Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Social Engagement

Great article in The Guardian on Socialtext by David Tebbutt, not only for enterprise collaboration, but how it augmented the Les Blogs event (hat tip: Loic).

Similarly, Kevin Werbach hosted a pre-Supernova party this Tuesday.  When Kevin made a toast he pointed out how it felt like a bubble event, but the key difference was how everyone chipped in $25 through paypal on the wiki signup page.  Good examples of easy (and cost-effective) group forming.

Les Influencers

François Granger, who blogs in both French and English described Les Influencers to me as a blog where publishers can copy and paste ads they choose.  Reporting is transparent and the ads are presented as though they are recommended by influencers.

 

Recommandé par des Influenceurs.

One of the closest implementations of Publisher Driven Advertising (PDA)/Sell-Side Advertising where Sellers Become Seekers to date.  Love ads that need transitive clearing and Cost Per Influence (CPI).  Wonder who influenced these influencers...  But let me leave you with my one criteria for judging an advertising model: does it create incentives for quality creative work?

UPDATE: See comment, François, Jarvis

Les Blogs Presentation

Posted my presentation from Les Blogs on this wiki page, which has grown to a perfect summary of the event with presentations, audio and blog posts.

The French Exception

The vibrant growth of the French blogosphere is something to behold.  French is the second largest language and half of students in France blog.  This is due, in no small part, to Skyradio telling their listeners to Skyblog what they think at most commercial breaks -- a multi-million dollar advertising investment from an MSM to make blogging cool.  Effective, considering they have 1.5 million bloggers according to Pierre Bellanger's presentation.  Wonder what will happen when they begin podcasting.

I really enjoyed the contrast Jochen Wegner provided in his presentation on how Germany needs a second pope.  Basically, nobody blogs in Germany despite their population and broadband penetration.  He implied that there hadn't been an event, or celebrity, or major marketing push to help it along.  Could also be similar to when i asked Orkut why Estonia was the six most populous nationality on Orkut the a population the size of Skybloggers -- he said one of his good friends was Estonian.  Adoption happens from social networks of founders plus mass event exceptions. 

The Germans I spoke to said wikis were far more popular than blogs and the credited Wikipedia (the German version is the second largest), which are both network and mass drivers.

One of the recurring conversations at Les Blogs, beyond metaphysical notions of what is a blog, is why doesn't everybody have a blog? While lots of blog pundits are quick to agree that the real action isn't blogs as publishing (aside: Doc's presentation put the nail in content instead of conversation) -- but chatter with friends that happens to be in the open.  We have explored this as part of the network structure, demographics, interests, everything.  Barak from 6A noted that focus groups show people consistently think of bloggers are people who are self-important and have too much time on their hands.  My wife, who was outed as part of the community this week, and is my favorite focus group, agrees violently.  And nobody gives a damn who has more traffic than who.

However, the reason I cringe when toolmakers says all the action is in the skinny part of the power law (uh, long tail) is that the toolmakers haven't followed through.  Two notable exceptions are LiveJournal and Flickr.  We all know that social networking (especially as a filter) is due to merge with blogging.  However, one consensus from insiders over the past week was that tool innovation significantly lags social practice.  I'd suggest this is the focus of where toolmakers will catch up over the next year or so.

Caterina made some claims that not everyone has something to write, but all can take snapshots.  All true, and the tech makes it dreadfully easy.  Time-spread media like audio and video has a tougher time until editing is emergent.  But people who use computers are generally literate enough to write letter to friends. 

Back to the rest of the world.  Not every country has a salon culture. Some are waiting for inflections of networks and mass. Many are oppressed and don't have events to move their voices like Iran.  Some still look for a third way like what I can't wait to have emerge from countries like Korea.

The story at Les Blogs wasn't some hot heads from the network core coming over to barf up panel sessions that have been heard before.  It was the mix of cultures at a moment in time that expect a day when we all write what we really think through the web.

Les Blogs and Social Software

Sitting in the French Senate for Les Blogs.  Given the fact that there are 300 bloggers here, I probably will not do my conference blogging schtick.  The past couple of days have been a wonderful getaway and chance to see friends.  Loic has been a wonderful host.

The Senate representative welcomed us to the first international blog day.  John Chambers spoke here last week, Steve Balmer joins them for breakfast tomorrow.  Blogs are the next revolution.  Half of their schoolchildren blog, French is the second most popular language in the blogopshere, they like to express themselves and debate their views.  20 different countries are represented here, half of attendees from outside the country.  As Peter Parker's uncle said, "a big power implies big responsibilities."  Like Spiderman, we have big responsibilities.

Joi Ito's presentation

  An extension of a series of events.  Internet is the first open bottom up network.  Ethernet connected some computers, TCP/IP connected the network (IFTF rough concensus working code), HTML (had a tagging protocol of SGML but you couldn't view the source, was too complex), with blogs we are connecting people.  Now we are fighting against people that do not want us to share our content and talk freely. 

Richard Florida, The Creative Class: anti-establishment, critical thinkers, autonomous action, self-fulfillment, self-expression, sharing collective action, community, learning and openness to innovation.  These technologies become adopted through word of mouth.  Some cultures adopting faster.  Gap between creative and non-creative class is bigger than between countries.  Shows the superbowl commercial of kids busted for sharing music.  Some people understand this gap and are selling to this creative class.  Watch user behavior and create products for it, don't change behavior.  Traditional media is trying to force people back into the old model.  iPod Shuffle isn't the best specified product, but word of mouth and brand let them make it a success.  Even through they have DRM everywhere and are suing bloggers, we believe they are on our side. 

Long Tail (gulp): Delivery vs. Discovery of content, file sharing(a sophisticated way of playing DJ), recommendation engines/reviews, blogs and word of mouth.  Problem is not how to protect my copyright, it is how to get people to listen to your stuff.  Worse than being copied is not being copied. 

Blogs and marketing: Kryptonite and a Bic Pen lost $10M in 10 days, Rathergate, Fastlane is honest marketing by conversation to develop trust, BBC and Infoworld Technorati sidebars. 

The Sharing Economy: The myth of intellectual property, "creative property" is a new idea, "the commons" is and always has been essential part of creativity, amateur vs. professionals.  This is an amateur revolution.  Professional sex is not always better than amateur sex.  Creative commons has 10M licensed web pages.  Red Blood Cells project where the White Stripes remix is an example of skipping the intermediaries whereas works become automatically copyrighted the moment they are made. (cc)

Remix culture is not just about creative content, it is about free speech.  Read my lips and other remix videos.  NBC is saying you can't use Bush speech because of copyright, lots of things are trying to stifle our ability to share.

Random Rants

A random that should not be taken too seriously and should have been done anonymously... 

 

What's a Vacation Anyway: In theory I am on vacation right now, but all that means while in a connected location is no long blog entries and no social bookmarking. 

The Future of TV: Watching people watching TV 

Barely Existing: Honestly, if you are going to blog about the virtues of aggregation, offer full text feeds so we can read what you preach. 

Social Network Exit Turned Spam: Around the time he left some YASNSs, every time his post is picked up by Topix and other aggregators, instead of content we get this social spam: Stowe Boyd, President/COO of Corante, is a well-known media subversive, and an internationally recognized authority on real-time, collaborative and social technologies. 

Flickrcasting: Why can't I subscribe to a photo stream that automagically puts the original photo in iPhoto and my photo-enabled iPod?  Or extract enclosures and photos within blog posts the same way?

Keyword: My little test with a spammer verified he is plucking "Keyword" to fodder is fake blogs.  Intelliseek did learn to filter him out.  My guess is he is a SEO trying to pickup clients for keyword optimization.  Anyway, I figured better to raise his noise to the level of signal to let real people calibrate their indexes.

Gas Price Indicatr: Gas is too fucking expensive.  Maybe sending a moblog of the pump helps people feel each other's pain.  But could be an interesting indicatr if aggregated and visualized.

Why the French Hate Us: Google Maps charts Mountain View and London, but they are off the map.

SmellyBlog: I got wind of a new startup working on an olfactory blog service.  If we can share text, pictures and video -- there has to be dollars in scents.

Oh, the Humanity: Getting BoingBoinged, the new /., sure does help you gauge the vast opinions out there on potentially paltry subjects.  Also, apparently there are more than geeks in this world.

Drill This In Your Head: Just because you blog as in using a tool, doesn't mean you know how to use it.  Look to norms: link, attribute your sources, make quotes distinguishable from your own words, read when others link to you, link back, it's called a conversation, you should know the drill.

Tom DeLay: Once again proves the theory: if you let golf run your life your life will be run over.

Comments Are Worthless: Show me and my readers the linked posts from people who can express a facet of their identity on the web (should be everyone, the big adoption problem), sorted in order of link rank.  Technorati should do this after letting people sort keyword searches by Authority.

Calling a Winner: You can't call winners in horizontals.  Like Google vs. Yahoo vs. MSN vs. Snap on Search (what is the IN or ON for Snap anyway?).  But you can call winners in verticals.And at least not get into trouble. Also, only way to beat Google is a different initial entry point than the command line, they own that.

Double Punctuation: I picked up adding two spaces before periods when writing long papers.  Technically, it's acceptable punctuation.  Stylistically, it's a horrible habit.  And you can thank Steve Gillmor for giving me heck about its (pronounced: heckaboutis).  Fuck, it's just words, man, you get my meaning.

On to Him:  Brian Dear is on to something about vulture vendors, or rather, they are on to him.  My advice: disconnect the phone, leave a message telling them to go through LinkedIn or get a blog. 

Speaking of Which: What are your favorite accountant, audit, banker, lawyer, recruiter, insurance agent, office supply, web host blogs?  Harder to name than you think.  Now think of markets you can turn to.  Now think of markets that are spam free.  Harder to name than you think. 

WYSIWHAA?: Which is worse, debugging HTML you have written or that assisted with a wysiwyg editor? 

Blog Revolution: Condy Rice is worried about the centralization of Russian electronic media, with good reason.  If only there was affordable decentralized media.  The developed and developing world is fine and good -- but the biggest untapped political impact of blogs could be in Cyrllic. 

Speaking of Revolutions: They say that France is teetering on a social revolution of 1968 porportions, because they won't sign the EU constitution they helped foster.  Leadership requires following through. 

Explorer: Tourism is going to places you and the rest of the market pay to know about beforehand.  Exploring is purposely going elsewhere.  Pros explore to places nobody has gone, Amateurs explore to places they don't know.  Somewhere in between going places friends recommend that tourists don't know.  Personally, I like getting lost on purpose.