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March 19, 2008Would anyone like to explain the point of the IABC eXchange?
I stumbled into the IABC eXchange (that's how they spell it) today. Had a look around, came out and walked around some, then went back in. Wasn't any better. Is there a point I am missing? Here's the gush from the first page (which features a really tacky blue background and weird fonts): IABC eXchange is an online tool for networking and collaboration. Developed based on member feedback, the IABC eXchange allows you to create member-only discussion groups, private working groups, and blogs that the whole world can view and comment on. You have the power to designate who can join your conversation: Grant co-author access to fellow members, allow others to submit entries that require your approval to be posted, or make it a personal platform for sharing your ideas and opinions. The IABC eXchange also lets you create a personal profile, including a photo and information about your areas of interest to help you connect with your fellow members. Stripped up of the really bad copywriting, I think it says "You can create an open, moderated or closed blog. You can put your photo and personal information on it, too." Yeah, and I can do that in Facebook, Twitter and the blog you are reading, too. But since I like playing with social media and trust IABC to guide me to communication nirvana, I jumped straight to the next page (which reverts to the standard IABC layout and fonts), where I was told: The IABC eXchange is an online tool for networking and collaboration created exclusively for IABC members. Create your own blog, form private work groups or special interest groups with other members and share best practices. Make your pages visible to the world or only to selected members. Whether it's work related, IABC-related or purely personal, the IABC eXchange gives you the power to express yourself. Be Heard® What the fuck? They just said that. But let's push on... The next page flips to stripped down, Times NewRoman font, in black and white. My choices are: 1) start a public blog or 2) start an IABC only blog. Since I already have a public blog, it would seem pointless to start a new one. On the other hand, creating a private blog for 13000 people in 70 countries seems even more pointless. So let's go with public. A few steps later, I had an official, certified, IABC blog. How far IABC has come! Posted by Allan Jenkins at 11:31pm in IABC, Social Media, Social Tools | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (16) | TrackBack (0) July 18, 2007Why Web 2.0 is a godsend to poltical activists
...while Web 1.0 was invented so that theoretical physicists could publish research online, Web 2.0 was created so that people could publish cute photos of their cats. But this same cat dissemination technology has proved extremely helpful for activists, who've turned these tools to their own purposes. So while Flickr should be used for displaying pictures of cute cats, it's also proved an effective tool for avoiding keyword filtering. Activists in China are using Flickr to disseminate images that contain words that get blocked by keyword filters - a simple tool built by Zhang Erning allows a photo of Einstein at a blackboard to be annotated with arbitrary text that won't be blocked by the Chinese firewall.... Posted by Allan Jenkins at 04:36pm in Politics, Regulation, Social Media, Social Tools, Society | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0) March 20, 200724 hours of Twitter
I rarely trot in David Weinberger's footsteps. Not that I don't want to, or even be ahead of him, but he's just generally ahead of the game. So I was amused that we both joined Twitter this week, and are having similar experiences. Like David, I cannot make a commitment to it. We will see how it shakes out. Like David, I find it a fascinating toy.... it's addictive and fun. Trivial? Yes. I cannot keep up with FIR as it is, so why would I want to know how Neville and Shel are putting it together. I've never met CC Chapman, so where he eats while getting from New York to whereever is not on my list of daily data points. Marjolein is having a good stats weekend? And Hopkins is off doing whatever he does when no one is looking? Great, but what about the snail problem in my garden? And, yet. Because this is my community, because these are my friends (and let us say right now... in the 21st century, you need not have met a friend for them to be your friend), this isn't trivia. I'm glad Shel and Neville's next podcast came together. I am glad Marjolein got a rash of hits. I hope CC gets out of Penn station. I hope the wallaby forgives Hopkins. I hope Andrea loves California. And, you know what? I like hearing about it, minute by minute. Twitter bought another 24 hours, at least. Writing in some haste, so links will come later. For now, follow the Technorati tags. Posted by Allan Jenkins at 12:17am in Social Tools | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) September 18, 2006Special podcast from the Stibo Graphic Forum
Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of talking about social media at the annual Stibo Forum held by Stibo Graphic for its many customers. Never missing a chance to show off their command of the medium, Lee Hopkins and I recorded Chat #18 of the Better Desirable Roasted Communication Café podcast directly from the Forum. And we were joined by special guest star Donna Papacosta! In this chat, you'll hear Lee, Donna, and Allan talk about how cheap & easy podcasting is, and move on to discuss why we bother to use social media. Is it masochism? Or does it have real implications for our businesses? We cite, among other cases, Whirlpool's American Family podcast, GM Fastlane Blog, the Southwest Airlines blog, and SecondLife. I apologize for the sometimes-iffy sound quality. Technorati Tags: stibo graphic, stibo forum, lee hopkins, allan
jenkins, donna papacosta, whirlpool american family, gm fastlane, southwest
airlines blogs, second life Posted by Allan Jenkins at 01:41pm in commscafe.com, Podcasting, Social Tools | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) September 10, 2006Copenhagen meetup and interview with Eric Schwartzman, PR blogger and podcaster, Sept. 23
UPDATE: We will meet at Café André Citroên at 1900. Again, let me know if you want to be a part, we have a couple of spaces left. Eric Schwartzman's On the Record podcast and his blog Spinfluencer are required listening/reading for communication professionals working with social media. If I had to cut back to just ten blogs, his would be one. And if I had to cut back to just ten podcasts, his would be one. They are just that good. Danish/Oresund bloggers/podcasters/advertising & PR folks have a great opportunity to meet and chat with Eric on September 23. He's in town that night and wants to meet some of the local social media folks. And, get this, he wants to record a "special episode of On the Record...Online" with some of us as the interviewees. I will make reservations, almost certainly within 10 minutes walk of Rådhuspladsen, for 16 of us. 11 places are already reserved, so there's five left. But if there is a surge in demand, I will try to find a place that can take more of us (Spiseloppen?). Please reserve your spot either by leaving a comment below or emailing me. Posted by Allan Jenkins at 11:35pm in Copenhagen, Podcasting, Social Tools | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (8) May 16, 2006Heads up! Read Albrycht on Web 2.0
Elizabeth Albrycht has posted a recent speech she gave about Web 2.0. Great insights, and I can only imagine the discussion afterwards. With all due respect to Elizabeth, she started down an interesting path, only to draw back just as the "gettin' was good": "... In order for our messages to be
received with some degree of credibility and trust, in today's questioning,
distrustful atmosphere, we need to move away from the message delivered as a
fait accompli, but embrace communications as something to be tested, then
provide the instructions and/or information needed to make those tests. You
could even call this process a conversation. So, what would transparent corporate communications look like? The questions
we as professional communicators have to ask ourselves is what information do we
need to provide so that others can reconstruct our decisions. Everything from
minutes to meetings to interviews with the participants could be made
available. They might not agree with the decision we took, but they will at
least understand the reasoning, which might buy some goodwill, for one. We also need to decide when to provide it and how to provide it. Is it only
made available when a problem arises? Is it easily searchable on the website
and available via a link? Or does the person inquiring have to jump through a
variety of hoops? At its most basic level, our job as professional communicators is to provide
information so that people can make decisions. With the exponentially
increasing number of sources of information, knowing what and whom to believe
and what and whom to distrust is becoming a critical need among all audiences.
Learning how to make decisions in this environment is perhaps our number one
need right now as consumers and citizens. Recognizing this difficulty,
organizations should seek to help people make decisions by giving them the
information they need to do so. It requires rethinking the old command-control
relationship we have had with our consumers. What I am proposing is a different way of practicing communications, which
can transform it into a tool for consumer or citizen decision making. This type
of decision making is not based not on one source or reputation, but is rather a
product of many sources, a triangulation, if you will, of positions. Perhaps
most importantly, it not not likely to be a final truth, but a flexible
position. It also means that organizations need to enter into long-term
conversations with a broad network of people connected to their organization,
both tightly and loosely, in order to be successful in the coming cyberage." If I read Elizabeth correctly (and I may not be), she's arguing that corporations should not only make their decisions public, but the thinking behind the decisions. I'm all for it. But I'm thinking into which C-level suites I can bring that idea and not get thrown out. I wish she had pushed the idea further (and perhaps it was in the discussion to follow). Still, it's a powerful article, and I highly recommend it. Posted by Allan Jenkins at 08:04pm in Social Tools, Writing I Enjoy | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) April 10, 2006The 2004 Tsunami; what other "nobodies" accomplished
Fellow nobody Lee Hopkins, on his Better Communication Results blog, wrote yesterday about "How to create a global project management tool in 72 hours." He was writing about the International Association of Nobodies, of course, but let me share the tale of another Web 2.0 meme-storm. (Raganites and other Web 2.0 skeptics, you might want to sit up and listen.) Within hours of the Southeast Asian earthquake and tsunami, three bloggers started Skyping, wondering what they could do to help. They turned to social media -- a Blogger blog, a wiki, Skype, and IM (all of it free, or nearly so). Within three days they had attracted 100,000 visits and 50 volunteer bloggers, wiki specialists, networkers. Within eight days, their SEA-EAT Blog & Wiki had attracted over 1 million visits, and 200 volunteers -- all unpaid, with no "organization chart" or "director" or "fundraising staff". They just did it. Dina Mehta's early posting on the topic (5 days after the event), her later personal account and this Information Week article are well worth a read, if you would like to know more. I first heard this story from Dina herself at last year's Reboot conference, and blogged about it in "We don't have the tools is OUT as an excuse." And I still believe that (and Web 2.0 skeptics should wake up to this): if three Bombay bloggers who had never met each other can form a distributed 200-volunteer charity information network in eight days... think what rich companies and associations can do. Technorati Tags: nobody, International Association of Nobodies, SEA-EAT blog, Dina Mehta, Web 2.0 Posted by Allan Jenkins at 05:14pm in International Association of Nobodies, Reboot 7.0, Smart Communities, Social Tools, Tsunami | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (2) April 09, 2006Goodbye RocketPost, Hello again, Ecto!
Neville Hobson and I were on the same wavelength, today. [Update: I see Lee radiated the thought yesterday from Australia... are we all joined at the brain?] I've been mentally composing this post about why I am dropping the utterly abominable Anconia RocketPost as a blog-post editor. But I see Neville Hobson has beaten me to the punch. In fact, he beat me to the punch weeks ago in a post I (to my bitter regret) did not notice. I installed the demo version of Anconia RocketPost when I saw Lee Hopkins get so excited about it. At the start, I was pretty happy with it. For one thing, it was WYSIWYG, which Ecto wasn't; for another, it just felt easier to use. I was a little disturbed that it never seemed to be able to download all my posts from the server, but I decided I could live with that since I never touch the old ones. RocketPost also had one other problem: inexplicably, it would start a cycle to install Microsoft Office Premium, whatever that is (I have Microsoft Office Pro). Clicking "cancel" let me move on, but it was disturbing. What possessed me to buy the damned thing when the trial expired, I'll never know. Cheap, for one thing (Neville says he paid $99, but my CC receipt says $29). I liked it, for another, except for the quibbles I've mentioned. So I downloaded the "paid for" version, and my life went to hell. Crashes, lock-ups, faulty screen painting, utterly inexplicable error messages. More and more as the days passed. Not one -- not one -- of my pleas to customer support has ever been acknowledged, much less answered. Finally, in frustration, I decided to uninstall the whole thing and reinstall. It seemed to uninstall. But, when I reinstall, I'm told it must uninstall every old version and then install -- and then it tries to do this, and collapses in a heap of exhaustion. Now, I've been around computers since 1980, so I know how to really uninstall -- delete every trace of registry keys, etc. But where Anconia RocketPost is hiding theirs will forever be a mystery to me, because the damned thing simply will not install again. If you are tempted to try Anconia RocketPost, do yourself a favor. Go get a beer, instead. Because you'll need a case of beer if you install it. [Clarification: No, Lee, this will not imperil your FOACADRC.] Technorati Tags: Anconia, RocketPost, Ecto Posted by Allan Jenkins at 09:27pm in Blogging, Social Tools, Technology | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (6) March 28, 2006Dallas students use MySpace to prompt pro-immigration rally
From Jake McKee comes this nice nugget about 4000 Dallas highschool students organizing themselves via MySpace, walking out of class, going to the park and protesting the growing anti-immigration sentiment in the US. Scene from a Dallas home tonight: Mom (sobbing) "I just don't know what happened to her... one day a good student and now she's protesting for.... little brown fruit-pickers!" Dad (angry and impotent): "It's that daymed innernet!" Mom (brightening): "Oh, by the way, Safeway has got fresh peaches on sale for half-price. I wonder how they do that?" Technorati Tags:
Dallas, immigration, social software, MySpace.com, protests Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:18pm in Social Tools, Society | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (4) November 26, 2005Business Week: Email is so five minutes ago
Clip this article -- Email is so five minutes ago -- for clients and coworkers: Although all these tools are gaining momentum, it's easy-to-use and practically
free wikis that proponents say offer the promise of collaboration beyond e-mail,
even though big editing kinks remain and other quirks and security flaws are
sure to surface. Internet research firm Gartner Group predicts that wikis will
become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. At
Ann Arbor (Mich.)-based Soar Technology Inc., an artificial-intelligence company
that works on projects for the Office of Naval Research, wikis enable the
company to slash in half the time it takes to complete projects. Soar engineer
Jacob Crossman says that's because the wikis eliminate the usual flurry of
back-and-forth attachments and resulting document-version confusion that's rife
in e-mail. Posted by Allan Jenkins at 03:14pm in Communication, Corporate Communication, Corporate Management, Social Tools | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) | TrackBack (0) November 10, 2005A democracy of groups: a tremendous article by Beth Simone Noveck
First Monday is one of the few peer-reviewed journals on the Internet, and is, as far as I know, the only one devoted entirely to the Internet. It was originally Danish, so I started reading it from Issue One, in May 1996, the articles of which were:
Electronic Cash and Monetary Policy
by Mark Bernkopf
The Social Life of Documents
by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid - introduction by Esther Dyson
Networked-centered is an oxymoron
by Rishab Ghosh
Law and Borders - The rise of law in Cyberspace by David R. Johnson and David Post
Corporate Metamorphosis: The Effects of the New Media by Sean Murphy Yep, in the first warm days of 1996, First Monday writers were looking at topics and ideas that, nine years later, are often just barely creeping into MSM. The November 2006 issue includes an article I want to recommend to Desirable Roasted Coffee readers. It's A Democracy of Groups, by Beth Simone Noveck at the New York Law School (she's the blogger at The Cairns Blog). It's about 40 pages long, and it's not written in the snappy style of Business 2.0. But it's a excellent examination of one reason why social media is compelling and essential. Here's the abstract: In groups people can accomplish what they cannot do alone. Now new
visual and social technologies are making it possible for people to
make decisions and solve complex problems collectively. These
technologies are enabling groups not only to create community but also
to wield power and create rules to govern their own affairs. Electronic
democracy theorists have either focused on the individual and the
state, disregarding the collaborative nature of public life, or they
remain wedded to outdated and unrealistic conceptions of deliberation.
This article makes two central claims. First, technology will enable
more effective forms of collective action. This is particularly so of
the emerging tools for "collective visualization" which will profoundly
reshape the ability of people to make decisions, own and dispose of
assets, organize, protest, deliberate, dissent and resolve disputes
together. From this argument derives a second, normative claim. We
should explore ways to structure the law to defer political and legal
decision–making downward to decentralized group–based decision–making.
This argument about groups expands upon previous theories of law that
recognize a center of power independent of central government: namely,
the corporation. If we take seriously the potential impact of
technology on collective action, we ought to think about what it means
to give groups body as well as soul — to "incorporate" them. This paper
rejects the anti–group arguments of Sunstein, Posner and Netanel and
argues for the potential to realize legitimate self–governance at a
"lower" and more democratic level. The law has a central role to play
in empowering active citizens to take part in this new form of
democracy. I have only read the first few pages, and have no choice but to print the whole thing out and read it this weekend. So far, excellent. Posted by Allan Jenkins at 10:07pm in Civil Liberty, Communication, Ethics, Law, Smart Communities, Social Tools, Writing I Enjoy | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0) November 02, 2005Is Wikipedia fundamentally flawed? Sure, but it's no less useful for it.
Is Wikipedia fundamentally flawed? Andrew Orlowski, writing at The Register, believes Wikipedia to be Utopian, and cites Wikipedia founder Jimbo Wales' own post that some entries are "nearly unreadable crap". PR colleague Jim Horton adds: "The wikipedia was born of a romantic notion that people would put aside
self-interest for the greater good. It doesn't work that way for long:
It didn't work that way for wikipedia." Friend and PR blogger Eric Eggertson disagrees: "It may not be perfect, but it's good enough for a lot of people." I'm with Eric on this. Let me explain why. Yes, Wikipedia is flawed. Despite the neutral point-of-view policy, bias inevitably creeps in: one either thinks Intelligent Design is lunacy or doesn't; either way, it's hard to keep one's bias out. Either in the entries one makes, or the entries one does not make. And inaccuracies float in: I wrote (most of) the article Tallulah Bankhead. In it, I accidentally created a dead link -- of course, I also brought my biases, since she's a cousin whom I admire. But here's why Wikipedia works, despite the flaws. Would I write a scholarly paper based on information in Wikipedia? Of course not, no more than I would write one based on articles in Encyclopedia Britannica. But for most people, most of the time -- it's more than good enough. Eric Eggertson prompted this post.
Technorati tags: Posted by Allan Jenkins at 10:25am in Knowledge Management, Reboot 7.0, Social Tools | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (1) | TrackBack (1) October 25, 2005Will internal corporate blogs outnumber external ones? It's a no brainer.
Fredrik Wackå, the thinkingest blogger in Sweden, writes that he's convinced internal blogs will outnumber external ones 10 or even 20 to 1. Reffing a study by the Economist Intelligence Unit, he notes what anyone who's ever been in a large (or scattered) company can attest to: it's just impossible to exploit the information that's "out there" in the company. He goes on to write: "It's obvious to me that blogging should play a role in that exploitation. I see
them as the "middle way". They're not the structured systems with elaborate meta
data that we find in large KM solutions. They're not email either, but they're
almost as easy as email -- which can't be said of the system approach... -- and
that's the key to success." Absolutely. I can't think of an organization of more than a few people that cannot benefit from internal blogs and wikis. But, and here's the catch, corporate communicators are just as reluctant to let go of the communication reins as any "mainstream media". The conversations I've had with internal communicators indicate blogs make them very nervous. Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:03pm in Business, Communication, Corporate Communication, Knowledge Management, Social Tools | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (3) | TrackBack (0) September 27, 2005Google Adopts Prediction Markets
First published, in slightly different form, at the MarComBlog of Auburn University. Last week, I wrote some about prediction markets. These are markets where hundreds, even thousands, of participants, each armed with "some" knowledge, pool their thinking to make better predictions than pollsters, better decisions than "experts". (Note: Wikipedia's Prediction Market article is a good starting place if you want to learn more, as is James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds (search inside at Amazon).) But what applications do prediction markets have for business and PR practitioners? The evidence is thin to date, but last week, Google announced it's using prediction markets to make better internal decisions: At Google, we're constantly trying to find new ways to organize the
world's information, including information relevant to our business.
Building on the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and the Iowa Electronic Markets, a few Googlers (Doug Banks, Patri Friedman, Ilya Kirnos, Piaw Na and me, with some help from Hal Varian), set up a predictive market system inside the company. Google claims the prediction market is working: prices quickly reflect what's likely, and entropy declines significantly over time. Just as you would expect in a functioning market. The next step (and Google doesn't say if they have or will take it) is to use prediction markets to make better management decisions. To do so would be a significant departure from management doctrine, which is that -- no matter how "flat" your organization -- most important decisions are made by the CEO/COO/CFO. But if markets, no matter how much the participants are laypeople, make better predictions than experts, then that's the logical next step. Looking back on my own tenure as CEO of a 125-person agency, and as Finance Director of a 13,000 member association, I am pretty sure the "market" -- had we had them -- would have made some different decisions than I and my management colleagues made. I've had only a few clients where a prediction market could have been deployed effectively (it takes a fairly good-sized pool, I believe), but I've no doubt the market would have made some of our marketing decisions easier and faster. Posted by Allan Jenkins at 09:53pm in Advertising, Communication, Corporate Management, Economics, Prediction Markets, Public Relations, Smart Communities, Social Tools, Society, Technology | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0) September 19, 2005Trying Out the Wisdom of Crowds
"Summer Reading" is usually more of a wish than an accomplishment. But I managed a lot this summer; indeed my June Amazon shipment is wholly depleted. I like to read two or three related books in tandem, for the joy of serendiptity. That doesn't always work, but in July it did, and in a odd corner: how crowds, individuals, and society collaborate and "know". The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes businesses, economies, societies and nations. James Surowiecki. Short take: a collection of people with ordinary knowledge will generally make better decisions than any expert. The Company of Strangers: A natural history of economic life. Paul Seabright. Short take: Most primates are only minimally social. Man figured out reciprocal trust, which allows anonymous transactions. Blink. Malcolm Gladwell. Short take: if you know (about) what you are seeing, your first instinct is is the right one. If you stop to analyze, you may well go wrong. I won't give longer reviews; all three have been reviewed to death, by better critics. A common theme: Surowiecki and Seabright both support the idea that "financial" markets, composed of independent "traders" are better predictors of future results than TV pundits. One of the markets they cite is NewsFutures, where a punter can "bet" on outcomes of current events: Will Schroeder stay on as German Chancellor? Will a hurricane hit Texas before November 30? Will John Roberts be confirmed? The thinking is that players, who have definite, though small, financial incentives to bet correctly, will, as a group, bet correctly. No individual will have the "answer". But the collective smarts of 20,000 individuals, with money or rewards at stake, should be a good guide. As an example, let me show you where I am. I have a stake in NewsFutures. Here was my status a few hours ago: As you can see, I'm backing Schroeder heavily to be re-elected Cerman chancellor. I'm spitting in the wind, obviously, but the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish papers -- all of whom traditionally have very, very good sources in Berlin, are tipping a Schroeder government. Right? Wrong? I don't know. The "market" seems to think I am wrong (but since I took this screen shot, the shares have jumped from X$9 to X$29... as the US papers start to pick up on the European analysis.) I also have a stake in Yahoo's TechBuzz Game. Here, I am on less solid ground, since I am not privy to tech buzz. But I have spotted a hole: there's a hurricane market. Meteorology fascinates me; and weather that affects the South deeply concerns me. So here I've confidently invested in Rita and Stan (who doesn't exist, yet). Rita is going to be all over the papers for a week or more. Stan will or won't develop. Still, I won't lose much by giving him a wager. Now, if you've stayed with me this far, you may be thinking one of two things: What are the moral implications of "betting" on hurricane strikes (or whatever)? None, that I can see. I don't cause a hurricane strike; indeed, if it looks like the hurricane will die out, I'll take the other position. I've flipped on the Schroeder thing twice. I lost my butt on Phillippe. Takeaway: the market is heartless & makes better decisions when it is heartless. But you aren't affecting anything. Nope, just reacting with great interest. Takeaway: the "market", given its incentives, is a better news gatherer than any professional news gatherer. I have a lot of links to fill in here, and will do so over the next day. In the meantime, a Google Search will probably get you where you are going Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:56pm in Books, Communication, Desirable Roasted Coffee, Ethics, Gadgets & Toys, Smart Communities, Social Tools, Society | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (1) September 09, 2005Lesson for Communicators: Grassroots Tsunami Team Remobilizes For Katrina
What can ordinary people do in the face of catastrophe? Jeremy Pepper and Richard Edelman believe natural disasters are events that leave bloggers and wiki-builders powerless. Warren Bickford believes there's little that IABC can do. (Addendum: Jeff Jarvis is hard at work with a coterie to solve the next disaster -- Jeff, why don't you and your group help solve this one first: Keep reading for how you can volunteer.) Nothing could be further from the truth: bloggers can make a difference. While I agree with Pepper that few bloggers seem to be doing more than complaining about government efforts, I'd like to point out a huge exception. I've written earlier about the incredible South East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami blog/wiki effort that went into action hours after the tsunami. Grassroots- organized using blogs, wikis, IM, and Skype. And effective at a time with most governments and relief organizations were in shock. The same team has swung into action with the Katrina Help blog and wiki. The team, spanning three continents, including professional communicators, has used the blog, the wike, IM, and Skype to set up: So what can IABC and its members, PRSA and its members, any communicator -- or any one of us, for that matter, do to help this effort? The lesson here for communicators? Bloggers and micro-media users -- real communicators -- can make a difference. It's a question of rapid organization and will. We don't have the tools is no longer an excuse for us. Via Conversations with Dina and other sources. Posted by Allan Jenkins at 11:32am in Blogging for the Sheer Hell of It, Citizen Journalism, Communication, Current Affairs, IABC, Katrina, PRSA, Social Tools, South, Tsunami | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (5) | TrackBack (2) August 29, 2005Rise of the Micro Multinational
Hal Varian discusses the rise of the micro multinational in this NYT article. In it he describes how businesses with a half-dozen employees spread across 3 continents can still do business effectively, using socia media and micro-media. He goes on to muse: "The internationalization of small and medium-size enterprises has got to be a
big plus for the American economy. It allows the small players to have access to
labor markets that only the big boys could afford a few years ago. "It is no surprise that many of these small, high-tech, international
entrepreneurs are foreign-born. They have the contacts, the connections and that
most critical ingredient, the ambition, to assemble the pieces needed to start a
business. "It is almost impossible for an entrepreneur to put a foreign development team
together without some strong connections on the ground. Even large
multinationals have found out that outsourcing is not the panacea it was
proclaimed to be. Paradoxically, it is easier for the micro-multinationals to
deal with the inconvenience of outsourcing than it is for the big international
corporations. Entrepreneurs are willing to do things that big international
corporations will not do - like staying up until 11 p.m. and using cheap
voice-over-Internet technology rather than expensive international telephone
service." Hat tip to elearningpost. Posted by Allan Jenkins at 07:07pm in Communication, Corporate Management, Management, Social Tools | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0) Study Shows Instant Messaging Builds Workplace Relations
This may come as no surprise to those experienced in internal communication, but the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication recently published a Korean study indicating that use of IM builds cross-company relationships. It's an academic report and hardly likely to sway reluctant management to install IM for workers. But communicators should be aware of it. Posted by Allan Jenkins at 06:48pm in Communication, Corporate Management, Management, Social Tools | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0) August 21, 2005Conversation Clouds vs. Blog Rankings & Page Rank
PubSub recently finished tearing up and replanting its LinkRanks service; I, for one, like the new look & the results presentation. And while I don't understand how the rankings are calculated, a few test runs on the bloggers I know indicate to me that the rankings are pretty valid. At about the same time, the Feedster 500 was launched. Another ranking service (congratulations, Neville and Shel). I don't want to be provocative: But how much should rank matter? I know the Blogging For Benjamins crowd is intensely interested, because more rank could mean more "reports" sold. The well-known political bloggers of the left and right are also intensely interested because, ironically, it gets them more coverage on MSM. But who else cares what your PubSub rank is? If you care, should you? Should I? What does my rank have to do with standing, reputation, place in the community? Everyone in every steel town in America once knew who Andrew Carnegie was, but who had the highest standing in their community? Probably the corner grocer, who helped you at church or building a house (And, lest anyone go astray, Shel and Neville are where they are on these ranks because they help the PR community). Dina Mehta -- and I wish I discovered her blog long before Reboot 7.0 -- discusses in her easy, inclusive way why the idea of rankings is flawed. In her post, she's commenting on another post by Adina Levin, that argues for the idea of Conversation Clouds as a better way of understanding relative influence. As Adina tells it: The cloud is built from a data set over a time period; the user
should be able to scale the time (conversation over a week, a month,
six months) The conversation cloud would need to provide ways to
navigate through conversation space. If you click on a blog, perhaps
you re-center around that blog's conversations. If you click on a tag
or topic, you search based on that. You'd need to experiment with
several ways of allowing browsing out from the first cloud. This type of picture would not measure rank. Instead, it would illustrate the connections within subcommunities. Cloud-browsing represents a pattern of blogsurfing. A reader might start with Mary Hodder's post on blog metrics, and then traverse to Dina Mehta, danah boyd, Stowe Boyd, Ross Mayfield. The cloud would show in graphical form what a Technorati or
Blogpulse search would -- who linked to the post. And it would also
illustrate the repeated links and cross-links as people reply. If you
zoomed out the time horizon, you'd see some relationships become more
obviously dense, with repeated patterns of links and counterlinks. I think this sort of presentation would get more of what we're
looking for -- a picture of the relationships in a community that
reveals participants, both loud and quiet. The ability to browse the
conversation. And as Dina comments: I think this would very nicely integrate values that I hold important
in blog conversations - relevance, integrity and credibility, interest
and empathy generated, stretch in teasing boundaries, intimacy with my
audience, respect and amicability - rather than blog rankings and
ratings. Making 'invisible' conversations and clusters and communities
of interest visible as a result. I'd love to see comments at posts
integrated into these clouds in some way too, as many who comment donot
necessarily blog, and often the comments enrich the thought in a post
much more. I'll certainly follow this conversation. Might (don't we wish) kill the A-list meme. And describe what we know to be true: our "cloud" is far more influential than any "top-100" list. Posted by Allan Jenkins at 08:45pm in Bloggers, Blogging for Benjamins, Communication, Online Media, Public Relations, Social Tools, Society, Taxonomy of Cyberspace | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (2) | TrackBack (1) July 06, 2005Social Tools - Ripples to Waves of the Future
On June 11, I wrote We Dont Have the Tools is OUT as an Excuse about Dina Mehty's inspiring presentation about how quickly the Southeast Asian Earthquake & Tsunami Blog/Wiki sprang to life -- using only volunteers and free communication tools. I described her presentation as best I could, but I've found a far better description on Dina's own blog: Social Tools - Ripples to Waves of the Future. An amazing story about "gettin' it done". Posted by Allan Jenkins at 01:14pm in Communication, Social Tools, Technology, Tsunami | Permalink | Comments Welcome! (0) | TrackBack (0) |
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