Green edges point to people tagging the URL. Blue edges point to the taggers’ first-degree friends. Fucia points to taggers’ second degree friends. White is the “back graph.” It shows people in different networks who also know each other.
If there was a way to post a “no vacancy” sign on my digital front yard, it would have been up long ago. There is no more room at the inn; I’m absolutely full and can’t eat another byte of whatever digital service you’re serving up, etc.
I feel the same way, but every once in awhile I find a service or app worth adding to the barn. I was introduced to Snackr over the weekend, an RSS ticker for your desktop. Tickers normally are trouble for me. Too much of a distraction, and this still might prove to be true with Snackr. However, the ticker format is also the reason why I like it so much. You see, it’s a daily struggle between me and my RSS feeds. Before Snackr, I’ve always taken an Inbox Zero approach to my RSS reader (Google Reader). I really like Google Reader too, but I can’t expect to plow through my new items every day so all is marked as read by the time I go to bed. I tried organizing my feeds, but I know it won’t work. I gave up trying to organize my email in folders a while ago. It’s a never ending time suck. Now I just have two folders/labels in email: Archives and Reply To. Everything else is either replied to immediately or deleted. Unfortunately, I can’t keep up with the amount of information in Google Reader as I can in Gmail using the same methods. I needed a new plan that will help me locate the articles that are most important and ignore those that aren’t in the most efficient manner possible. Snackr has met these needs so far. Here’s why:
Having Snackr scroll along the bottom of my screen all day will ensure that I won’t miss what’s important to me. I might miss it the first, second, or third time around, but I will catch it at some point during the day. In addition, Snackr is more background noise than distraction because it’s open all day. It’s just another part of my display like my taskbar.
You can set a timer on Snackr, so that all articles will drop from your ticker after a certain time frame. For example, I have mine set to four days. Once an article is more than four days old, it automatically drops from the ticker. I realize that this feature can be used in the traditional Inbox format, but I am so wired to clear out my Inbox that it would be very difficult for me to leave hundreds of articles in my RSS reader inbox for four days. A ticker is never ending, thus the urge to read everything does not exist. You just let it pass by and four days later, it will be gone without any effort on your part.
Screen shot of my display with Snackr at the bottom.
One more plug for Snackr. It was built using Adobe AIR, which allows for cross-platform desktop apps built using a combination of HTML, AJAX, and Flash.
by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Penguin, 2006, 324 pages
The advent of social media has introduced an era of collaborative communications that raises many questions. Are corporate blogs necessary to influence consumer buying decisions? Can low-cost viral marketing campaigns outpace traditional media buying? How influential, accurate and necessary have resources like Wikipedia become in an increasingly connected world?
Researchers Don Tapscott, head of the management consultancy New Paradigm, along with colleague Anthony D. Williams, leveraged $9 million in research to answer these questions with Wikinomics, a book whose focus is as broad and ambitious as Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat. Just as Friedman made compelling arguments for a flattening of the business world marked by the globalization of marketing, production and delivery of everything from iPods to executive assistance, Tapscott and Williams establish the influence of collaboration on an unprecedented scale in the development of everything from aircraft design to encyclopedias to open source software.
Wikinomics is built around four central ideas: openness, peering, sharing and acting globally. These ideas are woven throughout the book in the context of economic theory, American history, boardrooms and newsrooms. Some of the book’s concepts aren’t entirely new—many of us collaborate all the time with colleagues, customers and partners on materials like PowerPoint presentations, press releases, business plans, and the like. But Wikinomics does introduce some bold new concepts. According to the authors, Web sites have become passé. They argue that in order to thrive, communicators must instead build thriving online communities. The merits of new media platforms such as blogs, instant messaging, wikis, chat rooms, podcasting and more are discussed at length. “Peer production”—harnessing the creative energy of massive amounts of people—is emphasized as the key to an ever-evolving communications revolution.
The authors meticulously document how Google, MySpace, Second Life and YouTube have changed the way we communicate and collaborate in both professional and personal settings. The stories of “The Peer Pioneers” are fascinating, most notably the story of Wikipedia’s five-year evolution from a pet project to a resource used by more than a third of online Americans. The discussion of “Prosumers” and the “democratization of media” shed light on the ways that consumers of news are changing the way that news is reported, sometimes to the extent that we are creating it ourselves.
The final chapter consists of one sentence inviting the reader to “edit this book!” by visiting a wiki called the Wikinomics Playbook. It includes real-time updates reflecting new communication media that have emerged since the book was published, as well as other insights offered by dozens of contributors worldwide. In addition, readers are invited to edit the online version of the book itself.
In the end, that’s what makes slogging through Wikinomics’ drier portions worthwhile. Armed with the authors’ understanding of how wikinomics is changing the world of collaboration, we ourselves are left to collaborate with them.
The first ever ROFLcon happened this past weekend as a two-day symposium on the MIT campus in Cambridge Massachusetts for Internet celebs, academics, and everyday nerds (April 25 and 26, 2008).
The purpose? To find out what Internet Celebrity is, how Memes form, what comprises Internet Culture, how this affects living, breathing human-beings and where this bus is headed?
Let’s back track a moment, for non-geeks, nouveau geeks and casual web surfers, What is a ROFL and what is Meme and who is Tron Guy?
ROFL is Internet slang for (Rolling on the Floor Laughing). A language that has evolved from saving keystrokes in text messaging and instant messaging.
A Meme is an idea that, like a gene, can replicate and evolve. A unit of cultural information that represents a basic idea that can be transferred from one individual to another and subjected to mutation, crossover and adaptation. The concept of meme is from the 1976 book by Richard Dawkins, ‘The Selfish Gene’ and has been adopted by the Internets to refer to the aforementioned.
Tron Guy is Jay Maynard who came into Internet Fame by creating a costume from scratch based on the 1982 film TRON. He created a website detailing the process of creating this most incredible wearable art and thus the viral capacity of the web took over. As friends FORWARD to other friends he became an Internet success. Jay Maynard gets major accolades for staying in costume for the entire duration of the ROFLcon. And, I think he was the most popular micro-celeb.
So why invite the Internet to meet up in person? Many reasons it turns out… 1. Does the Internet function the same in real life as it does online? 2. What is Internet Celebrity in comparison with Hollywood Celebrity? 3. What is rickrolling and lolspeak? 4. Is the Internet really as democratic as it seems? 5. And…what do these Internets look like in person?
Does the Internet function the same in real life as it does online? Well, according to Ian Chillag of NPR’s New Show ‘The Bryant Park Project’ it does. “ROFL con: it’s the entire Internet in one place, in its human forms. Those human forms do what other humans do: they drink beer. Scott Beale of Laughing Squid made it easy last night. He opened up a tab at a pub in Cambridge, and the Internet was thirsty.” I was at this pre-ROFL party, a great place to guess ‘who is that?’. The highlight was meeting the guy who lives in the basement of the popular music venue ‘The Middle East’. Why is his apartment so significant? It just happens to be the background for level 4 in the game Guitar Hero. Apparently this guy became aware that his apartment was the setting for level 4 when friends were over playing the game in said apartment. LOL
So how does Internet Celebrity (or micro-celebrity) compare to Hollywood Celebrity…Alice Marwick (PhD student in the Department of Culture and Communication, NYU) asks ‘Is this the democratization of a formerly elite space, or sensational lowest-common-denominator trash?’ CNN says “The Internet is setting a new standard for celebrity. Fame is no longer about getting “15 minutes,” it’s about becoming famous to 15 people.” David Weinberger from the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society says, “The Internet allows the masses to wrest control of fame away from the traditional media, creating micro-celebrities with the click of a mouse.” For me the discussion turned to applied science with the live performance of Internet mega-celebrity (at least I think she is) Leslie Hall.
Experiencing ROFLcon meant experiencing live RickRolling and speaking lolspeak conversationally. If you know what RickRolling is then your eyes are probably rolling as you read this, if you don’t know what it is then I shall explain it now. Rickrolling is a prank and Internet Meme involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. The meme is a classic bait and switch: a person provides a link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true source of the link without clicking (and thus satisfying their curiosity). By extension, it can also mean playing the song loudly in public in order to be disruptive. A person who falls for the prank is said to have been “Rick Roll’d”. (this description is from wikipedia, sorry but it was the best overall definition).
I can has cheezburger…and what is LOLspeak? “LOLinguist Anil Dash defines the LOLcat phenomenon as “the convention of taking pictures of cute animals, most frequently cats, and overlaying absurdest captions on the images.” For the sake of brevity we refer to the dialect of these captions as LOLspeak, But we will not be among the throngs of poseurs to address its morphological intricacy. Instead, today we focus on its primary function as a mode of expression: LOL and its literature are, far from an efficacious little bleat of joy, an agonized cri de coeur.” (from Eve Adams at flakmag.com) I can has (anything goes here).
Is the Internet really as democratic as it seems? Even though many at the Con said that RickRolling was annoying and the pastime of the inept and crude, it reared it’s ugly head during the panel ‘Meme Infrastructures’. During this panel a large screen projected the ‘backchannel’ of questions for the guests posted live by the audience. Audience members could then vote on each other’s posts via laptops and phones in order to ‘favorite’ certain questions. With in twenty minutes the lyrics to Rick Ghastly’s song appeared and, through timely voting, arranged in order. The panel was RickRolled in real time. It was amazing and telling…power to the people.
What do these Internets look like in person? Here is Day 2 at Roflcon, video by Dean Browell—just look at ‘em, you can actually see a real ROFL.
In summary, ROFLcon was a new and enlightening experience. It was like a dream filled with Internet celebrities, lol-jargon, weird little cats saying things wrong and FREE pizza. I loved every minute. Did I learn anything? Well…I’m sure I did.
Like many PR people, I’m still unsure of the best way for my industry to leverage Twitter. Opinions are developing across the board. On one end, Todd Defren made some good points yesterday calling for PR people to go tweet or go home, and on the other, I know a lot of PR people who agree with Kara Swisher in saying that Twitter is relatively unknown outside the echo chamber. I tend to agree most with Sarah Lacy, posting today that Twitter is slowly but surely becoming well-known outside the tech elite, which means we all need to figure it out sooner than later.
Last night, we got a lesson in how social media tools - Twitter in particular - can do a lot of damage to a brand in literally minutes. It’s a powerful example of how big companies, working in partnership, spin their wheels while individuals trash them in the blink of an eye. Here’s what went down:
Several of my Bay Area friends and colleagues planned to join 600 people attending a screening of Iron Man tomorrow night, one night before the movie’s US premiere, hosted by Mike Arrington and TechCrunch. The movie’s been enjoying good buzz, and it seemed like it was about to get 600 more people buzzing. Right? Wrong. Check out this timeline (all times EDT last night):
8:30-9:00: Over 60 comments are posted to the TechCrunch entry, the vast majority expressing outrage. I can’t remember ever seeing a blog post get so many comments so fast.
Things just went downhill for Marvel from there - check Tweet Scan. Social media heavyweights like Jeremiah Owyang (6,562 followers) are tweeting things like “No matter how they approach this, Marvel is going to look bad.” Independent of the Twittersphere, as of this post there are close to 300 comments on the TechCrunch post, including the phrases “boycott” and “most pirated movie ever”, along with the personal contact information of some really unhappy people on Marvel and Paramount’s PR and legal teams who probably won’t get a ton of sleep tonight. Oh, and it’s headed straight to the top of Techmeme. Mathew Ingram, Daniel Terdiman, and Dave McClure are just some of the bloggers commenting on the PR aspects of the situation)
This has to have been tortuous for the Hollywood folks. My guess is that the lawyer had no idea how widely read TechCrunch is, the PR people (if they even know about this whole debacle) are mad at the lawyer, and that Marvel doesn’t have a Twitter presence to join a rapidly expanding conversation. The fact that Mike bought the tickets via Paramount and that the theatre, the AMC Metreon, seems to be on his side, only complicates things. That’s a lot of bummed out PR people at three big companies who would have to quickly act in concert to mitigate this, and so far they haven’t been able to. Who knows what they could have done if they were monitoring Twitter.
Twitter might not be that far out of the echo chamber yet, but I bet that tomorrow morning Marvel will vouch for its power in Hollywood. The 600 people who will be in attendance if the show goes on are people who can build good buzz - or share bad buzz in a flash. Iron Man will be #1 at the box office this weekend, but its reputation may already be irreparably tainted in Silicon Valley.
This is what the internet looks like when crammed into one room…This a video excerpt of Day 1 at ROFLcon ‘o8, a two day symposium at MIT in Cambridge Mass. April 25-26. Filmed by colleague Dean Browell and featuring Tron Guy, Marmaduke Guy, and Leeroy Jenkins. Camio appearances of Butter Room contributors, Beth Deel and Wendy Schuyler.
I am a big fan of twhirl, a desktop client that up until last week allowed one to update their Twitter account(s) and receive Twitter updates from friends. Then last week, twhirl introduced support for friendfeed in their newest version, 0.8. This came as a very pleasant surprise since I had been struggling with using friendfeed. I did not have an app that would keep me abreast of my friends’ online activities, so friendfeed was rather useless. Maybe I should back up a minute though. Not familiar with friendfeed? You mean to tell me that you are not using friendfeed yet after all the buzz it received out of SXSW? ;)
A Friendfeed Primer
Friendfeed is an aggregator and broadcaster of one’s online activities. It’s very simple to create your account, but could get rather difficult to keep up with if you are not careful. To set up your account, all you have to do is indicate to Friendfeed the account usernames for other social media sites that you want to share with your friends, such as Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Last.fm, Tumblr, Netflix, and YouTube (there are about 40 services total). Friendfeed does not need passwords of these accounts, fyi. And by the way, you can also share with Friendfeed posts from your blog(s) regardless of the blogging platform.
Once you’ve finished setting up your account, your every move will be shared with your friends and people that subscribe to your friendfeed. You see friendfeed is like the Facebook News feed, but on steroids. You don’t have to be “friends” with someone to follow their activities. The more people you follow on Friendfeed, the more likely you won’t ever see your friends offline.
The key is to manage your friendfeed subscriptions carefully. Like Facebook, I only plan on using friendfeed to follow my true friends, and twhirl is the best way to see what they are sharing.
I believe twhirl is so popular because the design is very similar to the AIM client and other 1.0 instant messaging apps. This creates an instant level of comfortability. Every time an activity occurs, you can receive a pop-up alert in the bottom right of your monitor. You can also set how long that alert should be visible. You can set the opacity, text font, notification method, refresh rate, and how the app should behave when minimized. You can also directly comment on other friend’s posts right within twhirl (very cool). One of the best features of twhirl is you can manage multiple friendfeed and twitter accounts. I realize this is probably only useful for the “super user”, but it should become more of a benefit now that twhirl has expanded with friendfeed.
I’ve tried following my friends’ activities in other ways, primarily through email subscriptions. I get email updates from Picasa or bookmarks from others via del.icio.us, but they never grab my attention soon enough. Eventually I would check them out. Twhirl does help me take notice of my friends’ activities because of its AIM-like features.
Actions speak louder than words, which sums up why I like friendfeed. I am a Twitter user too, but so many tweets that I receive are useless and nonsense. Friendfeed, on the other hand, shows me what my friends are truly interested in. Less fluff and all substance.
So, as my title reads … use with caution, but definitely use. If you do, feel free to follow me on friendfeed at http://friendfeed.com/vtwick. Just don’t expect me to follow back if I don’t know you.
The myScoper girls have arrived in Boston… This pic is from Cambridge looking across the Charles River at Boston (before we walked across it). It was 84 degrees and fantastic! A good day… ROFLcon is 37 hours away and counting… more to come…
Covering the Old Dominion from Tidewater to the Western Mountains and all points in between, The Butter Room is where you will find an alternative view from and of Virginia. Learn More.
Screen shot of my display with Snackr at the bottom.
I believe twhirl is so popular because the design is very similar to the AIM client and other 1.0 instant messaging apps. This creates an instant level of comfortability. Every time an activity occurs, you can receive a pop-up alert in the bottom right of your monitor. You can also set how long that alert should be visible. You can set the opacity, text font, notification method, refresh rate, and how the app should behave when minimized. You can also directly comment on other friend’s posts right within twhirl (very cool). One of the best features of twhirl is you can manage multiple friendfeed and twitter accounts. I realize this is probably only useful for the “super user”, but it should become more of a benefit now that twhirl has expanded with friendfeed.
