Process of Change

The good and bad of unplugging

bobreb — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:58:04 GMT

Classmates.com is fascinating. New people, new problems to solve, and a opportunity so big it -- well, it's big. I've been so caught up in it, I've largely unplugged from every other connection. There's good and bad in that.

The good is this: unplug for a little while and when you come back you have what feels like a more objective view. The kool-aide wears off. You also see how much you haven't missed. For instance, I was sorry to see that my network registered no new or interesting social networking ideas. Some folks from Yahoo published some useful work on planning recognition systems, but it's hardly ground-breaking (in fact it seems to gloss over whole classes of rewards -- intimacy and exclusivity). It appears to me that the Facebook/MyYearbook/twitter/chocolate/vanilla daytime dramas have lulled the industry to sleep. Whatever.

The bad is that I've missed some of the genuinely interesting things my network produces. Alex, as usual, has come up with a gem of a book recommendation. He recommends I Am a Strange Loop.

I Am a Strange Loop
by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Read more about this title...

I just downloaded the Kindle Edition. (Yes, I love my Kindle -- love it.)

It's also become apparent that I'm not likely to find the time to solve my community server comments/spam issue. No comments sucks. So, it might be time for a change. This site will remain a repository for all of my posts, but I think I need another, more public, outlet. LiveJournal?

Time to dance to a different tune

bobreb — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:08:52 GMT

After 105 good years at Microsoft, I'm leaving. That would be 15 ordinary human years. I'll leave the explanation of the multiple to your imagination.

Classmates.com was gracious enough to offer me what I consider to be a dream job. However, I don't think it would be appropriate to discuss that further in this venue. In any event, I'll be keeping my personal blog going for the foreseeable future. After a brief time away, you'll find me at http://theworkingnetwork.com.

I'm sure we'll be crossing paths, if only virtual paths, in the very social internet future. Until then...

Cheers

Bob.

Social Bookmarking, I forgot, I just forgot.

bobreb — Sat, 10 May 2008 18:10:13 GMT

I don't talk as much about social bookmarking as I used to. Even for me, it's in the shadow of those few lumbering social software giants. In my own defense, it really is hard to tear your attention away from the headlines -- to stop slurping the kool-aide-of-the-day. It's an artifact of the dark side of the social force.

Of course, I've never stopped bookmarking. I could no sooner do that than I could go without my browser. It's fully integrated and completely automatic. Still, just a couple of days ago, I received an email that reminded of how potent a tool it remains.

Here's the deal...

I received an email from a colleague. She'd uncovered a post, a little over a year old, called Community ROI. When I opened the page, I had to smile. Kathy Sierra. Been a while. Like almost every other post ever written for Creating Passionate Users, it contained some great advice.

I'm certain I'd read that post before. Positive, in fact. But I'd forgotten about it. I'd forgotten some of the advice it contained. I began to wonder what else I'd forgotten. So I visited one of my social bookmarking services (I use several), and began to browse my own collection.

Wow. I have to do that more often. Really.

It became clear that I retain only a fraction of what I read. And, that I don't always read everything I tag. Anyway, exploring my older tagged material was far more rewarding than I would have imagined. Aside from an engaging few hours of nostalgia, I (re)learned a thing or two I'll likely be putting into practice in the near future. Below are some of the pages I turned up. Be warned, my tastes are my own, your mileage may vary:

Sure, some of the information, and most of the opinions, were dated -- already. But there was much that was not. Perhaps more importantly, I think there are ideas throughout that were never even tried, or were surfaced poorly, or were just too far ahead of their time to succeed. Remember, a winning idea is rarely such due exclusively to properties of its own. Winning ideas have to be recognized as such by the people in the context in which they're offered. Seeds don't grow just anywhere.

Next Saturday morning, I'll dig a little deeper into what I used to know, or almost knew, or might have known, and see what other gems I can unearth. I may have to make a habit of it.

Should you find yourself mining your own collections, please feel free to share...

Toluu, now we're talkin useful, sort-of, maybe

bobreb — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:08:57 GMT

TheNextWeb posted a good review of Toluu. Briefly, Toluu is about feed sharing.

Looks great. And frankly, I'm far more interested in these sorts of things than I am the "centralization of decentralized me" style services (I believe Solis might have said that first).

I haven't received an invite yet, so I don't know this first hand, but according to readwriteweb, "what you and your friends read and tag as favorites will help you discover new feeds that you may enjoy reading."

I can only wait and hope that Toluu recommendations are not based solely upon me and my friends. The reason, of course, is that I already have multiple communications channels engaged between myself and my friends/contacts. The old line “tell me something I don’t already know” applies.

However, if they’re going to find me people with similar interests that I don’t know, and then point me to things in those collections that I don’t already have, that would interest me a great deal.

Friendfeed or Socialthing or what

bobreb — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:23:30 GMT

Friendfeed:

The good part here is that it's clear they understand we'll all be streaming our behaviors via many different online services. Our online persona's will not be limited to one site. Therefore, for me anyway, I can imagine Friendfeed stealing a big chunk of the attention I currently give to Facebook. (To be clear, I'm not your average Facebook user.)

Socialthing:

The good part here is that it's clear they understand we'll all be streaming our behaviors via many different online services. Our online persona's will not be limited to one site. Therefore, for me anyway, I can imagine Socialthing stealing a big chunk of the attention I currently give to Facebook. (To be clear, I'm not your average Facebook user.)

What:

What will these guys do to create sustainable differentiation?

FWIW, I'm experimenting with Friendfeed. You can find me at http://friendfeed.com/bobreb

Online Community Roundtable

bobreb — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 23:52:52 GMT

http://redplasticmonkey.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/notes-from-the-online-community-roundtable-312-microsoft/

I have to agree with Bill, there were some smart people there, and the conversation was lively. We'll have to do it again sometime.

Some other links:

http://www.fullcirc.com/wp/2008/03/13/notes-from-the-seattle-online-community-meetup/

http://teresacentric.com/2008/03/a-vertitable-online-community-smorgasbord/

Bridging the gap between possibility and practicality

bobreb — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 18:27:00 GMT

I've been attracted recently to ideas that bridge the gap between possibility and short-term practicality. The game is managing the evolution of an innovation. It goes like this: first, what is this thing; second, how does it help me do what I already do; and third, what new things might I do with it. You can't jump from one to three. You have to go through the steps sequentially.

My favorite example goes like this: people at one time thought the best thing to do with a video recording device would be to take it to a live performance and situate it in the best seat in the house. The resulting recording would deliver to every viewer the perspective that could be had only by those few attending the live performance and seated in the most advantageous physical location. As a phase two conception, it makes perfect sense. You can almost hear the pundits: "now everyone gets the best seat in the house." We can only understand something using the conceptual tools we already possess. In this example, it wasn't immediately obvious that you could put the camera places where people couldn't sit at all, or that you could have multiple cameras, or film the event out of order, or in multiple locations, or add special effects, or any of the many things we associate with recorded content today. It's a classic phase two conception.

Today, in the online social space, we find the early majority figuring out phase one, and beginning the move to phase two. Consider that the phrase "social network", or maybe "social graph" is popularly understood as a collection of your friends and acquaintances. That's a very narrow perspective, but it is understandable when we consider the conceptual space the idea is entering. In time, on the other side of the hype curve, we'll grow out of it.

Anyway, one idea that I think bridges the gap is the social media release. It bridges the phase one to phase two gap for the PR and marketing professions. I've blogged about it before, because I think it's both practical and a great case study in the evolution of an idea. As it goes mainstream, rigor is added, and process evolves around it. The image here was taken from a deck created by Matt Herzberger and made available on Slideshare.

All hail the bridge builders...

Long distance meeting tools

bobreb — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 03:42:24 GMT

I do a lot -- a very lot -- of work with teams whose members are not co-located. That's why I'm aways on the look out for new tools that might improve communications. Because it's usually development projects, the stakes are high -- miscommunication is costly.

Sarah Perez, of ReadWriteWeb, reported on Twiddla.com. It's an online multi-user whiteboarding tool. I gave it a quick spin and liked it a lot. Check it out:

Only weirdness I discovered was that I couldn't seem to change the drawing colors. The real test will come tomorrow when I spring it on a vendor I'm working with during our con call.

The Twine Drama continues

bobreb — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 04:20:00 GMT

As anyone that knows me heard, I've become a believer that a social computing experience resting upon a semantic web style infrastructure (RDF, OWL, SPARQL, etc.) has the potential to deliver an Internet first: a full featured information worker social computing experience -- a "web workers" dream come true.

As I've said before, the best bet to date appears to be Twine. But then Twine is still in closed beta, and I can't get in. Actually, that's the point of this post. You see, Nova Spivack, one of the men (maybe the man, but that's rarely the reality of it) behind Twine has suggested a way to the top of the beta invite list. Blog about Twine and you could move to the top of the list. Well, well. Done that before, and doing it here again. The request seems a bit over the top, but what the hell.

What should a service of this type do? It should provide me with unrestricted intellectual airspace. I, along with other people with related inclinations (I have learned recently to be suspicious of an unrestricted focus on peer relationships or any type) would be able to explore the web of people and ideas with a precision and fidelity hyperlinks and search algorithm's can't touch. Bring on the unknown unknows, and the serendipitous discovery -- I have desires that can only be met by ties of the weak kind.

We do get at a taste of that with services like Del.icio.us. Social bookmarking gets us part of the way there. But the social bookmarking services seem to have stopped innovating. It's almost like they've hit some sort of barrier and they've been either unable or unwilling to pass. Could it be one of conception?

And the big social networking services are heading in another direction altogether. I recently attended the Graphing Social Patterns conference and it's as if the players there believe there's only one social network per person -- the one called friends on Facebook -- and that no other valuable social graph does or can exist. Of course I'm overstating the situation. The smart ones know full well that every person is a part of many quite disparate networks. No doubt it's the potential commercial value associated with your "friends" networks and the mega millions engaged there (oh yeah, and the ability to actually address that market), that has them rapt.

And good for them. I wish them all the best. I have a ton of fun with Facebook. I just see the landscape differently. I believe the Facebook/Myspace/Bebo/etc. style services are among the first settlements to appear in the frontier and will not be the last; to me they are more a general consumer introduction to social computing rather than an end game. By way of contrast let me point out that I know the feeds in my RSS reader represent, and by a very wide margin, my most professionally valuable social network.

I can imagine what should come next, but I can't find much heading in that direction.

And then there's Twine.

Quotes and explanations

bobreb — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:31:49 GMT

I've been quiet lately. Partly it's because I've so much work work to do, that it's impacted my free thinking time. On the other hand, I seem to have the opportunity to build some new and interesting things at work, so what's to really complain about?

I'll try to post some of my team's work regarding recognition/incentive systems in the next week or so. I'm hosting a Seattle Community Roundtable Wednesday night and I'll be presenting it anyway, so clearly it's not a secret. And it does remain highly debatable. I could use the feedback.

Here's something interesting I found:

Any new technology is an evolutionary and biological mutation opening doors of perception and new spheres of action to mankind.

Marshall McLuhan.

I can't tell you how much I buy that quote. I don't think it's fully appreciated. That might be a good thing.

I lifted the above quote from this slideshare presentation. There are a number of things worth reading -- worth seeing -- in it.

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Webware 100 Productivity Finalist

bobreb — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:21:31 GMT

Both of the services my team supports have made it to the Webware 100 voting stage. Now it's up to the voting public to pick winners. Results will be announced at the Web 2.0 Expo April 22nd through the 25th. Very cool. Caste your vote today.

Vote of OfficeLive Workspace here.

Vote for OfficeLive Small Business

Facebook will someday fade, will you?

bobreb — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 20:54:06 GMT

Conceptually, I started down this road years ago. The term myspace, to me, was always something owned by the MySpace organization and was certainly not "my space". Alas, connecting personal internet properties of the blog/site kind such that the user can participate in any number of social engagements, perhaps even without leaving home, so to speak, remained only an idea for me. It looks like Chris Messina is one of several acting upon it.

I watched his video, and have been reading some (okay, much) of the commentary/discussion around the subject.

What interests me most here is the focus, and some of the assumptions. As for focus, it appears the idea of "friends" as the central element defining the social graph, remains. That is limiting progress towards my personal goal of a broadly accessible learning/knowledge focused social network experience. Anyone spending any time developing their "web worker" skills will know that strong tie relationships of the social networking "friends" kind have only limited value.

As for assumptions, one stands out in particular, though perhaps only for me and principally because I want to hear it. It seems that while most everyone is still paying homage to Facebook, an increasing number of people are coming to believe that it is not the last word.

I don't think the time is far off now when the majority realize that the only reasonable way of creating and maintaining an online presence, or persona, or multiple personas, will be on properties you own and control to the greatest extent possible. If all you do is rent space from MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, or any of them, you're limiting yourself.

Why rent when you can buy? You can still visit the renters.

Free tools for students, I'm impressed with DreamSpark

bobreb — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 16:06:26 GMT

http://channel8.msdn.com/Posts/2047/

A little inspiration I happened upon

bobreb — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 20:08:21 GMT

Here are a few diagnostic questions. When you answer “yes” to any of these, remind yourself what your larger goals are to get out of the trenches, and shift from comparing yourself to your direct peers and compare yourself on a larger stage instead.

Is this work BIG, or is it a task? (Email is a task)?
Is this work MEANINGFUL, or is it time consuming?
Is this work POWERFUL, or is it what we’ve always done?
Am I GROWING, or am I at the top?
Am I STRIVING, or am I coasting?
Am I REACHING for more, or am I checking off a box?

Squint at the capitalized words and I think they might be a good measuring stick.

From a guy named Chris Brogan and post called Trenches and Ponds.

SMR -- Social Media Release

bobreb — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 18:48:06 GMT

Interesting. Some adjustments are finally surfacing. My exposure to PR professionals to date has suggested to me that they were taking an evolutionary approach to understanding and reacting to the online social experience. That's understandable, but not necessarily the most accurate perspective.

Of course, I'm not referring to the people you'll come across in places like this or this. Those places make it look like there's broad industry experience and understanding of PR and marketing in the new world. I believe that would be your (and my own) confirmation bias at work.

This blog, however, is looking like one that is building some real bridges between new think and old think.

Saying things like this is likely to get traditional PR folks listening to you:

I use them in conjunction with traditional releases and they work extremely well. Personally, I prefer using a blog platform to create and distribute them.

A little compromise goes a long way.