Category: conferences

Elizabeth Edwards on Online Communities, ConvergeSouth Notes, Part 1

Please pardon any typos or grammatical errors. I am focusing my energies elsewhere, but wanted to get this out. Thanks. -Mike

ConvergeSouth 2006 began Friday night with a barbeque in Greensboro’s historic Aycock district. The barbeque was tons of fun and I got to eat with the North Carolina U.S. Representative Brad Miller. ConvergeSouth is an annual semi-unconference on blogging, podcasting, and videocasting. I say semi-unconference because the schedule was pre-determined and each session had a scheduled moderator, but was discussion oriented.

I first heard about it last year while I was taking a class titled “Blogging, We the Media, and Virtual Communities“. Unfortunately, I was unable to make it then and have been waiting ever since.

The conference attracted a wide variety of people involved in blogging. Among others, the participants included community organizers, hobbyists, consultants, politicians, and journalists. There were political bloggers from both ends of the spectrum; which proved interesting for the first session led by Elizabeth Edwards. Mrs. Edwards, who was speaking on building online communties, kept her politics out of the discussion completely. She told of how she has participated in online communities for nearly as long as the internet itself. Some of her favorite communities have included music lyric contribution sites and grammar usage newsgroups. She joked about how there were newsgroups titled both alt.usage.grammar and alt.grammar.usage. She used this as an example of how the web has helped her see that there are lots of ways to see things. It sounded as if this is one of the major ideas in her mind as she approaches the web. She has also turned to online support groups for more serious issues such as the loss of her son and her recent cancer.

Mrs. Edwards then spoke about her experiences building online communities related to political campaigns and community initiatives. One of her key points was the importance of being able to translate online community into community activism. While this could mean simply donating money through the website, it more properly refers to community members acting locally through face-to-face meetings with one another and their communities.

At one point Mike Krempasky, co-founder of Redstate.com, was invited up to the front so that leaders from both ends of the political spectrum could discuss how they deal with online community building. One of the topics brought to their attention, was whether they find posting a topic that is provocative to community members is better or worse than posting something that is agreed upon by all. It seemed that a lot of that had to do with what the particular point of the community was. In general it seemed that a post too provocative often causes more problems within the community even though it increases discussion. It sounded as though Redstate has found that topics everyone agrees upon are usually best for helping the community stay focused on its goals. This was funny in a way as Mr. Krempasky later took the opportunity to say that he “thought Brad Miller ought to be re-elected” thus provoking major online discussions. I actually went to a dinner hosted by Mike and everyone seemed to find it amusing how quickly the comments built up on the Daily Kos. It was new to me to meet political bloggers from either side and see how they use blogs. For the most part, everyone got along well and kept the discussions to the shared interests of blogging and online community.

Elizabeth Edwards mentioned that she grew up in a military community where the shared interests of cummunity members brought everyone together. She said that she is trying to re-create this feeling of community in all of the connections she makes online and off. Throughout the discussion she stressed that one of the best parts of online community is that it brings people together around a shared interest while leaving out the conflict that can arise from peripheral conflicting interests.

To a question about net neutrality, Elizabeth Edwards said that net neutrality was “enormously” important and was the, “Last town square we’ve got.”

Mrs. Edwards pointed out the importance of local bloggers and how politicians need to pay close attention to their voices. She gave an example of how her husband, John Edwards, has added an endorsement the other night because local bloggers pointed the importance of the candidate out to his staff.

While many other topics were discussed, I want to point out two discussions particularly relevant to this blog. When asked about the future of online community, Mrs. Edwards, highlighted the importance of driving dialogue to small, local, communities such as “libraries” and some other places I can’t remember.

Ed Cone told a story about how he once posted a message to a Tar Heel Basketball fan listserv asking whether they should make an exception and support Coach K in his role as coach of the U.S. team. One minute later, Elizabeth had responded, no they had to support the U.S. team despite the fact that Coach K was their coach.

In part two of my notes, I will share why the Scobles (Robert and Mary)am gave me a t-shirt during their talk.

Technorati tags: convergesouth convergesouth2006 blogging elizabethedwards onlinecommunties virtualcommunities

Balkan Beat Box, satellite radio, baby, Library Camp East and danah boyd

As you may have guessed from the title, this blog post is a bit busy. Tonight, I am driving up to Brooklyn for the weekend. Luckily, I just invested in a Sirius satellite radio, so the trip should be a bit more enjoyable. Saturday night we will see Balkan Beat Box.

Then, I will drive down to Jersey to meet my cousin’s new baby! I will be away from the web for most of the trip. Consequently, the blog will be silent until the end of my trip when I plan on attending Library Camp East on Monday the 25th. I look forward to meeting some of you there. I will be checking my e-mail when I can, but may be taking a little while on my replies.

I have to head to campus now to hear a talk by social networking researcher danah boyd.

Notes from BarCampRdu,Part 3, Social networking, Social browsing, and Microformats

For sessions 3 and 4, I attended sessions focusing on social software. From the wiki, session 3 was:

Social Networks – Fred Stutzman. We’ll spend a session talking about Social Networking Websites, such as Myspace, Facebook and Linked In. We’ll look at them, figure out why people use them, and share ideas about how businesses can leverage social networks.

It was attended by what seemed like half campers. Unfortunately, I didn’t really take very many notes during Fred’s session because I was already familiar with his main ideas. There are three main aspects of his thought that he discussed:

  1. His Facebook research (It really is fascinating)
  2. Situational Relevance:
    Situational Relevance in Social Networking Website
    Situational Relevance and Facebook’s Summer Traffic
  3. The Network Effect Multiplier, or, Metcalfe’s Flaw

Most of the discussion focused on situational relevance and the network effect multiplier. to get a good idea of the discussion, you might want to check out the discussion on those posts. I would also encourage you to check out my recent responses to Fred’s thought:

Session 4 was on social bookmarking and was moderated by Chris Messina.Chris got the discussion rolling with by explaining his idea of the future of web browsing and his original vision for Flock. He also made arguments for why the future of browsing is currently being developed with Webkit applications.

However, the discussion quickly turned to a discussion of microformats. Fred Stutzman and Terrell Russell or ClaimID (identity management) discussed their implementation of OpenID (universal distributed url login). hCards (like vCards) were also discussed. I had not really understood the idea of XFN before the discussion.

XFN is a simply way to define relationships between people. For example, this is implemented in WordPress when one adds a friend. A typical blogroll implementing XFN could look like this:

<a xhref="http://jane-blog.example.org/" mce_href="http://jane-blog.example.org/" rel="sweetheart date met">Jane</a> <a xhref="http://dave-blog.example.org/" mce_href="http://dave-blog.example.org/" rel="friend met">Dave</a> <a xhref="http://darryl-blog.example.org/" mce_href="http://darryl-blog.example.org/" rel="friend met">Darryl</a> <a xhref="http://www.metafilter.com/" mce_href="http://www.metafilter.com/" >MetaFilter</a> <a xhref="http://james-blog.example.com/" mce_href="http://james-blog.example.com/" rel="met">James Expert</a>

(example from XFN: Introduction and Examples)

It seems like a pretty straightforward evolution of social interaction through the web. It made me wonder why Facebook doesn’t implement this with all of the relationship data they hold. While it might be of limited value in their closed network, the future will (hopefully) allow exporting of data.

We discussed how all of these standards ought to interact in the future. If relationships and identity information were stored as microformats on an OpenID enabled server, it would become possible to export data from your OpenID server to a new service. This advance would make navigating between multiple social applications easier. It would also prevent the need to disclose uneccessary amounts of personal information by uploading ones address book to a new service. This move would both empower the user to take more control of their privacy while automating the more painful parts of joining a new network. My notes for this discussion read:

XFN + OpenID = portable network
XFN + hCard + Jabber + OpenID = ad hoc (open standards) social networks

These formulae certainly stay true to what Chris Messina began by describing as an “Architecture for Collaboration”.

I believe that we closed with a discussion of the privacy implications related to social browsing and microformats.

Technorati tags: barcamprdu microformats

Notes from BarCampRDU, Part 2: “Sex and the Death of Advertising”

For session 2, I attended “Sex and the Death of Advertising”. From the wiki:

My name is Martin Smith [email protected] and I learned to sell soap for P&G and candy for M&M/Mars. Selling soap was harder by the way. Sex & The Death of Advertising will discuss what we, as marketers, do when tried and true market creating strategies cease to work. What are the implications of the death of the Advertising Industrial Complex? Will new tools such as search engine marketing (SEM) eventually end up in the same tangled mess due to pressure from advertisers fleeing now unsuccessful channels such as TV, Radio and Infomercials? Is there something fundamentally different in new “pull” ad models that will prevent SEM from losing reach like television and print? We will discuss selections from The Attention Economy by Davenport and Beck, Gonzo Marketing by Christopher Locke and All Marketers Are Liars by Seth Godin. If you have a favorite marketing author or new marketing theory, please bring it to our discussion. Our session’s draft goal will be to brainstorm key elements of our new marketing paradigm and identify what’s next.

Martin did a good job of leading a discussion. He began with a brief introduction to his theory. Essentially traditional push advertising no longer works because people have become numb to the overabundance of messages they are exposed to. Generations raised with TV and the Web are great at blocking things out.

Another problem faced by advertising in general is what Martin demonstrated with the example of infomercials. When everyone starts using a certain method of advertising, the price for said advertising goes up while the effectiveness goes down.

After the introduction, he asked other participants to share their current experiences with advertising. We talked about Google AdWords for a little bit. During this part of the discussion, I feel that we hit upon a lot of the major points of the discussion:

  • “Word of Mouth” is extremely important. Martin discussed his experience with magnetic poetry. That was a product that largely sold itself through word of mouth. Martin pointed out that what took him 5 years of marketing then could probably be accomplished in 6 months now.
  • “The Long Tail“: We spent a lot of time discussing the importance of being able to reach niche markets. Why pay for AdWords if you hit the top of the rankings anyways. This also lead to a discussion of ->>
  • “Purple Cows“: Is it purple enough? Am I explaining it in a purple enough way?

In addition to these major themes, the discussion covered a number of other ideas. I am going to outline a few below:

  • Martin was a fan of the saying “Live by PR, Die by PR.” He used a number of examples from his career where a product was successful due to positive editorial press. For example, the magnetic poetry was picked up by the Washington Post. He also gave some examples of how bad PR, or no PR, can then destroy a brand.
  • We talked about the idea of a “Free Prize Inside”. Martin pointed out how the practice of giving away web services and product trials is similar to giving away a free prize in a Cracker Jack box, in that everyone expects a certain ammount of free. A lively discussion about free trials ensued. One interesting point someone brought up was that after six months with one software trial, it was integrated into his life. It seemed that there was a general concensus that we were all at least partially in the “business of giving away”.
  • Customer service is extremely important. Given the speed customers can share bad experiences, wer are only as strong as our weakest link. This is also really important because of so many products are now free that the service is what keeps customers. Furthermore, barriers for new competitors to enter are low. In a later talk on Social Browsing, we discussed how it will become easier to export settings and information from one service to another. This will make customer service event more of a defining factor.
  • We discussed the importance of inventory. This related to the last point: If Amazon and its competitors both have all the books, then customer service is what sets them apart.LIBRARY ASIDE: This made me think about how libraries need to market our inventories better. Everyone at the session seemed surprised that most of the Barnes and Noble and Borders books only sell one copy a year. Libraries have much larger stocks than your typical bookstore. It was pointed out that Amazon has 11 million or so books for sale. We have over 5 million in the libraries at UNC. Of course that doesn’t count what we can interlibrary loan. We need to promote WorldCat more than we do. Open WorldCat at least should help publicise our services a little. If inventory and free are this important, then libraries should be able to perform considerably better against our competition.This discussion of book inventory also tied in well with the ideas behind Lulu.com‘s philosophy (an event sponor) and the discussions of alternative publishing at a later session (I will post on this session later).

Technorati tag: barcamprdu