Phil Wolff: design

Rapid Response: Memetic Engineering in the 2004 Presidential Campaign (full text)

Thu, 20 May 2004 19:39:15 GMT

Initiative. Voice. Democracy.

We got'em.

We're gonna use'em.

John Kerry's Media Corps is a new site on JK.com.

http://www.johnkerry.com/onlinehq/mediacorps/

From HQ to volunteers to the mediasphere.

Talking points.

Issues of the day.

Attacks recorded.

And the tools to put them to use.

We have five months
    to bring the message
        through the volunteers
            to the voters.

So let me tell you about the Rapid Response Model, how Kerry's Media Corps builds on it, and what makes this a beta release.

The John Kerry Media Corps

Embracing the decentralization message, volunteers put together the Dean Rapid Response Network in 2003. Last week John Kerry's staff launched the Media Corps, their first cut at rapid response.

Components:

For each message (presumed weekly)
- An assignment
- A deadline
- Background
- Feedback email link
Other tools
- Research materials on the assignment
- Recent television ads
- ~~Link to the D-Bunker~~ (removed after the first week)
- Tips for writers and callers

That's the anatomy. What's the whole?

Media Corps is a boundary communication channel. It pushes memes to volunteers. The campaign's politics and communications teams design messages. Media Corps throws them over the wall.
Media Corps is an end run past the political press corps. It tells volunteers to take the memes and run with them. To local media. To audience participation channels. To letter writing and other P2P channels. Can you spell disintermediation?
Media Corps is a memetic amplifier, making messages louder and reaching further. No longer are TV ads the only place you're likely to experience the campaign's message. The community reinforces broadcast memes with their own versions. This improves what advertisers call reach and penetration.
Media Corps minimizes memetic drift, keeping volunteers on point. Its centralized and standardized seed message is the reference version. Unlike a game of "telephone" where messengers garble the message, Media Corps always gives a public point of origin.
Media Corps is a localization strategy, tailoring messages. Politics remains local. No national message works everywhere. Most advertising is wasted just trying to find its audience, let alone delivering the right message. Volunteers translate
Media Corps is a memetic biodiversity play, a lab for new ideas. Media Corps pushes its memes through thousands of channels, each reinventing the message. Some versions will spread further, survive longer, and have more impact than others. No single campaign office or market research firm can imagine or test all the variations the way the Media Corps can.

Why does it matter?

Money. Every minute of "free media" is a minute more trusted than advertising. But the payoff is dollars that don't have to be raised.
Message Innovation. Marketing sciences are all about developing the right sequence, timing, and presentation of the right messages for the right people. The right message is the hard part. Media Corps is a force multiplier for the communication team.
Measurable Results. Powering the feedback loop. Managerial gold.

The Rapid Response Model

Most of the money in this election will be spent on television ads.

Every presidential campaign staff has a political director and a communications director. Typically a political director picks the ideas, issues, facts, and positions that will win voters to the candidate and money for the campaign. Then the communications staff wraps them up in events for the media to cover, things for voters to read, oratory for the candidate to propound, and all the other stuff that gets the word out. Advertising and branding, product management and media relations. Promotion.

Campaign communications are dynamic.

Hot items in the press change a campaign's message strategy hourly. For example, right now Rumsfeld is defending his performance in Iraq instead of attacking Kerry's war record. While a candidate's staff is small and agile enough to respond to attacks, it's not enough. Once leveled, an attack can fester in the air for weeks. And character attacks are best fought by anyone but the candidate.

That brings us to "rapid response."

Rapid Response has four parts:

Prepare
Detect
Respond
Feedback

Preparations include:

Write, edit and test talking points
Recruit a cadre of first responders
List traditional media channels by locale
Write procedures for responding to each channel/program/publication.
Building training materials for effective response
Set up a database of responders

Detection in three steps:

Notice an attack, through surveillance.
Report the attack to your rapid response network
Prioritize the attack.

The US has about 300 million citizens, about 106 million voted in the 2000 general election [US Census Bureau]. There are tens of thousands of newspapers, radio stations, television channels, mailing lists, and web sites. Two "free" strategies:

Volunteers adopt a program/publication. "Mike will read the Business Section of the Miami Herald."
Automated clipping services, like Google News Alerts.

Response. Every attack should be met with a swift and effective response. Prioritize only when you don't have the resources to respond everywhere. When you choose among multiple attacks, watch for the attacks which:

are coordinated,
reach a bigger audience,
are authentic,
are more potent, or
open a new channel or issue.

Join fights:

You can win.
Where you can be seen or heard.
Where you need to learn something from the engagement.

Response has three steps:

Assign. It doesn't make sense for everyone to respond to the same thing. Make sure your response team covers all the attacks worthy of response, and that people are matched to the assignment.
Draft. Every attack is a little different. So tailor your response.
Engage. Mail the letter, call the show, post to the bulletin board.

Feedback serves four goals:

Risk assessment. Attacks going unchallenged? Attacks with disruptive potential?
Message improvement. What's working? What isn't?
Resource allocation. Where should we drive volunteer time and attention?
Channel/medium profiling. What can we learn about media outlets to improve our effectiveness?

Prepare. Detect. Respond. Learn.

Challenges?

Deeper-memes. Can you build a sequence of messages that assert an underlying value or point? For example, can "competence" and "character" be built in to how we talk about economy, environment, security?
Listen well to feedback. Listening doesn't scale, that's why we vote. And why we summarize. You need a combination of structured ("on a scale of 1 to 5...") and unstructured ("What did you say?") input.
Positive Reinforcement. Bring volunteers back for new message cycles. Acknowledge people and teams for effort, creativity, and results.
Experiment with the Process. This means consciously trying messages and talking points with different characteristics. How many words can fit in the bumpersticker version? What's the best day of the week to launch a campaign? Best time of day? Can we run two at once? Four at once? Does it have to be a whole week, or can we run one from start to finish in 48 hours? Test. Measure. Test again.
Tailored Experiences. Support both high and low energy volunteers.
Speed. Keep the cycles short. Look to IM and SMS for alerting to new threats.
Memory. Help volunteers expose successes and failures to each other.
Quick Help. Attacks aren't homogenous. In addition to research for this week's campaign, put response research for the 25 most common attacks, and 5 responses on each issue.
Training. Build volunteer knowledge and skill. It's summer: recruit 50 high school teachers to craft tutorials on each issue, on each medium. Interview successful writers and callers for their story. Feed lessons learned back to the volunteers.
Attack. Initiate an issue. Seed the conversation. See how long it takes for big media to pick up a meme. See how long other groups take to respond, both friends and foes. Change the rhythm, put opponents off-balance.

Rapid Response: Memetic Engineering in the 2004 Presidential Campaign

Mon, 17 May 2004 01:24:49 GMT

I wrote Rapid Response: Memetic Engineering in the 2004 Presidential Campaign, my assessment of a new project from the John Kerry campaign. It's a recap of the political Rapid Response model, an analysis of the John Kerry Media Corps version of that model, and a checklist of things for the JK campaign to work on.

Not included: the idea of the grassroots web site network.

When you blend:

"all politics is local" with
"the edge of the network has the power" and
"nobody trusts campaign commercials"

You turn to free media.

John Kerry HQ is doing it with Media Corps, but not to weblogs.

Both the Dem and GOP professional staffs are resisting publishing decentralization.

Otherwise they'd host the biggest network of blogs in the world. Blogs for each county, each precinct, every meetup, each working committee. Aggregators that tie local groups together. Both content and event/activity syndication. And promotion of those sites to the local news media, community groups, and political clubs.

The ROI? Better communication, coordination, cohesion, and collaboration. We need it as groups form, as citizens swell their ranks, as we commit time and energy to making momentum. Tools to help them follow the campaign's lead while making local sense of issues and messages.

But they're not. The people who understood and supported this vision are no longer part of the Kerry staff. Instead, we're seeing incremental marketing. 3 of 5 Cluetrain Points.

Maybe next time.

[aka public policy]

Why Sayers Wanted.

Sat, 15 May 2004 01:14:48 GMT

What's a "Why Sayer"? LEO says:

I suspect it may be an attempt at a play on 'nay-sayers' -- people who never do anything but criticize. 'Why-sayers' is a coinage that emphasizes positive thinking, creativity, and questioning authority. (Go Ikea!)

On a flyer at Ikea:

We're Hiring
Why
Sayers

People who want to make things better. Make things more fun. More clever. People who aren't restricted by convention, but challenged by it. People who fit perfectly at Ikea. Because it's the why that makes us successful. Just give us a call and submit a voice application. We'll be in touch with you as soon as possible.

Call (866) 831-8611
or visit us on the web at
www. IKEA.com.

On the reverse...

Tied together by a hand-drawn triangle:

The Dream
to create a better everyday life for the many people

The Business Idea
by offering a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them

The Human Resource Idea
by giving down-to-earth, straightforward people the possibility to grow, both as individuals and in their professional roles, so that together we are strongly committed to creating a better everyday life for ourselves and our customers

Followed by:

The Realization
it takes a dream to create a successful business idea
it takes people to make dreams a reality

Things I love about this:

The inner rhetoric of the organization, plainly exposed to the public. Values, goals, the mental model holding things together. Do you speak our language?
Psychographic positioning. Being stark about who you are improves the quality of the inquiry pool. Are you in or are you out?
Simple action directions. Call us.
The promise of prompt human contact. Competitive advantage in an era of form-letter-non-response.

[aka staffing]

Event blogging wishlist, unrequited.

Sun, 18 Apr 2004 17:52:12 GMT

I edit EastBayKerry.com , a TypePad weblog. It's a dual-use site: evangelism with a public face for our group and political cause, and a work coordination site. From a September 2003 help desk ticket to TypePad support:

I'd like an event typelist.

First, I want the fields described by vCalendar, RFCs 2445 (iCalendar), 2445 (iTIP), and 2447 (iMIP).

I want to be able to import events from my desktop calendars (outlook, palm).

I want to display upcoming events in my sidebar.

I also want to be able to show recent events or events in a time range.

Each event should have a permalink.

I want to sort by date/time of the event, not the date/time the link was posted.

I should be able to control day/date/time displays.

I should be able to emphasize some events as important, so they get an alternative CSS style (so I can pick them out of a longer list of events).

I want to be able to group or categorize events.

I want the option of providing a link to a .cal file so I can drag an event link from a page into a desktop app. Outlook and the Palm Desktop and most PIM packages support drag and drop.

When I create a new blog post, I want to be able to point to one or more events the way I point to categories.

I want to syndicate an event list, as with RSS/RDF/XML.

I want to show another person's list on my blog.

I want to combine several events lists (mine and/or others) into one list.

I want to be able to see events in calendar formats. See calendar.yahoo.com for various layouts.

Also: TypeLists should be accessible to guest authors too, with permission.

It's still on the wishlist.

[aka design]

Encouraging the sniffles to spread.

Sat, 10 Apr 2004 02:13:58 GMT

Grassroots journalism, meet grassroots fundraising. It took 1 form and about 5 minutes. Now I'm on my way to raising $10,000 for John Kerry by inviting other bloggers to join my Citizen Journalists Kerry 100 Club: 100 people at $100 each.

Take a moment to grok this.

A handful of volunteers in the beach resort of Santa Cruz, California, adopted an offline fundraising practice. Work your circle of friends. Colleagues from work, fellow students, the gardening club. Ask them to match your $100. It worked fast and easy on the ground.

So they took it to the web. A quick Deanspace installation, a little screen scraping of the JohnKerry.com donation site, some writing and graphics, and they're helping people give.

What they're not doing is just as important. No money kept; money goes straight to the campaign. No incorporation. No federal election rules to worry over. Frictionless. And two weeks from idea to go-live, maybe?

What can we learn from this?

Test human behavior before designing tools.
Free platforms that do 90% of the job speed everyone's time to market.
Open code platforms invite innovation and adaptation that create new kinds of value.
Campaign architectures can become hubs for innovators, leveraging prior financial, regulatory, branding, and systems investments. I can't wait for the DNC APIs.

While you're pondering, pull out your credit card and click here, why don't you. It's for a good cause and in a good name. Or create your own club.

Virality, anyone?

[aka community]

RIP Julius Schwartz, Editor, DC Comics.

Sun, 15 Feb 2004 23:36:59 GMT

TechNoir: "I met this man years and years ago and I have seen him repeatedly over the years even had dinner with him. If you really knew your comic history and you were on the con circuit you knew Julie Schwartz."

ABC reported the death of Julius Schwartz, Editor, DC Comics. He "rescued the superhero genre from near extinction in the 1950s. Revived and modernized Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern." Hawkman, Atom, The Justice League of America, and Superman too.

Maggie Thompson: This is the man who, more than any other, can take credit for the fact that we can still buy comic books today. The field continues to evolve — and maybe he’s been better equipped to handle that evolution, simply because science fiction was old stuff to him by the time he entered our field six decades ago. But — no matter how much we do admire the writers and artists who have entertained us — it’s Editor Julius Schwartz who came up with a formula that turned out to be a winning equation for our field.

This was important.

His rework of character, plot, theme, and visual design showed that each stupid little work can be reincarnated. Adapted to the times. Repurposed for other media. Giving power to authors and artists, and birth to entire media industries.

Where do you think West Side Story came from? Hollywood and Broadway made Romeo and Juliet over and over for decades. Then Julie showed that something old can be made new again.

If you haven't followed graphic novels and comics for the last twenty years, you may not know that Batman has been interpreted and reinterpreted by more than a hundred different creative teams. Schwartz paved the road so we can enjoy the Caped Crusader set in times Edwardian and apocolyptic, as a boy and an old man, broken hearted or beyond vicious, political or anarchic, isolated or a family man. All being true to Bob Kane's central character while infusing their own imaginations and visions.

So what?

When the American masses stopped reading literary classics and listening to opera, the storytellers of Hollywood and Rockefeller Center turned for stories to the franchises of the dime novel, the genres of the comic book. Westerns. Science Fiction. True Romance.

Before Disney opened theme parks, DC Comics proved even little cartoons have enormous market potential. Properties long dead can breathe new cash flow.

So we have media conglomerates. And a war for the intellectual property commons. I can repurpose Beowulf and Icelandic sagas, and Shakespeare. But when does Time Warner's Batman franchise enter the public domain? When can I put on a Batman school play or write a short Silver Surfer story without their permission, without paying for the privelege?

I love that storytellers renew and reinvigorate modern myths. So when you see Spiderman 2 and the Punisher this summer, or Hellboy, Starsky & Hutch, The Stepford Wives, Man-Thing, Catwoman, Alien vs. Predator, Astroboy, or Scooby Doo, give a nod to Julius Schwartz. "akasig"

My YASNS riff: My orkut doesn't fit.

Sun, 01 Feb 2004 13:54:42 GMT

You may try to model me, but you can't define me. I'm larger than a tidy form.

That's why God and evolution gave us the ability to lie. And posture. And pretend. And choose our words and body language.

I am not my business card. Or my resumé. Or my orkut profile.

They are merely shorthands, placeholders, for the real thing.

And you never get the real thing.

The closest you come is by interacting with me: self as black box. Not by description.

Second best to getting the real thing: ethnographic observation of my real life behavior.

Third best: following my narrative.

Fourth best: analysis of my online behavior.

That hamstrings YASNs.

The prob, of course is that I am many people in one skin and we all change who's in charge with the ebb and flow of blood sugar, brain chemistry, and the damned cat that peed on the carpet and I'm one way in A's company, another in B's company, and some awkward way when in the company of both A & B since I'm working with B, dating A, but had horribly bad sex with B but I can't remember whose fault it was.

I am complex, not one persona but many, changing over time.

We become self aware of this in puberty.

And spend adolescence learning to navigate ourselves, to choose, to actively dream versions of ourselves into being. For the objects of our infatuation. For our authority figures. For our parents. For strangers. Hopefully for ourselves.

Then adulthood calls for settling upon an outer persona. We simplify, most of us, at least our outer affect.

But the other me's are still inside.

And each of the million other Ryzers/YASNSers are the same way.

If I'm that messy and convoluted, can you imagine the relationship complexity? personas*(personas-1).

I have a few broad suggestions for social network improvements.

Model sociology. Not just nice stuff but all the icky horrible interactions we see in the office, in school, in gangs. Rites of passage. Flirting. Insults. Combat. Cliques. Authority. Power.

Model psychology. Squeeze in Maslow's Hierarchy. Piaget or someone else who models childhood development, especially arrested development.

Let me do more. Solve real life problems virtually. Design tools for tasks I really need. Group formation. Group destruction. Group work. Better meetings. Prioritization of communication. Help people be useful to each other.

Do less. Email, texting, http, phone calls are all pretty dumb systems. They just move content, so the human content becomes paramount, richer, engaging. Find your core and strip away the rest.

Admit your limitations and open up the plumbing. We need APIs so programmers can extend the models and tools.

I should be able to write an extension that lets you see a combined orkut profile and Google references.

Or find what the people in my virtual sub-community are buying on Amazon.

Or authenticate access to my calendar using friendship degrees.

Or sync my mobile phone behavior (who I text and who texts me) with my buddy list.

Or turn orkut into my smart phone's Caller ID system.

Or bounce new friends-of-friends against my interest profiles and nominate a few for acquaintanceship.

Or whatever. The world knows more than you do, so let them in.

If you want social software to endure, ...

A guy asked what it takes to scale your rolodex to 100,000 people. Then built Ryze to find out.

What's your question? "akasig"

Your blog's soul is its writing form; that soul's expression is its home page.

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 19:24:55 GMT

What makes blogging different than wikis or other web sites? Among other factors, blogs emphasize the home page over site hierarchy. This lowers a blog reader's and a blog writer's cognitive burden. Three examples:

Fresh stuff is prominent. Unlike other sites, readers always know where to look for updates and top of mind. Contrast with your typical corporate site of a thousand pages and no trusted way to know what is new. The old rule that fresh content attracts return visitors remains true.
Writing precedes organization. In wikis and most web sites, you first decide where in the site you are going to add or revise content. Blogging says "write first, worry about filing later." This has the benefit of shortening the distance between thought and captured utterance. It also frees the blogger from squeezing an idea into an existing box.
Write once, Save to everywhere. Not only is the distance from thought to paper shortened, blogging (and other [CMS] tools) also lets you route your post. Depending on the tool, you can distribute your post to multiple blogs, to email distribution lists, to [RSS] subscribers. You can also make the post visible to readers navigating by broad categories, by finely keyworded topics, and by criteria inferred from the post's content. So routing can be an afterthought. And bloggers know that their first impulse should be to open the blank page and write.

p.s. I originally posted this on Saturday, 3 January, but I somehow lost it (operator error). I noticed it was gone when Michael Boyink mentioned it (well considered comments, Michael). I recovered it from a copy kept by eVectors' k-collector (gracie).

[a klog apart]

Blogger for Hire: Gary Secondino, tech-savvy major account executive.

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 05:59:40 GMT

Gary Secondino is one of the first bloggers I read regularly. He's looking for a gig. Gary does a nice job of keeping links to his quals front and center on his blog (upper left, actually).

A weblog or blog
this is iSee iSay.

My Card
Hire Me
I'm an ESTJ
My Resumé

[Bloggers for Hire]

Wishlist: The Standalone RSS Autodetective Client

Mon, 05 Jan 2004 18:43:05 GMT

I really want a standalone autodetection tool. As I surf, it will:

live in the Windows system tray
parse pages for urls pointing to syndication formats like RSS and Atom
verify those feeds exist and collect their metadata
write a log file of the detection and verification info, in OPML
display the number of new discoveries when hovering over the system tray icon
push the file to a server, periodically and optionally.

By being a separate application from the RSS newsreader, the autodetective will be:

Smaller, consuming fewer system resources than a newsreader
Focused on the craft of detection, becoming smarter about finding things on the pages I read
Independent of a newsreader, so I can have more than one newsreader (including browser-based ones) without having every page I read parsed for each tool.
Diverse, detecting tidbits in my emails, chats, IRC sessions, etc.

If we wanted to get fatter about the client, it could spider to discover deeper (crawl this site) or discover wider (crawl the blogrolls you see). Less relevance than pages you've actually seen, but more context - especially as you revisit favorite blogs and services.

I'd also like the detective to discover more kinds of things and make sense of them:

Contact information (emails, phone numbers, postal addresses)
Physical locations (postal addresses, city names, geocoding)
Calendar events (dates, times, durations, descriptions)
Rich media (sound, video, flash files)

so I can review and bring them into other software.

There should be programming specs, so they know how to find the detective's journals, and check if they've been updated with fresh discoveries. I didn't include a "new headlines" balloon or ticker in the detective's features. The detective isn't a newsreader.

The detective should listen to your newsreaders too. Your newsreaders should also push the locations of your subscription lists ("you can find what Phil is reading at http://...") to the detective. This way the detective can optimize its reports by checking your subscriptions, then excluding them from discoveries.

Let me browse and edit my discoveries in a human-usable form. I may want to delete items from my history before sharing them with a newsreader.

I have an identity that lives across multiple computers and cell phones. I'll have detectives on each. My detectives should be able to confer and harmonize their discoveries. I may have multiple users on any computer, so detection prefs and journals should be aware of user profiles.

What's the business case?

Strategy: Environmental Awareness. What's the cost of missing that a trusted feed has moved? That a key customer/competitor/regulator has a new feed? What if we made our collective surfing of the Internet into a competitive analysis tool, each person contributing their view of the world? With detectives on everyone's desk, we're less likely to be surprised, more likely to catch new opportunities, and be smarter as a group than our competitors.
IT: Enterprise System Integration with Newsreaders. We're creating feeds of all sorts of information, including RSS of our SAP transactions. Many of these feeds will be customized for a specific context ("here's the RSS for orders Mary should approve.") The detective does away with error-prone cutting and pasting, automating the process of "I want to follow up on this". These feeds will drive attention to workflow and process. Some of the feeds will trigger people to write about specific items in team and project weblogs, improving communication.

I'll pay $20 retail for this.

Assuming you have an intranet blog server and either a server based news aggregator or desktop newsreaders, what would you pay for a 100 user site license?

Do you want one?

Integrating weblog aggregation data with enterprise data

Sat, 15 Nov 2003 17:26:37 GMT

Michael Angeles is gettin' it.

Watch people's online behavior and digital artifacts to build profiles.
Then organize the data for surfing and search, so people connect with each other.
Do that, and people organize themselves. Great things happen.

Prerequisites?

From thought to content in 1 click. Blogs do it. Wikis do it. Email and the phone do it too. Most other systems don't.
Content magnets. Rewards for every rung of Maslow's Hierarchy.
Respect. For the personal courage it takes for that first post. For privacy and other boundaries. For the collective power of invidivual choice.

via Roland Tanglao.

My local campaign blogging is coming along.

Mon, 27 Oct 2003 22:49:57 GMT

The domain came in over the weekend: EastBayKerry.com. Strong resistance by getting the local committee to blog. "I've never blogged before" is common. It's a little scary before it becomes routine. It helps when I explain (a) nobody's reading us, (b) it's just writing, like email, and (c) it's OK to muck it up.

They are coming aboard. More folks are reading, commenting, and signing up to be authors, a hierarchy of comfort. For example, see today's The Dems best hope in '04, a fantastic analysis by Harold Lowe, running for Oakland's city council. He explains why pairing John Kerry with Clark or Gephardt to win MidWest swing vote states could tip the scales.

Right now we're communicating via phone calls, email, a Yahoo! Group, the blog, and frequent meetings. I'm overly optimistic about my SMS announcement service, but hope it will become useful as we continue to reach people who have cell phones but no email. Everything remains too hard, including TypePad. I put the blog together myself but I can't imagine non-IT people doing it.

Cam Barret, Clark's blogger in chief, is earning his pay. Beyond the official Clark blog, Cam's folks rolled out local web presence en masse. East Bay for Clark is a feature-rich generic site. Good strategy. Like the Kerry camp, they have to populate the local blogs, but that's manageable.

The local Kerry team is growing, more than doubling each month. But how fast can you activate and ramp up a political network proportional to the 2.4 million people in Alameda and Contra Costa counties? The California primary election is in 126 days (18 weeks). Not much time to organize.

The centralization challenge is non-trivial. Headquarters staffs in most of the campaigns want to control the message through a network of volunteer flacks. To date, only the Dean campaign has

Longer term, after the elections, what are the lessons of mass produced weblogs? What motivators worked best to attract newbies into using mailing lists and blogs? How fast can people learn the blogging mode: the observe, write, feedback loop? What accelerates that cognitive shift? What sustains blogging through a long campaign? How important is visual design to creating a sense of locality? of affiliation? What does political blogfodder look like? And how do we make all this work for the offline? For the mobile phone user? "akasig"

Visualize blogspace.

Sat, 25 Oct 2003 23:28:07 GMT

DiceLaRed ("The Network Says") helps its customers see and understand.

For example, here is a picture of a real time graph, shown in the browser, that shows Spain's political parties by share of the current news cycle. In real time. Clicking on a wedge lets you dive into the news stream.

The flow of news and blogs is beyond understanding. The headlines alone are overwhelming.

So we need machines to helps us make sense of the flow.

DiceLaRed creatively blends news crawling + lexical analysis + data mining + data visualization + customization + alerting.

Apply this to your customers' weblogs, your industry magazines, and local newspapers for an environmental scan.

Apply this to job board postings. Understand labor market demand across the usual dimensions. Then stretch to discover new buzzwords and "terms of art". Can you say competitive analysis? How about strategic recruiting?

Apply this to medical discussion boards. Look for spikes in conversation about symptoms to detect outbreaks and public health problems. Look for swings in interest to retarget investment in health education and social programs.

Apply this to your citizenry, to understand what political issues are emerging in importance, and with whom, in real time.

We are much closer to a dashboard that helps us understand and respond, sooner and with more precision. Thank goodness. "akasig"

Skype and social networks.

Fri, 17 Oct 2003 02:38:18 GMT

Danah Boyd asks a few questions that Stuart Henshall answers with verve. My own answers to Danah...

"Skypememelogo"Danah: I’d really like to understand the excitement of social software enthusiasts. What is it about Skype that motivates you?

Skype engages people who believe their ears more than their eyes. Give Skype to someone in the music business. Or to a dyslexic or someone with ADD. Or to someone who listens to sports or talk radio. This is their linear, visually simple medium. Things should fit people.

My Skype addressbook is local. It's unmediated by a third party (unlike my AOL buddy list) and lives on the edge of the cloud, not on a server. This means my addressbook is private. It also means that software/network extensions to my addressbook can scale well and be diverse. My contacts are mine.

I can call anonymously. Just log out as me, log in as Mary Had A Little Lamb, and call someone. Then log out and never use that ID again. Unless they recognize my voice, I'm safe. Anonymity (or at least pseudonymity) is vital in larger communities. This assures that 911 calls are made. That whistleblowers reveal secrets. That journalists get tips. Anonymity enables individuality and civility.

Skype recognizes the social importance of privacy. Not only is my data kept locally, I control my profile, I control who can see when I'm available, and my conversations are encrypted from my headset to yours. IM, especially at work, is often monitored; phone calls less so. Skype creates a more trusted room in which to talk. Privacy leads to stronger community.

Skype moments are exposed by the software. Those user moments are your impulses to use yellow pages, white pages, caller-ID, call waiting, and file sharing. Those moments can be perceived and aided by programmers. So you will shortly be able to leverage your existing online social networks to find a relevant stranger to call, to populate your address book, to see a thorough profile of the stranger calling you (including whom you know in common), to have a side chat explaining the purpose of the call, perhaps to charge the caller for your time, or to securely share that song you're teaching them to sing over the phone. Skype informs phone calls with everything we've learned about software and the web.

Skype makes calls more like SMS and IM and less like One Ringy-Dingy, Two Ringy-Dingy. Multimodal, contextual, and soon with time shifting.

In short, Skype promises to bring everything I love about my TiVo to my phone.

Danah: Do you think that its popularity will be limited to specific communities?

No, but some communities will come first.

Early adopters will be computer users. Millions of us.

As people buy smarter phones and POTS-to-Skypenet gateways arise, everyone who has a mobile will use Skype-powered services.

If Skype was just the conversation triggered by your connection in your online community, that would be nice.

But it's more.

Skype's address book and phone logs can inform community. How about if people I Skype show up higher in my friends list, or get promoted from my fans list? What if recent frequent callers in my work-related address book show up in my intranet blog's Skyperoll?

I'll always take tacit data from user behavior over expressed content when understanding social networks. For the first time, my telephony behavior becomes useful as a sociocultural informant.

Danah: My skepticism increased dramatically when i read that Skype thinks it’s better than IM clients "Because it works!" What on earth does that mean?

It works as promised. Ummm, that's novel. Exceptional, even. Especially considering that it works over dialup, with encryption, on pretty average machines. Lots of geek cred under the hood to instantly replace hundreds of billions of dollars in telephony infrastructure with a 3 minute download, a headset, and an Internet connection.

From an industrial engineering and user experience view, they slashed the distance from thinking about calling someone to talking with that person. Skype cuts the number of tasks, clicks, typing, memorization and thinking that lead to the call. If both parties have Skype, you can even "Skype Me" in one click.

Skype also helps with discovery. Can you imagine looking for books if Amazon only took ISBN codes? Skype's lookup works well when the other party is online. And this will only get better.

About IM, when you're talking to someone, Skype lets you IM them using its own chat client. A personal backchannel, great for passing urls back and forth.

Assuming you're running Windows, please try it. Get the feel for it. Skype me or look up someone in a far away city and just ring a stranger to say "hello, how's the weather?".

skypememe: Record a call.

Mon, 29 Sep 2003 01:22:03 GMT

I want to use Skype to record interviews. In twenty years I may have half of Lydon's skill. We can always do analog recording, but the client (or programmer's interface) should allow all parties to save the conversation to disk. MP3, cvp.

I should be able to initiate or stop this at any time before or during the call.

Either party should be able to block recording. The Veto button.

Indicate the call is being recorded by at least one party.

Permit routing of the audio stream to a third-party recording service. "akasig"

skypememe: Skyperoll.

Sun, 28 Sep 2003 22:26:38 GMT

Skype knows when I'm available to take calls. Let me share that.

Expose user status to other programs.

Ehanced blogrolls, showing not only who's posted lately, but who's online.
Newsreaders that show author status next to the posts I'm reading.
An near-realtime status icon on my blog, so you know if I'm available.
Integration with IM clients, so we can see if buddies are skypeready.

Skyperolls should be sharable. I'd want to be able to merge skyperolls.

Make available Skyperoll Me links: click to add a person to one of your skyperolls.

The web can know me.

Mon, 18 Aug 2003 06:43:57 GMT

Steve Kirks reimagines the future of blogging. It is a beautiful, elegant vision. I want the drugs he's taking.

Create a different kind of aggregator, one that's a browser first and RSS reader second.

Read the rest...

OJR: News Sites Still Figuring Out What to Do With Online Communities

Sun, 17 Aug 2003 23:47:09 GMT

Stirland summarizes the state of the art in newspaper discussion groups. Mentioned:

Slashdot's Rob Malda knows how to foster an online community, Vin Crosbie's tips for news sites, Advance.net, AJC.com, Alternet.org, Amazon.com, Atlanta Journal Constitution's Maynard Jackson coverage, Belo Corp.'s DallasNews.com, Belo Corp.'s GuideLive.com, Belo Corp.'s WFAA.com, Boston.com discussion on church abuse story, Chicagotribune.com, CNET.com, CNN.com, Dan Gillmor's tech blog, Fredericksburg.com, Howard Rheingold: The Virtual Community, Latimes.com, Movietickets.com, MSNBC.com's science blog, New York Times forums, NYNewsday.com, NYNewsday.com opinion boards, NYTimes.com's Debates page, NYTimes.com's Sept. 11 discussion, Sacramento Bee politics blogger Dan Weintraub, Sunspot.net, The McKinsey study: The Case For Online Communities, Washington Post headline feed, Washingtonpost.com, Washingtonpost.com message boards, Weather.com, Web Lab.

Link-rich reporting makes me all tingly.

The Ultimate California Gubernatorial Recall Candidate List.

Sun, 17 Aug 2003 22:45:04 GMT

135. No primary. Wow. Handy. If it only came with a faceroll.

Moblogging vs. photojournalism, art, and erotica.

Sun, 17 Aug 2003 13:41:59 GMT

"The exposed life is not the examined life"
— Hank, The Young Girl and the Monsoon

Snapshots are not journalism. Photojournalism elevates snaps. Into narrative. Into context. Into engagement.

Snapshots aren't art. Art elevates snaps. Into questions. Into provocation. Into emotional or cognitive triggers.

Snapshots aren't erotica. Erotica elevates snaps. Into suggestions. Into sensual memories. Into teasing.

Moblogging may have innate characteristics. But there is so much more we can bring to the practice. What tools and skills do we need to moblog to higher callings? To make meaning? To engage?

Syndicating CSS?

Fri, 15 Aug 2003 21:16:34 GMT

Something came up on the syndication syntax list that bothers me. Syndication (RSS for now, Atom next) depends on separating formatting from content. A lump of html is thrown into an xml wrapper and passed along.

What happens to the original style sheets and the styled treatment of the post? Newsreaders today never know about them (a page's header isn't syndicated), so all custom class attributes are ignored.

This may be more important with Atom. With extensibility, we will syndicate more highly structured content (xml'ized invoices, recipes, sports scores, etc) that require more sophisticated help in layout and presentation.

Two strategies come to mind.

(a) Include the urls for relevant style sheets with each syndicated post. Let the newsreaders parse the post for styles they want to use, and incorporate by reference. A nice thing here is that as a style sheet is updated, content already delivered is updated too. or

(b) Pre-process the html before syndication. The publisher changes style sheet references into inline CSS, then writes out the RSS file.

Jesse James Garrett said:

I'd advocate a variant of (a):

Encourage publishers to create a separate stylesheet unique to their
syndicated content, rather than having aggregators pull styles from the
stylesheets for the corresponding Web sites. (Maybe a media="feed"
attribute on the stylesheet link could indicate this.)

Specify the stylesheet URL at the feed level. This cuts down on the
potential redundant data in the feed.

Support cascading. Allow post-level and inline CSS.

(b) is far less attractive. It'll bloat the feeds, and it'll be a big
hassle for the publishers to support.

I know you're all familiar with RSS, and suspect you've been following Echo's evolution. Am I understanding the problem? Are there other approaches I haven't considered? Does strategy (a) or (b) come to mind as the superior approach?

["aka"]

I pre-ordered Emotional Design. Is it here yet? Is it? Is it here yet?

Thu, 14 Aug 2003 22:46:57 GMT

I can't wait for Don Norman's new book to arrive. Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things. It's a skinny paperback. Norman posted drafts of the prologue (500k pdf), chapter 1: Attractive things work better (245k pdf), and Epilogue: We Are All Designers (200k pdf). Wouldn't it be cool to understand why people love me but hate my blog? Or vice versa? Perhaps a companion piece to Fogg's Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do?

An interview with RSSJobs creator, Steve Rose.

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 22:26:30 GMT

I've been following two things very closely for many years: content syndication and labor markets. Last week RSSJobs was announced, bringing the two together. Here's my interview with Steve Rose who built RSSJobs.

What inspired or provoked you to create RSSJobs?

It was a combination of things. First was the frustration with my own job hunt. Like many IT professionals, I was unemployed for 6 months. When I did finally find a job, it was for half my previous pay, and in a environment I never would have considered otherwise. Even after starting that job, I was still job hunting. Every morning I was greeted with emails from Monster, and Dice, and several others with the results of my saved search agents. They were pretty useless. Monster only allowed 5 agents, and the emails only had up to 5 jobs per agent. I had to go to Monster's web site to see all the results. Then there was Dice. It gave me up to 50 jobs for each agent every day. Most of them were the same as the previous day's results! They were supposed to be just the new ones. I was spending all my morning time before work weeding through these, and I rarely had time to check any other sites that I didn't get emails from. Sites that didn't get updated every day went un-checked for weeks or months. Who knows how many potential jobs I missed out on because I didn't have time to check all the sites I wanted to check for updates.

Second was exposure to "RSS". I started reading all my web based news using NetNewsWire earlier this year, and was amazed at how much easier it was to keep up. So I stared playing with the RSS format, creating some feeds for my own personal use, and I thought this would be useful for checking a local University's job board. I wrote a quick java servlet to parse the new job listing and return the results as RSS. It was so cool! Not long after that, I added Dice and Monster to the mix.

At this point, it was all just for my own use. About 2 weeks later, I went on a job interview, and when asked what kind of personal projects I had, I mentioned this and described the benefits of RSS. One of the developers interviewing me knew about RSS, and thought it was very good idea. He said I should market it. So I came up with a simple business plan, adapted my servlets to a subscription-based model, and built a web site around it.

How would you describe what RSSJobs does?

RSSJobs is simply a search agent for other job boards. It takes search parameters from the user, searches the job boards they want, and returns the results to them in RSS.

Who is it for?

Ideally, RSSJobs is for anyone looking for a job on the internet. It is well suited to individuals who have jobs, but want to keep their eyes open to other positions, and don't have the time to do an exhaustive search every day.

That being said, the average person out there doesn't know about RSS yet, and has a hard time understanding the benefits. It's a paradigm shift for most people, making adoption of RSS more difficult. Web browsers are comfortable, and people don't want to give them up, despite their limitations.

So at this point, I don't expect most job hunters out there to "get" the benefits of using RSSJobs, so I am not targeting them just yet. Right now I am focusing on those who are already using RSS. As RSS use becomes more widespread, the target audience will expand.

When did it go live?

The official live date was August 1, 2003. The site has been up for a few weeks, but only myself and a few friends knew about it.

What's your day job? What's your technical background?

I am a Software Engineer. As a Software Engineer, I have done a little bit of everything. My strongest language is Java, but I also work in C/C++, as well as various 4GL type languages. I've done application, database, web, and multimedia development, sometimes all on the same project.

What programming tools did you use to construct RSSJobs? What platform are you running the apps on?

It was developed using Java 1.4.1, and currently hosted on Mac OS X Server 10.2.

What version(s) of RSS do you produce?

RSS 2.0

What do you think of the Echo project? Will you be supporting the new syndication formats?

I don't know much about the Echo project, but I plan to closely follow the market for RSS content. If other formats gain popularity, I will consider supporting them as well.

Most of the job boards bar "reverse engineering" and other screen scraping, concerned over theft of data by rivals and disintermediation. How does your design work around or through these concerns?

I have considered this, and I don't expect there to be an issue. The site clearly states that the user is searching other job sites. The job listings from the various boards are accessed on demand, and nothing is cached by RSSJobs. There is no attempt to mask the origin of the content. If the user wants more information about the job, they are sent to the job board, where they can apply for the job if they like. Users should still register and upload their resumes to the job boards being searched for maximum efficiency.

I liken what RSSJobs does to a personal assistant or agent who does the research requested by a client, and presents the results. For example, say my friend doesn't have internet access, but wants to use Monster.com in his job search. He asks me to search for jobs for him. Is there anything wrong with me typing in his keywords, downloading the results, and putting a summary of the listings in an Excel spreadsheet on a floppy disk for my friend to look through? It seems perfectly reasonable to me. RSSJobs does essentially the same thing.

Many employers use HR information systems that output job listings in an HR-XML format for bulk uploading to Monster and most of the big job boards. What kind of information is lost between employer and candidate?

I have no idea.

What's on your wishlist for news reader features?

I would like to see an RSS Reader that could manage the items from an RSS feed as individual items. A user could archive specific items for viewing later after it is no longer included in the feed. Adding locally-stored comments to an item would be a nice feature too.

Is there anything employers could do to make your job easier when searching jobs.Acme.com?

Yes, when they post jobs, keep the content simple. No embedded HTML tags, or other things that RSSJobs has to filter to keep the XML valid.

Where do you think the other bottlenecks are in getting work to workers?

I think the biggest problem is getting the word out about available jobs. There are so many different ways jobs get announced, between Job Boards, classifieds, and company web sites, it is hard to keep track of them all. RSSJobs is trying to help with that.

Where do you see RSSJobs going?

For now, RSSJobs is just a part-time endeavor. If it helps people out, and provides enough revenue to cover the hosting costs, I will be happy. It will expand slowly, adding new features and more search sites on an ongoing basis. Ideally, I'd like to grow it large enough to become a full time job, and maybe even provide a few jobs as well. But this is not going to be another .com flame-out, trying to become too big too fast. I've been part of that already. If the demand for RSSjobs is there, it will grow to meet that demand. If not, no-one is going to loose money over it.

What kind of feedback have you been getting from new users? What have you been learning from the RSSJobs experience?

Surprisingly, I have received very little direct feedback about it. What I have received has been positive, even excited, with a few requests for features I have already considered for the future. But the loudest statement has also been the quietest one. People are using the site! The site is still in its early stages, and I don't want more volume than I can handle, so I haven't done much to promote it yet. The little bit I have done has drawn more traffic than I could have expected, and people are actually using the site as it was intended. that says everything.

What have I learned? I'm not sure I have learned anything yet. It is all happening so fast, and things have gone remarkably well, almost too well. It's when things go wrong, particularly very wrong, when you learn the most. I'm sure that will come. Hopefully sooner rather than later.

###

Udell: Test Driven Development.

Tue, 05 Aug 2003 02:02:33 GMT

I spent years learning how to turn the mess of requirements in customer minds into working code. Jon Udell has an update on the latest improvement to that process: test driven software development.

The Blogging Process.

Thu, 31 Jul 2003 22:28:51 GMT

Dave Pollard decomposes a day in the life of an active blogger. Very focused. Much more than this flowchart. I'm going to read it twice.

While the act of posting is trivial, the other behaviors surrounding it are not. This is a great improvement over similar work written in 2001.