Continuing what has been a stellar year in Miami in terms of online conferences, the The Word of Mouth Marketing University came to town. To welcome some our friends from out of town who came to speak at the event, including Rohit Bhargava, Joseph Jaffe, JC Hutchins and Jason Anello, we organized a blogger dinner last night:

Brian Breslin of infinimedia

Joseph Jaffe of Crayon

Jay Berkowitz of Ten Goden Rules

By the way, Josh Hallett snapped some great photos at WOMMU, some of which appear on WOMMU's good live blog. Have a look!

10 May 2008 in Events & Conferences | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

On Wednesday, May 2nd, we celebrated the two-year anniversary of RefreshMiami! When a few of us first met at a Starbuck's in South Beach on May 5th, 2006 (Brian Breslin, Chris and Rebecca Saylor, Robert Murray and I), little did we know how significantly the RefreshMiami community would impact our lives. As Brian writes on the RefreshMiami blog:

"So its been 2 years. Wow. In the last 2 years I have either met or interacted with hundreds of great people in the south florida tech community. Lots of people have gotten jobs, made friends, and had a great time. So with that in mind, I think its time we celebrate."

Celebrate we did! Here are some photos. Michael Tangeman compares RefreshMiami to the First Tuesdays and such of the early dot.com days (see also comments on his post):

"It is so refreshingly unlike the dot.com days here in Miami. No suits, no VCs just flown in from the Valley, no investment bankers looking to take somebody public, no lawyers handing out cards and wanting to get in on the deals. The talk is about technology and apps and projects and what people are up to, not about shares and options and exit strategies."

If you're new to Miami and looking to meet and connect with other web entrepreneurs, developers and designers in South Florida, here's how to participate:

1) join the 220 member strong RefreshMiami Google Group for discussion on local tech issues, job postings and more;

2) join our group on Facebook;

3) if you're on LinkedIn, we just started a group there. Here's the link to join;

4) Subscribe to the RefreshMiami blog;

5) Come to our next meetup! Our next event is on May 28th in Coconut Grove ... see you there!

08 May 2008 in Events & Conferences | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Blogging about not blogging ...

So I haven't blogged in a while ... or rather I've been on Twitter alot.  As it turns out, to rephrase Hugh MacLeod, "Blogging Tweeting is a great way to make things happen indirectlydirectly."

David Berkowitz blogged how Twitter makes blogging better ... and in one way worse:

"One prominent blogger, who I won't call out here, includes a daily summary of his Twitter posts on his blog. Very few of those posts are worth syndicating. They only make sense if you follow him. I find myself reading his blog less now because of it."

I'm not the "prominent" blogger in question ;)  but as those of you reading the feed know, I'm equality guilty of reposting daily tweets here. The postings were archived and did not show up on the front page of this blog, but were regularly shipped out on the feed. This served a few purposes, including:

• Using the blog as a journaling and archiving system so that years from now I could look back and find what I was doing on any particular day, through the archived daily tweets here. Twitter has no archiving mechanism and it's currently very difficult to find your tweets from any single day: you have to scroll back in your twitterstream to do so.


• Posting daily tweets to my blog helped keep this blog going at a time when I've been particularly busy and haven't found the time to blog. The last three months have been very hectic, starting from before organizing  BarCampMiami, to leaving Scrapblog, to the various things I'm doing today and which I'll describe in upcoming posts.


• In addition to keeping the blog alive with content, the daily postings kept Google's spiders crawling and indexing this site for these past few months.

However, daily postings of tweets are difficult and/or boring to read and as David points out, they only make sense if you're following them on Twitter as they occur, in which case it's redundant to see them on Twitter, on the blog and aggregated with my other activity on socialthing! and FriendFeed.

I've been active elsewhere

Speaking of which, I've been active on many other services as well. I've added the social networks and sharing services I use most to my blog's navigation and sidebar and have thus reclaimed my blog as a central identity hub from which to find me online. These services are listed under my picture on the sidebar, and are reposted below. If you'd like to connect on any of these services, please leave a brief comment describing how we know each other or why you'd like to be connected (see note below*):

Updates on Twitter
Facebook profile
Flickr photos
LinkedIn profile
del.icio.us links
Upcoming events
Tumblr lifestream
Trips on Dopplr
Dugg items
Shared on Google Reader
LastFM radio
Jaiku lifestream
Skitch screenshots
Presentations on Slideshare
MyBlogLog communities
Friendfeed lifestream
Technorati profile
ClaimID identity
Netvibes universe

*Note: I accept most friend requests, although I connect mostly with people I already know or have met on Facebook, Dopplr, Tumblr, Jaiku Google Reader, NetVibes, ClaimID, LastFM, SlideShare, del.icio.us and Upcoming. I'm more open with connections on Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, MyBlogLog, FriendFeed and Flickr, although I reserve the right to not connect for whatever reason - please don't take it personally if I don't reciprocate a connection request.

Having said all that ...

... I'm blogging again ;)

07 May 2008 in Social Media & Networks | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Note:  this post on Social Object follows two previous ones, on The use of social objects as artefacts for identity management and on Social objects and the observer's paradox.

Sergeant Jalonen must have spent his childhood in a concrete sandbox

After I graduated from college, I completed mandatory military service in the Finnish Army. The year-long experience yielded intense experiences, lifelong friendships and lots of stories. One of them comes to mind: Jalonen and I were the first two soldiers from our company to be promoted to the rank of Sergeant. While I was promoted for technical skills in field operations, Jalonen was chosen because he was a strict disciplinarian, as tough as nails. So tough was he, that our company's soldiers concluded among themselves that he must have spent his childhood in a concrete sandbox!

Surroundings and situations affect your behavior

I never gave this story much thought except to joke about it with my friends.  Aside from the humor, however, the suggestion is that a childhood spent playing in concrete sandbox will toughen you up. Were they too quick to judge? What part of Jalonen's personality is attributable to a difficult childhood, and what part is attributable to the situation of being in the army?

In "Blink," Malcolm Gladwell describes how people tend to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors and disregard situational ones (see fundamental attribution error). For instance, it's tempting to stereotype a work colleague by saying "she's tough negotiator." However, that same person may be seen differently by friends and family, who might describe the same person by aspects not necessarily shown at work: "fun-loving, caring, generous, etc." University of Oslo professor Ole Hanseth further explains,

You do not go about doing your business in a total vacuum but rather under the influence of a wide range of surrounding factors. The act you are carrying out and all of these influencing factors should be considered together. This is exactly what the term actor network accomplishes. An actor network, then, is the act linked together with all of its influencing factors (which again are linked), producing a network.

Can your physical surroundings act as an influencing factor on your behavior? Social Scientist Roger Barker extensively researched see Architectural Psychology and found that, quite obviously, "In a store, people assume their roles as customers; in school and church, proper behavior somehow already resides coded in the place".

The object-centered environment

A store and a wedding are social objects (because they're conversation starters and topics for people). They are also object-centered environments. You step into a situation that structures your behavior. Both physical structures like stores, churches and public parks and situational events like weddings, soccer games and flashmobs condition the participants' behavior to perform a certain objective collectively with like-minded others.

Work is a common form of social object as well as an object-centered environment. When you go to work, you "plug-in" to an environment where you then socialize with your colleagues and customers, because you work at the same place. If you telecommute, you're still "plugged in" to the work you do with your colleagues. For instance, traders around the world plug in to financial markets. Such environments are rich social objects, both positively and negatively. Think about the number of varied work-related conversations you've had over the years!

Moulding your environment

In Roger Barker's research, the places were clearly identified with a set location and purpose, like a hardware store, a high school, a denominational church or a financial market, like the Chicago Board of Trade (see Karin Knorr-Cetina's paper on "The Market as an Object of Attachment"). But what about when you perform a different activity in a location generally meant for something else? For example, a wedding may be performed nearly anywhere. In Hawaii, Florida and the many other coastal areas, weddings may be carried out on a beach. In this case, the wedding supersedes the beach-going activity and conditions the guests' behavior. The wedding ritual is generally standard within cultures, and everyone knows what to expect: gathering, union, blessing, and celebration. Other examples include a birthday party in a playground, public manifestations in city streets, flashmobs in a store, doing work inside a Starbuck's, TupperWare dinners in someone's living room, street soccer games, rock concerts inside Second Life, classical concerts inside a church and a BarCamp in a concert hall. Each of these activities bring people together around a shared object or objective, they include their own rituals, and they are performed in a certain way. The objective of the gathering supersedes the purpose of the location and the environment is molded to suit the gathering's purpose. Chairs are placed, tables are setup, goalposts are erected in a field, and so on (see "Placemaking, the way in which all human beings transform the places they find themselves into the places where they live").

Bernard Hunt, Managing Director of HTA Architects Ltd, talks about life in physical spaces:

The physical form of a place is only one side [of the coin]. The way life is lived in it, and the common purpose around which that life revolves, is the other. And from cave dwellers to loft livers human beings have always used places to achieve their common purpose .... Somehow things were easier when that purpose was protection against the elements, defence from attack and control of disease. Successful placemaking seemed to happen when what was built was in direct response to imperatives like defence and topography and also when it was done unselfconsciously by different people at different times.

Barry Smith, Department of Philosophy at the University of Buffalo, writes:

A physical-behavioural unit such as a religious meeting, a tennis championship or a sea battle is an intricate complex of times, places, actions, and things. Its constituents can include both man-made elements (buildings, streets, cricket fields, books, pianos, libraries, the bridges and engine-rooms of battleships) and also natural features (hills, lakes, waves, particular climatic features, patterns of light and sound). These features and elements may be further restricted to a highly specific combination of, say, a particular room in a particular building at a particular time with particular persons and particular objects distributed in a particular pattern. In general, however, it is a form of generic dependence which prevails in the realm of physical-behavioural units; a judge must hear and decide the case, but it need not be this judge; the capital city must be located somewhere, but it need not be located in this spot (and in time of war it may be relocated).

So whether the situation is dictated by the purpose of the location or the purpose of the gathering, you behave according to the appropriate culturally established rules you've learned. You have learned how to behave in a store and how to behave in a wedding.

What role for space in online community building?

In a discussion thread in Jeremiah Owyang's Community Strategists group in Facebook, Jonathan Trenn mentions:

"I think this is an excellent question, but what concerns me is that we are not talking about communities here...we're talking community platforms. Important distinction."

This begs the question: to what extent is the platform an integral part of the community? To what extent does the platform foster or condition community behavior? Offline, a basketball court may be an integral part of a local community, just like a bingo hall, church, community center, grocery store, etc. If you take away such spaces, you would expect the community to change, because you would restrict the different areas and reasons for people to find each other and interact based on their shared interests. Does this same dynamic play online? To what degree does the architecture, features and tools of the community spaces you provide foster or restrict community interaction? (see Karin Knorr-Cetina's work on "The Market as an Object of Attachment" is worth further reading for the notions of "wants and lacks", "attachment" and "embeddedness" in community.)

The way the online space is designed has wide ranging implications for community interaction. "Social Design" decisions include whether to allow people to create a profile page, upload a picture, write a bio, tag their content, add bookmarks on content and people, comment on others' creations, add friends, determine privacy settings, invite friends, publish to other platforms, create and moderate groups, browse profiles and content, "pivot" from one page to another, have personalized URLs, receive email notifications of activity, vote and rate content, engage in phatic communication, receive a mini-feed of friends' activity after login, classify friends, participate in public forums, and so on. These design decisions affect space, because each of these actions and activities have a placeholder on the website.

Unlike a media like TV, magazines and other traditional media, social media is highly participatory and created through the active contribution and collaboration of people interacting with each other. Each design decision and how it is expressed on the website, leads to far-reaching implications for the community. And if these decisions are not made and certain features are not provided, the community will find a way to either adapt their space or to find other spaces where they may engage in conversation and activity.

Back to Jalonen's concrete sandbox

To tell you the truth, military service is not such a pleasant experience. There are thousands of constraints on space, time and privacy. Your identity is formed daily in front of others through your behavior and actions. Heroics are performed and tiny hacks are found to break the rigidity. We found a way to build friendships and community, regardless of the hardships. Overall, however, relatively few cherish the environment enough to want to make a career of it. It is not so much that Jalonen's youth was spent in a concrete sandbox, but that the army situation itself was a figurative concrete sandbox.

Are your service's users stuck in a concrete sandbox? How do your website's features foster or hinder identity formation, personal expression, profile discovery, and community interaction between people? Can the community appropriate and form the space to fit their needs? How might different cultures appropriate the same website?

This post highlights the importance of design decisions in online community building. Answering these and similar questions with an eye to community-building, and before the first trace is drawn, determines to a large extent the community-building and word-of-mouth potential of your web service.

12 March 2008 in Social Media & Networks | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

There's a packed house to watch Mark Cuban interview Michael Eisner: two billionaires in the room:

"This is a joint panel session for both SXSW Film and SXSW Interactive registrants, and will be a one-on-one interview with the founder of The Tornante Company and new media studio Vuguru, will feature the former head of Disney turned media mogul discussing his past, present and future endeavors, as he builds new companies and models for entertainment consumption. Interviewing Eisner will be former SXSW Interactive Festival keynote speaker Mark Cuban."

Michael wanted to see if the time had come for story-driven professional content to be monetized on the Internet. Can contnt owners make money from content? It's almost the time, but pretty soon this distribution channel will explode and it will be like what's happened before: one plus one will equal three. He has seen this numerous time in his career. For example, the addtion of movies and television was bigger than either one alone.

Michael would like to say he has a research group figuring out what to do; he doesn't. They're trying things out. For example, he talked to Chrysler, who put him in a Nitro and said "go to SXSW and look young"!

The people working in online video will be the Spielbergs of the future. Michael says he has a talent for finding such talent.

Why do we see so many changes in business models by content producers on the net? Partly it's because they know it will be huge and they want to get as big a slice of the pie as they can. This happened to Prom Queen, where distribution deals were renegotiated after it went big. There is no unique business model. That's why all you can do is to find the people who are doing interesting things and raised $5 from family and friends to make their video.

What type of approach should content producers take? For one thing, Michael says, "Stay away from media moguls like me". Those who get in a band with two other people, stay in a Day's Inn and work on a shoestring see media moguls as a last resort. Then there's the 12 year olds in the user generated arena, and you can sometimes see something pretty good. Michael is not interested. But the group that's very interesting are those youth studying film production in schools: they are educated, smart and professional.

Of what you see online, 99% is awful and 1% is good. The intention is not to do crap, but it's hard to know this before the fact. Lots of bad movies are made, but no one intended them to be bad.

Michael thinks that within 5 years, content on the Internet will be as important as content on television or cable. Already, content is a huge deal.

Will this be primary content or secondary content? It will be both. Nothing will be different, just the distribution channel. This will be media over broadband. Mark Cuban disagrees, though. People are rushing out to buy HDTV more than they are PCs. There are no standards. (Michael agrees that 90% of America that has TV on their PC are sitting in this room). Eisner says he doesn't dwell on the technology. If there's a story that makes you laugh or makes you cry, somebody else will want to see it and there will be a way to distribute it online. If you have the patience and you are interested in dealing with new people and new ideas, this is the place to be.

Question and answer

How will Eisner acquire a large volume of cool content? How will Michael upgrade the quality of content in volume? The point is to make a good show and you can have millions to perhaps a billion people watching it. If you know how to monetize this, then you have a business. Michael's skill is in identifying good content. But talent agencies are looking for talent as well. This is becoming a business. As long as the cost is low enough, the talent acquisition and management business will grow.

Every new technology predicts the demise of the movie theater. Artistic decisions need to be made if you're shooting something for HD ... there's way too much detail. Should content creators be making these decisions at the beginning of the process if they're filming for the net? Yes and no. What's hard to do is the emotion. If you have good emotional content with heart, it will work on any screen, including the big screen. So it's a matter of cost and budget, during the production process. One of the best things of producing on the cheap is that you can redo it, if it works.

What's Eisner's take on Creative Commons and the remix culture? Michael says he's conflicted, because he has a long history of defending copyrights. What sets this nation apart is paying people for intellectual work, which is just like paying people for physical work.

What about the growth of product placement as an advertising mechanism? It's very important. In the creative process, it's very important to have it done right, because bad product placement can ruin good content. Eisner objects to 30s pre-rolls. There's a lot of experimentation going on, but the combination of sensitive insertions and voice overs can work. We're used to advertising in entertainment, because most would prefers ads to paying a subscription. If you have common sense, you will understand what's annoying.

Opinions about the added capabilities that digital brings to content (interactivity) and do these need to be integrated into the content creation process? This is the one thing that makes the internet totally unique. Eisner likes to have control over the content, but he likes the interactivity. It's clever, compelling and works. He is adding interactivity to content, and admits he is not clever enough to think of all the ways to take advantage of interactivity. Mark mentions there are problems with interactivity. On the advertising side, there are no standards, so if you have different distribution channels, you need to encode each one specifically and think about how the players are different, so you can adapt the ads. Cables and satellite are gearing towards interactivity now. Mark is putting emphasis away from interactivity on the net and is moving to digital cable and satellites.

What about the published written word in the digital landscape? How do big media companies adapt? Michael says he has no idea. He says his Kindle died after about three days. He says the written word is the essence of everything he has ever done. It's hard to go out and shoot and get lucky. He doesn't believe the days of the written word is over. Mark thinks we're approaching screen fatigue, and there will be a resurgence of book reading ... rather than reading stuff on the screen. And there's an excitement to getting out of the house and into the movies. So these media are not going away.

11 March 2008 in Starting up | Permalink | Comments (2)