scooblog by josh ledgard : OCS2006

Live at OCS - A Tour of Innovation

jledgard — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 01:03:04 GMT

Topic: On the Horizon: A Tour of Innovation

Description: What are the most significant trends in social software as we look ahead 24 months?
Introductory comments: Danyel Fisher, Microsoft Research Community Technologies Group & Ross Mayfield, Socialtext

Last year this session talked about the emergence of mash-up applications and how your app, without an API, would be meaningless.

3:11: Opening remarks. Now is time to start thinking forward.

3:12: Ross Mayfield, Socialtext

3:14: Now: Wysiwyg in wikis is here now. Not really new, but makes the collaboration more accessible. Also building API's into all the wiki's. But it really needs to get to the point where copy/paste from word works.

3:15: Bar-Camp and other "unconferences" are huge.

3:16: Social software features built into everything else on the web. Need to be there or else your site will lose traffic as users start to expect it. Then "kingdom of loathing".

3:17: Screen sharing, video and voice is now the norm.

3:18: Identity and "single sign on" is still an issue. "drives me batty" - Don't see this problem going away any time soon. I wonder if Google will earn enough trust to solve this problem personally.

3:19: Animal Crossing DS - real time with map of world. Kids know when the virtual stores around the world open.

3:20: Interesting link: http://gmpg.org/xfn/ for the uber geeky.

3:21: Call to action participate in more and more online communities.

3:23: Interesting Link: http://beta.plazes.com/ Real time track where I am with software on my laptop. Share this with friends. I think this needs to be migrated to mobile phones not laptops.

3:26: More web based utilities coming like the Amazon scaled storage. Just outsource my business needs until I have high enough demand to set up my server. Today you can upload a virtual server for 10 cents an hour and use their storage back end. The really cool thing is that you can scale out instantly. Then the servers turn on instantly. Pay for what you need. Jungledisk: will let you save storage to amazon world. Creates a shared drive similar to foldershare, but with online storage built in.

3:28: More collaborative working coming. Screen sharing is more fun than editor sharing.

3:33: What about ajax/chat type web based collaborative real time editing?

3:34: Danyel Fisher is up now.

3:35: Intro to the MSR Communities technologies group.

3:36: Mentioning the research about online interaction. "Sooner or later everything will have a conversation attatched to it".

3:37: "Greased Paths" making it easier for folks to have targetted interaction. The thing to think about is "have you greased the paths for your users in a way that is useful for them"

3:40: Interop VS Money:Is it bad to take people away from your site if you are interoping well?

3:41: Now into netscan... too bad they don't bring in forums... Danyel should get on that. :-)

3:49: http://www.msslam.com/ - Cool mobile stuff.

3:51: Why hasn't RSS caught on? A. People need to be able to use it without knowing. I would say it has caught on. Most users don't know they need it though.

3:54: What's on the horizon for MS products? A. Wide varity of things. :-)

Time for Wine and Cheese. A better, more readable recap of everything coming in the weeks to come.

Let me know if everyone liked this live blogging thing.

Live at OCS - Online to Offline Interactions

jledgard — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 00:00:35 GMT

Again, this will be more notes that will grow and change over time rather than time based since it's not a presentation.

2:00: Second breakout session. What are effective ways to mobilize your online community offline?

ACLU Problem - People will click easily, but congressmen don't care about e-mail and online petitions anymore since they are so easy.
Problem: Geographically diverse set of participants.
What sort of things work? (From Java.Net users)

If people are going to be somewhere anyway for a big gathering. Java.Net community leaders meeting at JavaOne conference. Works really well to get them to fly in early.
Tasks that is something people can rally around. Like coding X that's needed. Vote on top project and then start coding it.
Get to know your userbase in a deeper way.

Spontaneous interactions happen with thriving communities, but are there ways to design and optimize for enabling these interactions.

Share calendars and meeting times. There is a missing link between who actually does the interaction. How successful are the tools that you use to mobilize people.

"Send a photo of" type of requests worked good as light touch way to connect people offline or get offline interactions...
How can you show people the results of thier offline interactions? How many people did your invite mobilize? Flickr groups? Which friends responded. Sort of like evite, but for activism reporting.
"turn off" factor that leads people to unsubscribe... if the events don't fit them.
What about offline groups that need online connection? Is that easier?

Social pressure of not wanting to join another group.
Tech adoption process is hard if people aren't engaged. Easier to get people who are web 2.0 orientated.
Netsquared conference - Help non-profits get more web 2.0 savvy - Story about people who couldn't make it to the offline event and they set up an online conference to parallel the offline event.

Online event was time limited. It was chat room that was live just like a back-channel, but separate. The offline stuff was streamed and presenters had to do a chat session online after their talks.
"mixed mode" event.
Pushback from offline folks that if questions came from online community it would cut out time from the folks that travelled to the event.

Netflix world - Why would you go offline for a movie, but the business is dependant on offline connections through mail.
Do people want to get lost in an online world? Some people are more comfortable online and don't want to interact offline... or vica-versa.
Book: Great Good Places

Places you go when you aren't home or at work and get to play out difference personas.
"Internet is the best place to go to find "nutcases" like yourself that you just can't find offline in your friend group. "

Pre-conference organization for the real conference works really well to get people excited and gives people the chance to participate early.
Create virtual delegates for conferences for people to speak who can't be there.
Run sessions through Skype to funnel information out.
Is the character of the audience really ready to meet offline? Is there critical mass enough?

End of session. New post coming for the final presentations.

Live at OCS - Mobile Communities Breakout Session

jledgard — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 21:39:41 GMT

This is the first of two breakout sessions I'm going to attend. I'm skipping out on the "performance metrics" session since I'm tired of the metrics question. From a conversation last night. "Your performance metrics (for collaboration) depend on the business goals of each project."... and that about sums it up. What are your higher level business goals? Those are also the goals you have around forming a community. If you can't find a match.. maybe you have the wrong business goals or shouldn't have a community.

1:36:Lunch is over. Beef tenderloin and baked apples. Very tasty.

Here are some notes from the breakout session I attended. It felt like such a new space that there were more questions raised than answers.

Opportunity - Point of purchase information from consumer reports.
Problem - Restriction in joining mobile community like dodgeball if you don't know who your friends are on the service. Social pressure not to join if you don't know you'll be welcomed.
Observation - No one replies to e-mails anymore, but will read and reply instantly to SMS messages. I noticed this with my baseball team this summer. The question was asked when SMS will "tip" and have the same spam problems as e-mail.
Most sites doing 1 way publish to SMS and some working on getting the 2-way read and publish to blogs thorough pictures.
Wonder why there aren't more voice applications in th mobile space. Call up and leave a message at a location and listen to other people's messages? Why isn't Vm trading more popular than texting?
Site: http://www.aula.cc/
Observation: Dodgeball will take over match.com as the biggest dating site.
Question: How much longer can carriers extort folks for SMS messages?
Text messages fit in well in the current users attention span. Even the character limit is almost a feature. You know they will be short and important.
Question: Is there really anything different for mobile communities other than just an extension of online?
Study referenced that said Americans don't adopt SMS because of the lack of public transportation. Most of us use phones while driving and in Europe they see the phones while waiting in public places. Makes culture for SMS bigger.
Nike story: They sent people from poster to poster in NY to get a prize and each poster had a new message to text in to get the next clue texted back to you.
Surprising lack of movement on micropayments.
Chinese depth of use information from lithium communities… looking at what’s most important to have and enable in mobile environment. They use everything. Carry all the time not open like laptop. Get instant fix of information. How can you give users a quick fix of their communities?
Chinese deployments get huge hits from mobile XHTML page uses. More than non CH deployments of communities.
Book recommendation: "Communities Dominate Brands"

Study of a TV station in Finland that just let people text in messages that where shown and read on TV. People pay for this and to have them read outloud.

What about mixing IM presence with location for cell phones? Dodgeball, but in real time and hooked up to existing friends list.
How do I decide who gets all this information about me? Can I nominate best friends instead of just the people I chat with?

That's about it. It was as fast as I could type. As you can tell there were more questions than answers.

Live at OCS - Community Business Models

jledgard — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 19:47:56 GMT

9:50

Topic: Community Business Models
What new opportunities and experience influence current online community business models.
Introductory comments: Michael Sherrod, MyFamily.com & Michel Thouati, Lithium Technologies

9:52: Michael from MyFamily is talking. They promise no slides and low tech.

Brokerage: You build it as your marketplace.
Merchant: You built it as a place for users to trade and sell.
Vendor:
Affiliate
Utility: Provide serviecs for other community sites. Sort of like wetpaint, lithium, 43things, etc.
Subscription
Freemium
Feeder Site
Ad Supported
Sponsored
Hybrid

I think drawing this on the whiteboard should count as slides. :-)

9:57: Myfamily.com - when the bubble burst they focused on subscription model to maintain the sites. It was near death for the site. Myfamily.com had a 90% renewal rate yty.

10:00: Freemium - Redoing myfamily.com to make it all free and then upsell them to paid services. Ad supported free and then pay for collaborative tools, advanced photo uploading, etc.

10:01: Community feeder sites - Affiliates sign up with myfamily and provide gravitational mass through the 3rd party sites.

10:03: Collaborative text Editing for developers - This is off topic from the IRC channel, but check this out... http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/ ... http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/images/sessionbig.png Mac Only though. :-(

10:07: The presentation is a bit boring so the IRC folks are passing around links. I thought this example of a wiki-based FAQ system was cool. http://wiki.ittoolbox.com/index.php/FAQ:I_have_for...

I'd love to be able to turn the top FAQ from the MSDN forums into FAQ entries like this.

10:11: Some pictures are up now... http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ocs2006/

10:15: "It's all about the meta-data" Data showed that tag navigation meant people navigated wider on sites than they had previously. This also meant for the business side that they had increased chances to show more contextual ads based on more specific content. Fun meta-data: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/sonoma/show/

10:20: 2 elements needed for any model. 1 = loyalty & 2 = Content.

10:22: Create that installed base model on loyal customers. Once you have the emotional connection it's hard to replace it. Like moving from compuserve to NNTP. :-)

10:23: "Bank on content generated from return users that grabs new people constantly adding folks of broader ranging interests".

10:35: Holy Triangle: Critical mass around each community/micro-community; Embedded Community into content & support pages ; People Pages (old fasioned community, social networks) ;

10:40: Self help = search, asking the question, browsing via tags or links or organizations.

10:47: Lots of talk about amazon turning on wiki's and forums on popular products, but scaling them back on products that don't have enough interest. This way they push the critical mass around. However even the popular item discussions aren't that healthy. They need tagging forum content so they can add that content on more of their related pages.

Break Time - Then breakout sessions.

Live at OCS - Demo Time

jledgard — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 18:47:06 GMT

Good morning to all three of you interested in refreshing my blog regularly today! The day has started with some demos.

8:30: Forum One - Speak Out - Is a unique chatting service they offer to their clients. You can schedule a chat and questions can come in and be approved in advance. Then the transcripts are automatically generated with Q/A style results published right away to the Internet. I like the feature that allows you to solicited questions ahead of time for people that may not be able to make the live chat.

8:45: WetPaint - WYSIWYG wiki technology that can be integrated web sites. The demo site is www.wikifido.com. Cool demo site with dogs, but it doesn't work with IE7 yet. It thinks that IE7 is less than IE 6. "we recommend Internet Explorer 6.0 or FireFox 1.0.7 and higher for PCs". Update - I'm told IE7 support is days away. You can create free demos on wetpaint.com. Then they also give style options. Thier intro expereince when you create a new site is cool because they automatically play a flash demo on "the first edit".

The service is free and add funded. They recently took on a pay contract with ABC to do a lost wiki. (http://lostwiki.abc.com )

8:58: www.ittoolbox.com - Is an online community site for IT Pros. They bill themselves as a media company that's been profitable on their own for years. The content you see is very targeted based on your interaction and the profile information that you fill out. For example: you automatically get a stream of posts from people who's posts you contributed in before. That's a neat idea.

Good talk on looking at your site for social networking feature opportunities that make sense for your business. They are also looking at a credibility point system for thier users that will automatically give them more power on the site.

9:05: http://www.yuku.com/ - "Message Boards 2.0". Looks like a modern version of ezboard that allows anyone to easily create an online community and set of message boards. Users can get e-mail, RSS, and SMS messaging. They also reskinned mediawiki to view their specs. They publish their specs online via wikis. They don't give users access to the specs. Specs are mostly powerpoint pictures. They do, however, have a good voting page where users can see features recently completed, in development, and suggested features that they can vote on.

9:10: http://www.changeeverything.ca/ - "Welcome to ChangeEverything.ca, the site for people in Vancouver, Victoria and the Lower Mainland who want to change themselves, their communities or their world." The site is built on the 43things toolset. You know they are Web 2.0 because "ChangeEverything.ca is in permanent beta". They started a "how to" section that has targeted posts like these on saving money: http://www.changeeverything.ca/learn_how_to_save_money

It's 43things, but done for a local community to keep the community more geographically specific.

9:15: Good question about when to do your own new site or leverage stuff like myspace. The answer was around the discreteness of your community. In thier case they felt the need for a local community like this rather than simply being part of a larger community.

9:26: http://www.liveworld.com/ - Community software provider. Their trying to do solutions that integrate the right community flavor for the site they work with. The example they are showing off is http://community.tvguide.com/index.jspa.

9:30: What's next for liveworld? - Doing a lot of video and also doing more to allow people to participate with mobile components. They also specialize in moderation tools that let people moderate 600 posts/hour. They sell these tools along with their software for sites to give to their moderators. No Joe, you can't up and quit. :-)

9:35: Breaking news that google may pay over 1billion for youtube. This is going to be a big topic of conversation today. There was already a lot of conversation about youtube business models.

9:36: http://www.lithium.com/ - Another community software/services provider. Very proud of their plays into gaming since they run the US playstation forums and nintendo forums.

They also brag about their CRM/community integration for community support. This way your company can link customers that call to posts they've made in their communities. They also have forum software that lets users escalate questions to the companies official support staff for a fee.

9:38: http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation is their (Lithium) playstation site with the latest version of their software.

9:40: ROI study back from one customer that claimed they saved 40million in support costs. But the impact on sales the community had was even bigger than the cost savings.

End of demo time - new post time.

Live at OCS - Internationalization of Online Communities

jledgard — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 02:12:01 GMT

4:00: Before this session starts... I had a good conversation with someone from Java.Net. Their team is currently helping teams at Sun push their projects into the open on Java.Net. Sound familiar? There were a lot of similarities and we agreed on some of the following keys to success.

Teams willing to communicate publicly (schedules, plans, specs, roadmap's, etc) will be much more successful in wooing contributors than teams that just push source code over the wall.
Some of the more successful teams killed off their internal support aliases and told everyone to do their Q/A in the public. This way they got more knowledge in the hands of people that may be capable of contributing source.
It was important that the managers (front line) and the developers be bought in on the change to go public. The interesting difference here is that Sun, top down, is being pushed to go more open. Look at the recent comments by Mr Swartz. If you don't believe in openness... you won't attract a thriving community.

More to come later on this conversation I hope.

4:09: The INTL talk started.

Topic: Internationalization of Online Communities
Description: What should we know about the explosive growth of online communities in the largest markets in the world – India and China?
Introductory comments: Satya Prabhakar / Sulekha.net & Xiaofeng Jin / Linkool.biz

4:12: Sulekha is a mix of Yellow Pages, Classifieds, Social Networking, Blogs, and Media.

4:15: "Small to medium business advertising is huge. " - Millions of small businesses. Only a small % of ad spending is online today for most of those businesses. Expect online ad revenue to continue to grow big time in India.

4:16: Only 1.5 million broadband connections in India, but growing at 30% a quarter.

4:17: Because of the lack of BB the best pages are still kept simple and low bandwidth.

4:20: "The most valuable commodity today is time and human attention." How do you keep human attention... this is the big question. Their bet is the social media. 50-1 readers to contributor ratio. Problem is that most of the content isn't worth the time for those 50 people.

4:22: Want to move those 50 to be contributors with active connections to others on the site. Make the connections personal so they have to come back to keep interacting.

4:23: One way to attract big writers is the opportunity to be heard. They publish a hard copy book of the best entries each year to pull in more people.

4:26: Big problem on how to attract talent. Thinks that Social Networking is the key to finding passive job seekers.

4:27: Also an interesting comment on building services for advertisers to connect with feedback systems and surveys to potential target customers so the ads are more interactive to the benefit of the company.

4:30: Switch over to China...

4:31: Wow - 50 million active community members (online) in China. Out of 123 million Internet users. This ratio seemed really high. Forums & BBS are the most popular application.

4:32: 60% of the members are 18-24. Under 18 is another 16%. Only 30% over 30. Completely new generation online.

4:33: Chinese want anonymous access and that's some of the most popular.

4:37 :Active number is high because the only way to get non-government news is though the rumor mill. It's sort of amusing that the government is creating this need, but then also wants to run the infrastructure.

4:40: When we first opened the MSDN forums the heaviest set of users were from China. We don't know what they were using them for, but they were very active in the first week until we told them we'd build them a Chinese version later. At least they proved that we supported the character set. :-)

4:46: Missing pieces in China:

eyeball economy results in low quality... still looking for raw hits.
Alliance among the communities. There are no bridges between the islands and there are copyright issues.
There is a need for a trust system...

Is this really a needed in China list? All of these feel like missing pieces to the US online economy or trade.

4:54: Do college students have broadband? Yes, but they still have to pay.

4:55: Who advertises online in China today? Big brands (Ebay, car companies, Samsung, etc). Sort of like India waiting for the SMB revolution in advertising.

5:00: What about Micropayment systems? Not yet at the point of doing phone related commerce outside of ringtones and text messages. However the system is very liquid in cash and it's getting very easy to get cash or a loan.

5:01: Time for Wine and Cheese. :-)

Live Blogging the OCS - Opening Remarks and Multimedia Communities

jledgard — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 23:22:56 GMT

Well, we're back from lunch. The food alone is a great reason to come to Sonoma. The conference organizers take advantage of that. I'll probably gain a few lbs here over the couple of days. We just had some Chocolate Bread Pudding that was awesome. (The conference takes place in a culinary school.)

Update: Refresh for new content. I'll post at the end when I've moved onto a new post.

1:20: Opening Remarks by Jim Cashel (Forum One) & Joe Cothrel (Lithium Technologies)

1:21: Everyone is still gathering around searching for power outlets...

1:38: "Freemium" - New word I hadn't heard before. What's the balance between a free and paid experience? In my head is what does this mean for Microsoft developer collaboration? How much do we give away and let the community play with and what role do our paid partners (and us) play in that free ecosystem. What does "Freemium" mean for web based developer support?

1:45: It's a large room and introductions continue. There are some folks here from the e-bay developer network that should be interesting to talk to.

1:50: There are a lot more people here trying to make money hosting/building community solutions for folks.

1:51: How do you deliver value to advertisers through your community and social network? How do you transition the members to paying customers?

1:52: Everyone is reminded that we sent the bio's around already and that your introduction doesn't need to be your life story. That takes some pressure off when this comes around to me.

1:55: Hi, I'm josh ledgard. I work for Microsoft on developer technologies. Specifically my team works on tools and services that enable developers to collaborate with each other through our products. We've recently been working on getting collaborative development projects off the ground with our communities through the release of Power Toys... Damn, I forgot the line "my dogs teach children to read".

2:01: I'm told that pictures from the event are going to be posted here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ocs06/ . Pictures from last year are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ocs05/

2:10: Intros still going. I'm trying to start an IRC channel in the background. A few start-ups here. A lot of pitching being done in the intros.

2:15: Intros continue. Good sign... there are a bunch of people this year with Windows Mobile devices. Specifically I've seen the new Treos & the MotoQ device.

2:24: Intros are over. I've got one person in my IRC channel with me.

2:30: Just announced a second :-) wine tasting in a tasting room after the event today. There is one at the end of the day today in the conference hall and another @7.

2:33: Thankfully they just announce the blogging policy... we're allowed. :-)

2:35: New presentors talking about Multi-Media stuff.

Topic: Multimedia Communities
Description: Multimedia communities such as YouTube.com have exploded onto the scene. We’ll discuss the impact and promise of these communities, with a look at two new offerings.
Introductory comments: Bill Schreiner / AOL & Brian Gruber / Fora TV

2:40: Youtube! Again, slides with pictures and no words. Very trendy. It's slideware 2.0!

2:41: Device ubiquity as reason for the take-off. Not sure I buy that. PC/Mac/Linux platform agnostic, but I can't take my Youtube videos easily on my ipod. But there is something to be said about the easy of publishing video online just like Blogging. However it's not as easy as Blogging just yet.

2:45: Bill just said he had published the video from the intros online already to show how easy it was to publish video.

2:48: Are there really 6k videos of people lighting farts on fire on Youtube... Nope... 427 as far as I can tell.

2:52: Marc Cuban quote: "only a moron would buy youtube.. they are breaking the law... the only reason they haven't been sued yet is that there is no big money to sue."

2:54: Story about his son. Dating a girl and frequently bring laptop down with girlfriend attending dinner virtually with video. Common for them to be video present while doing homework. Apperently it's really popular for kids who can't drive to each other yet.

2:58: Commentary about moderation of the videos. How do they moderate stuff? Mostly sounds like they wait for users to click the abuse buttons.

3:02: Making it easier to product videos... Jumpcut, just bought by Yahoo.

3:04: Statement that video presense will be bigger even than asynch video posting. But also big on cell phone video blogging.

3:05: Onto Brian from foraTV...

3:06: Brian was the head of marketting for Cspan. ForaTV does online video of public hearings and cspan style content. Wanted more local events captured and distributed to the people.

3:09: http://www.fora.tv/ Unmediated, on-demand, and user generated. "ForaTv expands the public forum for discussion of important world issues to multiple, simultaneous fora in a digital venue. Public spoken words from engaging, authoritative sources delivered via high quality digital video spark the interaction. The symbol of ForaTv is the inside shadow of the Roman arch which stood at the entrance to the ancient Forum."

3:15: They also do synced transcriptions for featured video events. Clicking on a word in the transcript starts the video at that point. Very much like the onenote feature that lets you record a meeting and hear the adio next to each note you took in sync.

3:18: I think they are letting the speakers go on a bit long this year. The goal was 10min talk, 20 discussion. There's a lot of people here, but the Fora session sounds more like an ad. Probably just presentor style.

3:20: The "Why not just hand out $200 cameras and let people post the content to youtube? They want to add value in post production and features that YouTube doesn't have. I have to wonder if community post production online wouldn't be better than what he showed today. Today they just let community create the navigation and additional links.

3:30: Wrapped up the talk with some discussion about user generated tagging. The missing link is tagging that extends inside longer videos to let people create custom timelines.

Breaktime.. next session = new entry.

Live Blogging - OCS 2006: Online Communities for Social Good

jledgard — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 19:21:00 GMT

9:30-10:30 Key Trends in Online Collaboration for Social Good
Presenters: Chris Wolz, Forum One & Perla Ni, GreatNonprofits

Update: Refresh for the latest information.

9:10: Introductions have started. Chris is "setting the stage". Scarce resources push non-profits harder than corporations into online collaboration because they need to harness the power of the communities.

This goes back to a conversation last night I had with someone about the difference between me asking people to do collaborative development with Microsoft and them asking cancer survivors to publish information about clinical trials they were part of to a non-profit web site.

9:15: Introductions... People I should meet today: Folks from Java.net & collabnet are here. :-)

9:20: No words on slides. :-)

9:22: Quote from cluetrain "You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and ... Or you can join the conversation"

9:25: Blogging & Mobile devices solve "Last mile" problem for humanitarian groups and getting information from disasters. " Not much use of social networking for public good just yet. " - How will this change with the myspace generation?

9:26: Surprising... "I see all kinds of applications to share video clips that drive people to help for social good". Youtube = cheap ads and a way to get the word out for non-profits. Scoble would be happy. :-) Is this more powerful for people than text stories?

9:30: www.gdacs.org - online tools that alert people to disasters around the world. Hooked up to earthquake sensors and send out SMS & e-mails to track the stuff. Helps first responders gather around events. They also use Google earth. Show real time hurricane tracking that people can add data and reports to. Talk about where they send the teams from to which disasters. A cool use of technolofy for sure.

9:35: Another Google earth tool. People working for wildlife (Jane goodall I think he said) foundation. Ties blog posts into Google earth. Also embedding blog posts & photos into the google earth map. Lays out the story on the map. I wonder how discoverable this information is? There is no public commenting, but if they did they could open up their field work to anyone around the world. I think for a second that I'd love to geotag my blog like this.... but then I realize it would look really boring. "Look, another post from Sammamish WA".

I wish this were web accessible through google maps, but you need the app and the layer to see it.

9:40: Google liked this so they are building this into the app itself.

9:41: Non profit folks still believe that this tech is still out of thier reach when, in reality, the cost is consistantly being driven down.

9:42: Do non-profits risk opening themselves up to the flame wars? Attendee comment that the same rules apply. Need to force user registration and add penalties for bad behavior.

9:45: Perli takes over the slides. She is also the founder of http://www.ssireview.org/ in addition to greatnonprofits.org. Statement: most non-profit web sites have no draw to pull people back into the site. They only list basic information, donation information, and sign-up information. They don't tell a story that compels people and use the same lame marketing pictures that corporations use. (my words, but her sentiment. )

9:50: www.Homelessnation.org Group is making videos of homeless people to tell the story of the people that need help. Not trying to tell you what to think, but rather jump to conclusions based on the content they are producing. Lots of videos & podcasts that tell the story. Dozen+ videos posted per day.

9:51: Is this really successful? Based on site traffic compared to other similar orgs... yes.

9:52: www.Click.TV : Embed user opinions that stream with the video you are watching. Reminds me of MST3k for users to generate their own tracks and commentary. Cool idea. Shows wonkett talking over Bush on one of his latest speeches. "Take any video and let your users go crazy."

9:55: www.sexetc.org Videos on sex ed for adults and teenagers. Sort of the opposite of the movement to "Protect teen girls" I saw driving down here in Oregon. :-) I wish I had a picture of their huge billboards on the freeway. Gretchen and I had to wonder for hours "Protect teen girls from what"?

10:00: Maybe just a powerful statement that gets users engaged. Go to www.remembersegregation.org.

10:03: Build an "experiential web" to motivate users. Great graph of MTV versus Myspace traffic... guess who is winning the "daily reach" in web traffic... by a lot.

10:05: Video seems big this year at the OCS... especially user generated videos for your cause.

10:08: General discussion & commentary about not just putting stuff on your site, but using youtube & google & aol videos to generate buzz on the cheap.

10:10: http://www.ronaldmchummer.com/ Against the 42 million toy hummers that McDonalds gave away with happy meals. They have a "create your own sign" for users to interact with. Use the "Sign-o-matic". Some good satire here: http://www.ronaldmchummer.com/vote.php. Over 132k user generated signs! 6k folks on their e-mail list. Awareness is the ROI measure. Measure success by gallop polls over time. Look at cost per awareness tick. Is there a real connection between people doing this and actually taking action? I'm willing to bet that a lot of those 132k sign makers ate at McDonalds afterwards. Is that OK?

10:18: Problem: Shards of Glass ad from superbowl. Cost a lot of money and upset tobacco companies (cost more money) is that worth it? hard to measure ROI from this sort of ad. What it may have needed was some call to action in the real world that may have made the message go further. How do you tie the on and offline. Last night we talked about the yellowball thing as a great mix of on and offline actions to motivate people. Can't just have online anymore.

10:23: Break time. Update: Side conversation about "utilities" like youtube and how they will figure out to monitize rather than just letting people "abuse thier bandwidth". What will change for these groups when youtube figures that out? What if a contextual ad for Mcdonalds ran before an anti-Mcdonalds ad hosted on youtube for the ronaldmchummer site?

11:00: New Presenters...

Case Studies: Effective Online Collaboration for Social Good
Social Edge / Skoll Foundation / http://www.socialedge.org
Victor d’Allant, Executive Director, Social Edge

11:03: Forums got too complex. Had to have moderators simplify the introductions to the forums. Keep them under 500 words. Non registered members can't post.

11:05: They are also blogging to help social entrepreneurs get funding. Make the information useful and public is sort of the theme here. The blogs also force people to come back to the site. Keeping attention is clearly a theme of the morning presentations here.

11:09: The lone "Microsoft Guy" (me) receives his second dig. First for windows media player not working (ended up being bandwidth) and now for the presenters slides from Keynote not transferring to PowerPoint well.

11:11: The world bank closed comments because they were depressed they didn't get comments. Have to be patient to build your audience is the lesson here. It's about the content or the message.

11:12: Why don't they have wiki or podcast? The answer is "what would they do with it?" They don't know what content makes sense for the medium.

11:14: Tags became a requirement to user generated content navigation.

11:19: Why not open it up for user created blogs on Social Edge? Down the road that will happen, but they need critical mass first. At the moment maybe there are not enough of their target audience there.

11:21: New Presenter... Marty Kearns, Executive Director, Green Media Toolshed

Media Volunteer / www.mediavolunteer.org

11:23: "How do we use groups online to actually create change?"

11:26: Three different types of networks. 1. Scale Free (think six degrees of kevin bacon) 2. Modular (people are in clusters loosely connected) 3. Hierarchical - top down organization of a network. The question is how to leverage these strong social ties in any of these networks? There is a need for a rich complications list. 50 million people signed up for do-not-call list in a short time with no leader. This answered a need and it was strong enough to get people to do something.

11:28: Groups need common stories to rally around. Spiderman on the bases in baseball. Threat to the game... 80k people respond on espn.com. 48 hours later baseball pulled back the ad.

11:30: Chevy create a commercial site... most people made anti-Chevy/SUV ads. Chevy tried to take down the negative ads but... Check out these Youtube vids. Tahoe sales down 46% the next quarter. (Timed with gas prices rising though.) Marty also linked to the McD Hummer site again and yet another site of people taking pictures of themselves flipping off hummers. (I think he hates SUVS a bit. ) <commentary> Sorry Marty. I drove down from Seattle in my Nissan Pathfinder with my wife and two Bernese Mountain Dogs... and it was a lot of fun that wouldn't have been had in a tiny hybrid vehicle (dogs = 110lbs each). My SUV also allows us to bring back wine without shipping it. I think there are probably better social causes.</commentary>

11:45: Another offline connection. People are 40% more likely to do something as a result of an offline interaction. Is there a way to make online as good or is offline interactions with your community the best way?

11:47: Aren't these online interactions (Chevy add) too hard for common users to get around? Doesn't it take a special person to do those mash-ups? Need a balance of "slick" vs "plain text". I personally think you need to design features at extremes. One for the readers and everyday folks and the other end of features for these "advanced" users that catalyze the readers.

11:54: Conversation about not using money to motivate people. People want to be motivated by a cause or a shared group rather than money. (At least small scale money like Mechanical Turk.)

That wraps up the morning session. I'll create new posts for the afternoon talks. I'm off to lunch. Enjoy!

Live Blogging Begins from the Online Community Summit

jledgard — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 18:40:36 GMT

It's that time of year again and I'm stuck in Somona CA attending the 2006 Online Community Summit. It's a small event with an invite list that's a mix of big tech business (Sun, Microsoft, etc), non-profit groups (Gates Foundation, Omydiar network, etc), and more consumer driven companies (AOL, Consumer Reports, etc). There are always fascinating conversations and I'll try and keep tabs on everything here.

The first session, this morning, is actually a pre-conference gathering on "Online collaboration for social Good". For now.... I'm going to eat breakfast.

Update: I'll be posting each new session and the notes as a new blog entry and update it as the session goes on.

8:45: Less Mac's than last year, but more firefox.