s a modifier and accelerator to this experience. The more dissimilar people are to you or your own experience, the more you can expand your mind and perspective. Travel does this for us, be it the fully immersive, in-person version (the kind where a passport is especially handy) or a virtual version made possible by the web - like blogging. Just last week I saw a link coming in to EXCELER8ion from a blog called ‘Bloggingham.’ I went to Bloggingham and was happily surprised to find it published in a different language (Danish as it turns out). Not that this is the first time a foreign language blog has linked to us, but I am always excited by this none-the-less. Jonas of Nottingham, as I’ll call him, added us to his blog roll and quoted Shannon in a recent post. I’ll be honest, I couldn’t tell exactly what language Bloggingham was written in (it looked Germanic and that’s as far as I got). Every attempt of mine to translate the site failed. Without a way to translate the site I was at a loss to read Bloggingham which left me chagrined. I wanted to get to know a little more about Jonas. Given that Jonas clearly had no problem reading our blog (or maybe he just has a working translation tool), I put it in my mind to send him an e-mail. Before I got too far in contacting Jonas I saw this great image on his blog about what blogging means to different people:

Even though the blog post on Bloggingham was in Dutch, I could see that the collage was in English and I wanted to know more about it. I saw that a reader of Bloggingham Trine-Maria had posted a comment and linked to what appeared to be the original PDF document. The file is published on CK’s blog (Christina Kerley) with the related story here. In quick succession I had jumped from one Danish blog (Bloggingham) to another (hovedetpaabloggenblog) and on to a U.S. Marketing blog (CK’s blog). Talk about flattening the world - try that one out before blogs were mainstream.

People make connections - blogs are facilitators

Back to the human aspect and the human network. If Jonas of Nottingham didn’t bother to check his blog stats and notice all the traffic coming from English speaking countries he probably wouldn’t have put this post up, declaring his intent to start publishing in English. Which brings me to the point about blogs that I want to drive home and put in the carport for the night. It’s about people. And yes, I “get it” that it’s still a minority of people, and hopefully I’ve addressed that point by my comments on how blogging is a multi-mode medium.
So here’s my version of that headline:

Blogs transcend borders, languages and cultural differences because people power blogs

So what’s your version? If you can think of some to add I’ll group them up and send them over to CK for us.
–Julian

Today we’re continuing a series of posts from my Father, Lorenz J. Gude. This is number V. Although my Father writes mostly on politics these days over on his blog YankeeWombat, I believe our mutual interest in areas like media and technology are appropriate fodder for a blog like EXCELER8ion and RecruitingBloggers.

Big Chill II

by Lorenz J. Gude

Expressing strong - perhaps I should say edgy - opinions on a blog can make a person unemployable. Kim du Toit for example.

"….the shock of discovering that my website made me unemployable by corporate America came at a vulnerable time. Desperate to become gainfully employed after closing my consulting business for the business failure that was Did Today, I put my resume out for work (and it is a fairly impressive one, I have to say). As most of you know, the corporation that offered me a job disappeared from the face of the earth after finding my website. To this day they’ve never returned my phone calls, the cowardly lickspittles. A few months more got me several calls, but after ?due diligence? those calls too dried up.

I gave up looking."

Kim du Toit is a ‘he’ by the way and very much a man’s man. To put it neutrally he is a gun enthusiast and 2nd amendment gun rights advocate. He started his blog before he realized it might be a problem, but he wasn’t naive about the consequences when he contemplated starting a business. He knew that Google would make his blog easy to find - particularly with an unusual name like Kim du Toit. His software venture ‘Did Today’ probably failed for lack of backers because of his blog. He discussed the possible impact of his outspoken blogging history with his wife before trying to start the business.

"In the end, we decided that attempting to rewrite the past three years, or trying to cover it up, would be worse?Google will not be denied?but at the same time this blog could be a liability for the company.

Well, it was, just this past weekend. A prospective investor, check in hand, decided to do a little last-minute research, and Googled ?Kim du Toit?.

He?s no longer a potential investor.

His reasoning was pure business: having an outrageous conservative gun nut womanizer as CEO might become a public liability in years to come. And he could be right."

He is too harsh on himself with ‘womanizer’ in the usual sense - he doesn’t brag about extramarital exploits, he just posts erotic, not pornographic, pictures of his favorite women movie stars at the weekend on his blog. The rest is a succinct summary of his corporate liabilities. It’s just my opinion but I think what really makes Kim edgy to corporate America is that he enthusiastically reports incidents of citizens defending themselves with firearms against armed robbers and burglars and the like and makes no secret of the fact that he prefers it when the criminal ends up dead. I think it is important to recognize that the NRA (National Rifle Association) probably wouldn’t want to be associated publicly with his outspoken opinions, even if they agree with him privately. That is an important distinction. Public bodies, like the NRA and corporations cannot be associated with outrageous personal positions. It just isn’t what we think of as ‘professional’. So I would say that it is probably a good rule to not post material on the Internet that might be seen as ‘unprofessional’ or controversial if you ever want to work for an organization sensitive to such things.

A second easy lesson here it is that if you are going to blog about edgy stuff - make it anonymous. Blogging is not only more public than we think it is, it also stays around and can come back to haunt you. Sure you can take down your blog, but there are cached pages available and then there is all the material on other people’s servers that has been written about you. A good example of someone using a pseudonym effectively is Neo-neocon. She is a member of a very liberal family and profession in the very liberal northeast part of the US and blogs anonymously to make it easier to keep the peace. Even if her friends and family that disagree with her politically discover her blog, the anonymity makes it so they don’t have to bring it up. I would speculate there would be limits to how far employers would normally go researching your history on the Internet - the CIA and other tightasses excepted - and that in practice most people will just have to make it a common sense rule to mask their more edgy material with anonymity in order to steer clear of unemployability.

We all get to see events through the lens of our own obsessions but bloggers are particularly blessed in that they can share their obsessions with their fellow netizens. Take the case of Representative Foley and the inappropriate e-mails and instant messages he sent to a 16 year old House of Representatives page. My interest is in the - hold your breath - media aspects of the incident. That’s right, I’m going to skip right over all the good stuff and talk about McLuhan’s idea that we remain unconscious of the potential of new media long after they come into general usage and go on thinking they follow the rules of their predecessors long after we should know better.

What do we have here in media terms? Love/lust letters on the Internet. As McLuhan predicts the content of new media are at first just the content of older media. Old wine in new bottles. What we miss according to Mcluhan is that we see only the wine and miss that the new bottles are not the same as the old bottles. Thus Gutenberg printed the Bible - the most in demand book at the time which had previously been produced by hand. He didn’t think of printing magazines and newspapers as his successors did- much less get it that novels might be a good seller. We think the content is the whole story and miss that the new medium works by different rules and has different potentials than its precursors.

Rep Foley’s e-mails have been described as over friendly, the instant messages as sexually explicit - just like heaps of love/lust letters that have gotten previous generations in trouble. I’m not denying that there is a clear case of sexual misbehavior and misuse of power here. That is a content issue; I’m focusing on the form here. What I am saying is that this is yet another case of someone thinking that their behavior on the Internet is transitory like private conversations - or ‘what happens in Las Vegas’. The nature of the Internet is that it remembers. Keeps copies, caches copies, backs up copies. What happens on the Internet stays on the Internet, but not like Las Vegas - it stays forever and can come back to bite you. Rep Foley just didn’t get this aspect of the medium as future generations undoubtedly will. It feels anonymous and/or private when it is not. Future public figures will be more careful of what they say on the Internet as a matter of course and will back quickly away from any statement that could be used against them - just the way they do now when microphones are pointing at them. I don’t think that Rep Foley would have expressed his sentiments so freely in a signed letter because he understands the rules of signed love/lust letters. Yet old fashioned love/lust letters are much harder to find than e-mails and IMs. It occurs to me that he might well have been cautious enough not to say the things he did on the phone - again because we are all aware that a phone might be tapped. Perhaps he didn’t realize was that he would have actually been safer from discovery chatting up his pages on the phone.

From the point of view of political content it was supremely embarrassing that Representative Foley was responsible for legislation designed to protect children on the Internet. From a media studies point of view using McLuhan’s ideas, it is a supurb example of how individuals are unconscious of the real characteristics of an emerging medium. No less a techie than Bill Gates denied on the witness stand having said things that were clearly in e-mails from himself carefully preserved by Microsoft’s thorough back up procedures. The Medium is the Message

Technorati Tags: Kim du Toit, Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message, Corporate Blogging, Blogging Policy, Blog Policy, Rep Foley, Foley Scandal