Phil Wolff: technology

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]

Kill Bill movie-references guide

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 05:06:33 GMT

Scaramouche (1952, George Sidney) The Bride versus Johnny Mo fighting on the railing.

An influence across generations.

While I'm reading how memes diffuse through the blogosphere in hours and days.

I love the web.

Social Networking Technology Forum, 28-April @ 7pm, Berkeley

Tue, 13 Apr 2004 02:52:51 GMT

Brian Sarrazin turned me on to this Social Networking Forum at Cal. Wednesday, April 28th, 2004, 7p-9:15 pm. Wells Fargo Room on the Haas Campus. Topics look worthwhile:

the economic incentives of SNT and the concept of “incrementalism”
the efficacy of SNT in building long-term relationships
the opportunities of ubiquitous computing, efficient user interfaces, database scaling and more intelligent query engines
the global marketplace as facilitated by SNT; market consolidation

The poor sods roped onto the panel: Eytan Adar of HP, Bobby Chao of Chinese friendster YeeYoo.com, VC Skip Fleshman, Andy Halliday of Spoke (formerly of In-Q-Tel), and Marti Hearst of Cal SIMS. Bonus: PhD Research Presentation by Harvard's Wayne Lim. $15 includes a quick dinner; rui@berkeley.edu for tickets. Bring Bullfighter but listen to voices of skepticism and experience, to what isn't said.

[aka community]

Google News + Technorati + Citizen Blogging = ?

Mon, 12 Apr 2004 18:31:41 GMT

Out of the millions who blog, a handful do what professionals call journalism. Would more be better? Should we actively promote citizen journalism?

We could.

Local Civic Journalism clubs.
A full blown track in public school starting at age 8.
An awards ceremony like the Pulitzer for best CJ reporting, best analysis, best thread, best catch of something missed by major media.
Grants to develop curriculum for Business, Science, Public Affairs, Sports reportage.
A professional guild helping CJers get press credentials and access like any news network.
Legal services for bloggers to protect sources, file FOIAs, use sunshine ordinances, and defend IP.

And this is just for plain old text.

What will citizen journalism look like in 2009? My wild ass speculation: (like anyone will remember this post)

Moblogging comes into its own. Photos at a campaign stump speech by attendees outnumber those taken by photojournalists. And some aren't in bad light, of the back of someone's head, of the floor, with a finger over the lens, or from 10,000 feet away. Some will capture the spirit of an event and a defining moment. Long bet: By 2010 I'd be very surprised if ubiquity alone doesn't find us with a cell phone photo (or whatever we wind up calling them in 6 years) winding up above-the-fold on a major newspaper story, featured on the evening news, and gracing the cover of Time Magazine. A generation ago, big media adapted to electronic news gathering. The public continues that trend as the diffusing technology follows Moore's Law (more, better, faster, cheaper, smaller).
Campaign coverage.

A blogger on the presidential campaign bus.
Designated bloggers at each meetup, taking photos and posting the minutes.
Campaign aggregators, by location, topic, and affiliation go up 5 minutes after the home page.
Local reporters become editors for local bloggers, compiling their accounts of the campaign.

Personal video blogging becomes a staple of the portals and ISPs, a reason for customers to adopt broadband. And buy shiny tiny new digital video cams. Even laggards will have Logitech cams delivered with their just to be in on the conference call at work or to talk with family. First evidence: surging video camera aftermarket.
Video syndication. We'll be moving more video en masse. RSS enclosures, anyone?. As we're seeing in China's blocking of weblogs and other news sources, people route around censorship. P2P news distribution offers that alternative. Even for text news, P2P distribution of RSS and cached feeds let the network scale up.
News discovery systems, like Google News, will expand reach from the thousands of traditional news publishers to a broad selection of personal publishers. At first it's to weed out P.R. pros and to find reliable streams of general interest subject expertise. Eventually, they'll learn that the sixth-grade blogger has something meaningful to say about Outkast, worth sharing.
Blog juice. TV news and online editions of newspapers will explore ways to co-opt cheap content. Bloggers as stringers? Look for a play from the Classified Advertising department to annotate listings with fresh context from blogs, especially in smaller markets. Maybe even sharing revenue with popular bloggers. Example: citizen reportage on housing, neighborhoods put in with real estate listings.
Stringer status. I'll bet hundreds of bloggers earn stringer accreditations from national news services and local news media. Not for everyone, but those willing to subscribe to journalism's standards will find this an edge.
Do you want it fast or good? Most blogging is about fast, slashing the distance between idea and paper. But video is inherently more interesting after post production. Home studio software adds polish. Voice overs, teleprompters, transitions, stock music, green screen backgrounds, titles. Nonlinear editing tools like Final Cut Pro will emerge in free/cheap format.
Extension. News isn't homogeneous, it's specific. Chess reporters have standard ways of representing game play. As do those who cover soccer/futbol. Or obituaries. Or police blotters. Or movie reviews. Watch for structural extensions to standard blogging, new blanks in the forms tailored to the application. And for clever ways to share new extensions.
History. Opposition research teams will hire specialists to comb campaign, activist, and lobbyist weblogs for dirt. Every weblog post from this election cycle is fair game. Would this help or hurt Kos's election chances?
En mi primera lengua. News translations on the fly, continuing a reverse cultural imperialism where English absorbs ideas and words from around the world. RSS and Atom will face semitic times of day and non-Gregorian calendars.
VNRs. Video News Releases will come along with citizen journalism. Citizen flackery and propaganda.
My News Station. We saw a handcrafted version of this in the Dean campaign. HowardDean.tv used DishTV, cable news, and hacked TiVos to collect news. They also collected video from the field, from students and volunteers, and cut it into a daily TV news program. That will become automatic. News aggregators (Bloglines) and discovery systems (Google News (clusters by topic), Technorati (clusters by reference), Daypop (what's hot)) will group and cut together syndicated videos based on location, time, and subject; create a montage of related footage; and stream a custom video channel just for you.
Community stations. Following Hoder's advice on regional blogosphere building, we'll see "people's news" become a trusted alternative to state and corporate media. Military professionals will prioritize community blog servers right after radio and television stations. It won't happen in this decade because John Kerry should be able to keep the peace for the next 8 years, but the next time a country fears an attack by the US, watch their blogosphere come under attack from within.
Big screens enter. What do you do with a 250 megapixel monitor? Something 5 feet tall by 8 feet wide at paper resolution? Could you create a dynamic montage of video and stills that reflected your interests over time, relative popularity and proximity of news stories. The World Wide Wall® of News: a must for every corporate Chief, political war room, and mayor.

Where do you think citizen journalism be in 2010?

[aka community]

Mail is part of Google's enterprise strategy.

Sat, 03 Apr 2004 17:46:24 GMT

Jeff Jarvis says Google email (gmail) is just another portal me-too.

I don't think so, Jeff.

Email has juice. Only telephones are used more.

40% of a company's knowledge is stored in its email boxes, hidden from intranet search engines, locked away on desktops. Email is rich with:

social information (who is asked about what, who redistributes information to whom),
time signatures (sent, received, read, forwarded, printed),
threading and propagation clues (A sent it to B who replied while copying it C who forwarded it to...),
urls pointing to the web,
enclosures passed along, and
entry points, from mobile devices to robots to business software.

evectors' ZOË demonstrates the value of combing through your mail to fuel search and reveal context.

For Google, this has three strategic benefits:

Better Google scoring. There's no reason Google can't collect a billion emails by this time next year. A million users times a thousand messages. The urls will inform PageRank™, and in near real time. If you thought weblogs got you Google juice, wait for email.
Ad Revenue. Either you'll pay for ad-free viewing or you'll get Google text ads tailored to your emails. A billion page reads of additional targeted inventory to sell.
Appliance sales. With Google search, weblogs, and email, Google will give Microsoft mail service a run for its money. Watch Google roll out Blogger in a Box this year, the better to clue the Google search engine to intranet content. A year from now, watch the microcontent of email and weblogs continue to converge, especially behind the firewall.

How does Yahoo differ from Google?

Where Yahoo sells communication, Google sells context.

Where Yahoo brings integration, Google leads with relevance.

Where Yahoo! lets you type up a "buddy list", watch Google tweak your orkut social network with clues from your mailing behavior, and vice versa.

Where Yahoo uses their toolbar to access their many services/properties, Google's toolbar will observe your browser experiences. And that includes now sending and reading email, surfing, news watching, reading and writing weblogs, following and posting to usenet, and shopping. With email, orkut and your toolbar, they now can create a compound profile of your interests.

Context, relevance, experience. Tough to beat.

[a klog apart]

Emergent disorganization: lessons from East Bay Kerry.

Fri, 02 Apr 2004 01:17:48 GMT

I've been rationalizing the 30-50 hours a week of grassroots campaigning I've been investing in the local Kerry campaign since last summer. Changing the world is great, and we're doing that. My takeaway is what I learn from it, how the work itself changes me. Here are a few lessons learned.

EQ is more important than IQ.

Everything in campaigns is about emotion. Values trigger emotions, as do symbols of those values. And emotions get you money, volunteers, votes.

Campaigns are tough on the emotions.

A local DFA leader said "Anger Unifies" at the last Democratic Unity Meetup. Lots of adrenalin. Ups and downs. I went to three Dean meetups the night after the California primary, the day Dr. Dean withdrew from the race. I saw frustration, despair, anger, denial, and loss. But I also saw resolve, support, and bonds with their fellow Dean faithful. In a race that lasts six weeks, you can turn up the emotional volume. But what do you do with a race that lasts 100 weeks?

You can't pick your comrades.

We encounter every "people problem" that HR pros prepare for, that social workers encounter, that psychiatrists commit for, in grassroots campaigning. The persistently off-topic person. Trolls. The person who thinks everything is interesting and emails you about it, and your 500 fellow volunteers. Fair weather friends. The craven mercenary. The paranoid. The narrowly obsessed (we almost started a John Kerry's Hair weblog back in September '03). The person who picks fights. The lonely. The shy. It takes centered, socially adept people to work with these people.

Burnout is a huge problem.

We're lucky to have any active volunteers survive the primary season. It's expensive to volunteer. You're giving up recreation that might have been keeping you sane. You're spending less time on friends, family, and your love life. You may even trade off time you could be working or looking for work, dipping into savings or living frugally. I know volunteers who put off graduation, that lost a job, that neglected their health. So recruiting well rises to the top 5 issues every week.

When grassroots groups pay for their own expenses, they go to jail or embarrass their candidate/cause.

My group, East Bay Kerry, is unincorporated and not a PAC and not recognized by the FEC or IRS. If we take money from an organization to print fliers or buy buttons, we're breaking the law. If we sell buttons at a table, we're breaking the law. If we keep a few bucks from a house party to pay for the party's pizzas, we're breaking the law. It's paralyzing.

We need ways to legally raise and spend money without screwing John Kerry for President or the DNC.

Hoisting: those higher on the scale of commitment recruit those lower on that ladder, and work to bring them up.

There's a clear ladder of political engagement. It runs from "I can vote?" to elected official. At each step of the ladder, we pull up those behind us. If you volunteer for 2 hours every two years, you call someone to vote this year. If you're leading a writers bureau, you recruit new members from those who were previously interested but not volunteering.

How much does that happen in the workplace?

Rarely.

Self-interest doesn't often lead to such seemingly altruistic behavior.

But if it is in the campaign's interest (or the enterprise's), how can you institutionalize pulling folks behind you up the ladder? How do you make each leader's success dependent on the growth of replacement leaders and fresh blood?

The new labor market features increased competition for great talent, increased employee turnover and shorter tenures. So hoisting becomes a competitive advantage. How well do you align incentives with hoisting behavior? How well do you incorporate

There is no organizing software that thinks of the user as the voter or volunteer.

All the commercial tools for running electoral or advocacy campaigns is top down, center out. CRM for politics. Clueless, in the Cluetrain Manifesto sense.

Keep all that stuff, though. It works.

Add new edge-powered stuff. Let anyone say "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!" Without approval from a hierarchy. Decentralized authority and the tools to act on it. And then help that nugget of energy flourish internally, and in interaction with others.

There are no tools for committee-scale organizations to be productive.

I want to put on a lecture series for John Kerry. Or host a bowling league fundraiser. Or mentor a Swing State grassroots team. Or coordinate high school students in growing Or coordinate 75 Earth Day activities.

Where are the tools that let me plan, staff, fund, schedule, coordinate, train, account, syndicate, dunn, manage, remind, and otherwise get things done?

Where are the recipes for getting things done? And the place to post my own?

We need team-scale productivity tools.

No grassroots organization is an island.

This is from some analysis I did for ActivistTech or DemTech or whatever it's called: A hypothetical bridge commission.

My speakers bureau in East Bay - West of the Tunnel works with other committees

Fundraising
Media relations
Writers
Swing state

Both ours, and those of East Bay East of the Tunnel, San Francisco's grassroots Kerryfolks, local union organizations, the Wellstone Club's speakers bureau, the official campaign, venue hosts, etc. More than 200 political and activist groups are players in the Bay Area's East Bay. Each committee in my organization needs to be able to manage the life cycle of relationships with each of the others. To get things done: events, money, recruiting, media, etc.

Where are the tools for identifying potential relationships, making them real, sustaining them, and gracefully retiring them?

Blogging remains absurdly difficult.

And the tools don't make it any easier.

Information overload is a real problem without practices or tools for managing it.

Just before the California primary, I was receiving more than 500 political emails daily. I didn't even get to look at my thousand RSS feeds.

When we got to 10 daily emails on our local Yahoo! group, people started unsubscribing faster than they were joining.

We're experimenting with multiple email channels (high and low volume, broad and niched, ad hoc and scheduled) but it's all confusing to our volunteers.

How much fatigue will the average voter feel in 200 days, if this keeps up? How can we lower the political noise? Does tuning out mean voters stay home?

Ok, so I'm off to a meeting of the Speakers Bureau.

The Well-Heeled Dean CIO Quiz

Mon, 16 Feb 2004 20:14:03 GMT

I've heard it said by Dave Winer and many many others: if only Dean had reinvested half the money raised into the Internet, then ...

OK, so you're the Dean Campaign Chief Information Officer in August 2003. The money starts to roll in. $20 million over six months, $2-4 million per month.

What would you spend the money on?

What does your monthly budget look like?
What is your application and infrastructure portfolio?
How much will you allocate to maintenance?
You're building from scratch, so what problems do you hope to avoid through wise architecture?
What are your big milestones?
Who are your key vendors?

How do you spend in consonance with the campaign strategy?

How will you use the Internet to bring offline voters into the campaign at the same numbers as radio or television broadcasts?
What is your online strategy for responding to attack ads and opposition pundits in radio, television and print?
Online community takes time to build and is very hard to organize geographically. What will you do to match the state-by-state primary schedule?
What can you do with online services to serve the campaign in caucus states?
You are preparing for Bush to launch in Spring 2004. What are your countermeasures to reach out to moderate Republicans online while the GOP uses its advanced voter email systems to barrage 200 million validated email addresses?
How will you lower the cost-per-vote vs. the GOP?

Ingrid Jones's diary.

Sun, 15 Feb 2004 17:24:12 GMT

Delightful to see the new American politics through such insightful British eyes. Me and Opehlia. A blogger and her cat from the land of the Beatles and Disraeli. A regular read on metablogging, online democracy, and other things I find fascinating. Just a bit askew in unexpected ways.

Does the Queen Mary 2 have enough life boats?

Wed, 28 Jan 2004 14:11:39 GMT

I saw a picture of the Queen Mary 2. Ten lifeboats on a side, 20 in all. The ship can carry 2620 passengers and 1254 crew. So 3874 into 20 is 194 people per life boat. But you need to plan for some boats being more full than others, some breakage, etc. So let's assume 10% overcapacity, or about 215 per boat. Most restaurants don't have that capacity. Do the QM2's boats? Who built them? Do the lifeboats have boats, food, electronics, storm shells?

John F. Kerry wins in Iowa. 1 down. 49 to go.

Wed, 21 Jan 2004 05:02:39 GMT

OK, I gloated for an hour.

I'm only a little surprised.

A few factors contributed to the success.

The big management change in the Kerry camp in November. Strong organization on the ground.
All the candidates spent a year turning up voter turnout. With high turnout, a GOTV machine isn't a competitive advantage.
Kerry put all of his energy behind one punch. Can he keep his balance and sustain that level of effort? Will the same tactics that worked in a 2.9 million person state scale to one with 35 million people?
The whole message thing changed then too: They Let Kerry Be Kerry. He's great with people. Great on discussing issues. Totally affirms my view that campaigns are conversations.
Bush bagging Saddam elevates warrior status. Kerry served in combat, highly decorated. Served on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee for 20 years. A long time architect of America's war on narcoterror and political terrorism.
Dean and Gephardt nuked each other. Not civil, and Iowans punished them for it. It's to Dean's credit he survived.
Kerry and Edwards have a higher Emotional Quotient (EQ) than Dean. Dean wasn't very likeable in the debates or in interviews. One long note of derision, frustration, just ready to burst out of his skin. Other candidates, like Kerry and Edwards, showed many emotional notes, in appropriate circumstances.
By process of elimination (angry Dean, babyfaced Edwards, civilian Gephardt) you're left with Kerry.

What should Dean do?

Keep on plugging, the machine was working.
Work on yourself. Get high, drunk, a massage or something so surgeons can expose your warm fuzzy side, the side that laughs, giggles, cries. Your true believers know it's in there.
Go two weeks without mentioning Iraq. It'll scare the bejeezzus out of Clark.

What should Kerry do?

Franchise your HQ. Start building tools so your volunteers can do more kinds of things. "Franchising" your headquarters roles lets each metro area lay solid groundwork before you come to town. (Call me. 510 444 8234)
Get six hours of sleep and keep eating your oatmeal.
Money follows support. Put supporter enrollment above donor armtwisting.

All said, I'm proud of my local team. Our small crew has five people on the road in Iowa and New Hampshire. We're actively working on our campaign craft, studying from old hands. We're doing the basics badly but learning from each experience, better each week. We're communicating well with each other, despite our circle growing.

Slowly those of us who were afraid to commit are becoming true believers. We can say things like:

John Kerry is the Real Deal.

We're sending a president to Washington, not a message.

He's the one we want on the podium opposite Bush.

and believe them.

And we have the nerve to ask people to join us.

Come to a Kerry meetup this Thursday night.
I'm shopping for a media relations strategist for the Bay Area, to help us take back the White House.
I need a team that understands precinct, CRM profiling, and direct marketing software, so all Americans can have health care at least as good as Federal employees.
Curriculum developer wanted, so we can build the Opportunity America we all deserve.
Speech communications professor, to give voice to the average American instead of powerful interests.
I need a conversation with someone who can coach newbies on project templating, so 20% of our children don't go to bed hungry.
A digital artist, to bring sunshine and transparency back to government service.

Call me. Or write: phil@dijest.com.

You're not seeing a lot of me here. I'm doing most of my blogging over on EastBayKerry.com (all politics is local). And spreading myself thin in bulletin boards, other people's blogs and doing campaign related stuff. My apartment flooded, throwing off my schedule and keeping me away from my computer for a week. Small stuff.

"akasig"

Brain rich environment.

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 01:25:34 GMT

Susan Mernit called. 30 minutes later I'm in a North Berkeley bakery with J.D. and Mary. "J.D. Lassica?" I ask. Indeed it is. I didn't tell him to his face, but I've been learning from J.D. for more than a year now. That whole big J in the "blogging as journalism, blogger as journalist" meme. Thinking about ethics. Management as journalism. Public/private tradeoffs. Truth squads. He's quieter in person than on his blog (maybe that's called "listening", Phil).

Stuff I didn't get to mention to J.D.:

EastBayKerry.com is about making national issues local, local issues personal, and to provoke engagement in the political process.
Don't Blog was birthed during breaks while hung over at the 2003 Blogtalk conference.
I really like that General Clark's been holding Bush directly accountable for domestic misconduct about foreign affairs. Not just well said, but a consistent and dogged demonstration of public integrity.

I've been tuning in to Mary Hodder's biplog (Berkeley Intellectual Property Weblog) since Spring 2003. New Media Mary [sorry, Mary] also edits the napsterization blog. Mary's writing/shooting a documentary on Cow RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, sort of a Total Bovine Information Awareness Program. Blogworthy in a Mad Cow era. Contrast this to Mary's growing irritation with fringe intrusions into her own privacy, like seeing her name and RSVP status show up on party evites. Transparency in that little virtual social encounter makes going to the party less mysterious, meeting people there feel less serendipitous, and steals intimacy from the inviter-invitee relationship.

Just imagine how the cows feel. MooooveOn.

Then Thai lunch with Susan.

Susan wants to bring bloginess to social service charities. All that klogging goodness (authentic and timely stakeholder communication, collaboration turbocharged, institutional memory, etc.) for not-4-profit agencies that heal, feed, and nurture those who need it. Off to a good start but enduring bigco bureaucracy wrapped in 501c3 woolens.

Susan advised a bit about the state of the Actionable Sense Society's formation. Thanks.

Why do we need to escape the home office for the social engagement of a cubicle farm? Why do we find it so useful to meet in person? Do we ever figure out what we're going to do when we grow up?

I like it when Susan calls."akasig"

Emergent Democracy and the Digital Divide.

Wed, 07 Jan 2004 05:34:35 GMT

Wealth Bondage's The Happy Tutor wrote:

So no computer, no emergent democracy for you, right? Who here speaks for the illiterate or the working poor?

Is being informed a right or a responsibility? How about being connected? Must literacy be prerequisite to choosing your representative? Considering the role statistics play in election and governance, how about numeracy? Computer literacy? Geomancy?

Democracy emerges whether we like it or not, or so it appears; pluralism will out. The process looks like sausage grinding, even with digital five-spice powder. Its arrogance may even be bitter to the taste. But emergent democracy is a morphed hybrid of shadow people and meatspace. Our virtual selves make connections, our flesh selves makes them solid, enduring, and actionable. It's as though a spirit world guides us to meetups, to churches, to union halls where we speak in tongues in praise of lesser gods, of devils to apagenate, of evangelical congregation leading to personal and collective salvation. Watch as democracy emerges from our phones and explodes into the world of bad breadth, parking karma, and baby kissing.

I worry less about the digital divide. After all, the digital divide will be over when we can vote by Nokia, around 2012. I worry about the many millions of adults stripped of their right to vote because of a felony record. Of the children who have no say in the legislation and budgets that define their health, development, and safety. Of long term residents become second class non-citizens. What would happen if the more than ten million ex-cons in the U.S. population had their votes restored? What would happen if we enfranched children, parents voting their proxy? Could this give us our second black president (Clinton being the first)? Would schools and food for kids get parity with pensions and healthcare for seniors? "akasig"

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?

Executive blogging issues.

Wed, 03 Dec 2003 09:06:21 GMT

Robert Scoble wrote:

I keep asking executives "when you gonna start a weblog?" But, quite consistently get an answer of "way too busy." I asked Sanjay and Dan'l that about a week ago. They both ran down what their schedules look like. Nearly every minute of every day is scheduled. Dan'l told me he often is traveling and already rarely gets to see his family.

It's a tough problem. Since I don't think executives will get the time to weblog (at least not until it's so important that they are forced to by market conditions -- and we're several years away from that, if ever since they can get more leverage simply by calling up the Wall Street Journal or USA Today and asking for a chat) then internal bloggers will need to build better ties to execs and PR and marketing so that we can help solve the problem. I'm trying to do just that, and I've had some success, but my time is limited too. So, we need to figure out how to get some scale. One guy can't do it all.

The blogdev community has an opportunity to treat this as a challenge, an opportunity. What behavior, what facilities, will let someone as harried as a Microsoft executive or a single mom working two jobs squeeze blog writing, reading, and discovery into their lives?

Is it audblogging on the run? A quick speed dial on your cell for a note. Maybe audio or sms blogfodder? Great if it can be transcribed into searchable text. Blog as stream of experience.

Or do you make 200 phone calls a week? Maybe your phone bill as RSS becomes blog fodder. Basic analysis can show who has your attention (frequency, average length, total time). Further analysis could detect patterns among your network (Bob on Tuesday mornings; talks with Mary seem to follow Tim most of the time). Blog as phone pad.

Do you live in Outlook? Maybe you can default that all your outbound mail is cc'd as a draft to your weblog. That might cut blogging time to picking and choosing from the queue. Blogging as backup brain.

Maybe you live in your calendar, all meetings, all the time. Turn your calendar into blogfodder, provoking the posts before, during, and after meetings. Reverse chronology should come naturally here. Blogging as technography.

Before performance, executive culture is about trust. Execs limit conversation to trusted cliques, chains of command, and other social circles. LiveJournal-style control of who gets to read specific posts may overcome inhibitions about using the blog interface to capture your thoughts. Socially informed blogspace.

You also mentioned the role of PR. Here's a new role: beat journalist. Be the Dan Gillmor of the Microsoft marketing veeps, a development programme, of M&A. Get on their calendars for 10-15 minutes a week, ask routine and provocative questions, transcribe and post to internal blogs. Canvas internal blognets for related posts and tie the threads together. Blogs as reportage.

Are we getting closer?

PeopleAggregator alpha is A material.

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 02:31:29 GMT

The PeopleAggregator is starting to come together very nicely. Feels simple, usage nearly obvious. A pleasant experience. Pretty easy to define relationships.

And it's built on xml.

Here's my public page and the RDF underneath it.

Some thoughts on relationship vectors...

When I declare my connection to someonein PA, I pick one of these types:

know of
don't know but want to
know of in passing
know by reputation
acquaintance
friend
close friend
relative

The degrees of friendship are very nice and upbeat, but I think it conflates (a word I don't get to use very often) three dimensions into one:

time (past, present, possible future relationship),
strength (distant to close relationship), and
attraction (love, neutral, hate).

I should be able to declare that I mildly dislike Amy, my current wife. Or that I intensely hate Bob, my former boss. Or that I have a crush on Cat, this person I barely know. If the scales are quantified, you can do marvelous things with recommendations, matching, etc.

Add an "other relationship" category to accomodate the many ways we define our relationships. "Slept with", "worked with", "screwed over", "blogrolled but never met", "makes me gag", "lust after", "we're both Elks", "divorced me", and of course "know, but don't want to" (needing to divest). "Family" is also a pretty broad and shallow bucket; Genealogy XML covers more of that ground. And this doesn't even get into culture-specific notions; tribal affiliation means different things if you are a Native American, a Jew, a Boy Scout, or a Kurd. Leave room for those wonderful connections and the results will astonish. "akasig"

RSS Portlet, served rare.

Fri, 14 Nov 2003 23:03:38 GMT

I want to put my program in your program. Really, I want users of your program to use some of my user interface. You, know, kinda like a rectangle of stuff on MyYahoo!. That's what portlets are for, packaging up what gets shared and how. Documentum and Plumtree and friends set up the Portlet Open Source Trading site (POST) on SourceForge to share portlets. Just download the war files and your app server's portlet container should make it available. The first is an RssPortlet: "Rss Portlet views Rss 0.91 and 2.0 newsfeeds. It includes edit mode for adding or eliminating additional newsfeeds." There's also a GooglePortlet. All per the JSR 168 Portlet Spec and the OASIS Web Services for Remote Portlets TC. All very fresh and beta, but portlets offer nearly drag and drop extensibility to portals (for developers at least). So what?

Watch more RSS feeds stream to portals (intranet and public) near you.
Watch enterprises publish more content in RSS.
Other content syndication formats will spread easier in enterprises.
Blogs become attractive (cheap, usable, fast) sources of portal fodder.
Look for this to be part of the BEA, IBM, Oracle, Vignette, and Plumtree blogging solutions.

"akasig"

Dinner with Dina and Friends.

Thu, 30 Oct 2003 17:05:27 GMT

It felt like an acid trip and swings in blood sugar and the five seconds of a family reunion that are sheer delight.

Stuart Henshall, always gracious, hosted Dina Mehta at Boobo di Beppy where staple busting portions stun you with their fat content. More on the restaurant later.

We talked about Skype, blog uptake, and other things until I realized that I was at the social scientists' table. Michele Chang is an ubicomp goddess researcher. Dina is a behaviorist. danah boyd (no caps for typographical balance) is getting doctored in social network behavior. Denise Cheskin comes at behavior from a marketing view, and I'm a demoblographer (I blog demography) and labor market analyst. Clynton Taylor is a full tyme ethnographer for business (from where do I know him?). And Stuart has x-ray vision when it comes to models, business and management models I mean.

We were a worldly bunch. Dina from India. danah originally from England but sans accent? Stuart from NZ but with a courteous American drawl. I'm from New York but work has taken me to strange places like Houston and Lausanne. Liz Goodman's from the Big Apple too, an ~~actress~~ artist become ubicomp sociologist en route to Oregon. Denise went to grad school in France. It felt so cosmopolitan to be in such a faked up Italian joint.

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"

Monster enters the community business. Look out Ryze.

Tue, 21 Oct 2003 00:53:49 GMT

Monster is getting into schmoozespace. Ryze, LinkedIn, et al are in for some competition. A gang of Monster execs tried Ryze in July: CIO Brian Farrey, VP Dan Miller, SVP Danielle McCabe, VP Douglas Hardy, software engineer John Hayward, VP Michele Pearl, Director Sean Luitjens, and Creative Director Sue Duro. Michael Schutzler too, SVP responsible for Monster Networking. Schutzler stopped by LinkedIn too.

Why does Monster care? Two problems:

Monster spams employers.

Monster makes it easy for job seekers to apply for a job. So they do. To lots of jobs. Multiply the number of job seekers times the number of jobs to which they apply, divide by the few jobs offered. Monster spews a supersonic torrent.

Employers are treating Monster-generated job applications like spam. The bigger ones spend heavily on applicant tracking systems that filter, blacklist, and screen, typically less effective than your average bayesian filter.

Monster needs to show employers the handful of needles in the career pool haystack. But how?

Monster needs to improve on the 4% Relationship with Workers.

The average job search lasts around two months. The average person gets a new job every 3.5 to 4 years, about once per presidential election. So you need Monster 2 of 48 months, between 4 and 5% of your career. What about the other 95%?

Monster has to advertise to you for four years so you return. That's expensive.

And your profile becomes stale the week after you post it. So employers won't pay to mine Monster's "resume" bank.

Can Monster bribe you to keep your profile current? To share your professional network? To write about your work life?

If so,

Your continuously fresh profile will be at least 20 times more useful to employers.
The record of your electronic relationships with others in the community helps employers find clusters of like-minded people, the better to recruit.
And you'll already be in the house the next time you launch your career campaign. Monster won't need to advertise to you again.

Monster's head start, challenges, and opportunities:

Monster's lead:

Traffic. 40 million job seekers have visited Monster sites. If even some of those email addresses still work, they might be able to draw a million people to try the community. Compare that to
Motivation. Job seekers have an economic interest in making it work.
Conditioning. They are trained to fill out forms.

Monster has real challenges.

Resumequity. Their current policies are hostile to user privacy. They claim ownership of all data you write when on their site, or any data they infer from your behavior. This runs counter to a strong cultural and political trend moving power and control of information to individuals.
Pay to Play. They want to charge for membership. It's not clear that anyone has made a go of that in schmoozespace.
Tone. Executive and contractor experiments failed in the past, not least because of the tone of the places Monster created. Time and staff have passed. Can they create a place that is safe, fun, social, purposeful, casual?
Friar's Fallacy. Groucho Marx wrote in a letter to the Hollywood Friar's, "Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." I don't feel any particular connection to other people in the phone book. Monster needs to foster feelings of affiliation and membership beyond a credit card transaction.
Big Walls. Monster doesn't open its databases to the world's programmers. Amazon and Google have, and thousands of experiments helped these giants discover new ways to create value.
All Work. Many other communities created for business find that people want to explore and band together about non-work things. Can Monster aggressively follow and support their users?

Opportunities:

Nodespace Neighborhoods. BostonWorks' Jason Butler describes "nodespaces" as those data intersections that connect people with each other. Monster can create just-in-time community around specific job postings, employers, occupations, and interests. And there is no reason some of those spaces can't be branded.

Fellowship. Cynthia Typaldos addresses professional and personal workplace isolation with her professional guilds. If Monster can match and beat that, it's scale will have a chance to work.

Built in Word of Mouth. More jobs are filled by referral. By helping you form tribes, Monster multiplies the effectiveness of your job search. And increases the chance that you'll refer a Monster employer to a Monster networker.

Cross-Property Inolvement. Monster operates relocation, training, testing, and other businesses. An active and lively social network can be used to improve customer acquisition, retention, and satisfaction in many of their properties.

Hosted Blogspaces. There's no reason Monster can't host weblogs for every user, both on the job seeker and employer side. Most people won't try blogging, many will try and leave, but millions will try and stick. Monster could become one of the top blog hosts, along with Google, AOL, and Yahoo!

Humanization of Candidates. Job seekers are people. But you wouldn't know it from datafied personas job boards pass to employer databases. Social networks offer employers a chance to understand more of people than their "resumes".

Will Monster execute well and fast enough for employers to defer to Monster's network instead of rolling their own?

It all comes down to social capital. The more you help your customers harness it, the stronger your competitive advantage.

# # #

From the Monster PR site:

Monster Redefines Career Management By Harnessing Professional Networking; Network Available to 40 Million Job Seeker Members. excerpts, bulleting and empahsis mine:

Monster ... today announced plans to launch Monster Networking, a professional networking service.

Monster Networking is an online community where professionals across all industries and levels can exchange information about jobs, offer expertise and help others achieve their goals.

Monster will serve as the host in this community,

fostering introductions between members and

encouraging them to:

share career advice,

cultivate long-term professional relationships, and

support each other's goals.

Proprietary matching technology will allow Monster to

proactively initiate introductions between participating members as well as

promote relevant career opportunities based on criteria in a member's professional profile.

Member profiles will include skills, occupation, employment history, schools attended, titles, interests, and geographic location.

"In addition to leveraging the Internet as a powerful recruiting tool, consumers continue to rely on their network of friends, colleagues and peers when seeking professional guidance or advice about how to best achieve career goals. Today, we embark on a new Monster - one that serves all professionals who are looking to manage their careers, not just those seeking work."

Monster Networking is a subscription-based service that is expected to be available in Q1 of 2004.

"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?".

Community Services for Enterprise Blognets

Wed, 08 Oct 2003 18:19:49 GMT

Community Services for Enterprise Blognets

While your firewall protects you from intrusion, it also cripples the community software that keeps the blogosphere hopping. Here's are some of the services you might want to bring inside to help your blognets grow and prosper. The list grows, changes, and is not complete.

I've grouped these services, arbitrarily, into three categories: Discovery, Reading, and Writing. Discovery services help you find stuff and navigate, and understand blognets and the blogosphere as a whole. Reading services help you keep up with relevant information. Writing helps you author and publish. Basic blogging service is extra.

In your workplace:

Which 3 are mandatory for a blognet pilot?
What risks do you assume if you don't provide these services?
Which services might you be better off operating in support of public employee and customer weblogs, even though they are the open blogosphere's services?
What policy and IT operations issues do these services raise?

Service	Description
Discovery
Intranet search	Covering the intranet and DMZ, your private search engine must update its index frequently. Best is if they re-index within a few minutes of fan update server being pinged. Engines which work well in public, because they use hypertext links to establish relevance, may not work as well in the intranet, where there are fewer links or other cues. For example, the Google appliance.
Location tagging and search service	Find blogs physically near me; find posts related to a location or system. For example, Geourl.org.
Referral logs	Who's sending traffic to me? It's sometimes useful to understand your readership. Other times you discover people with similar interests.
Weblog neighborhood	Who is like me? Who writes about things like me? Who else is cited like me? For example, Technorati link cosmos.
Topic service	Find posts related to this one within my weblog, across the intranet, and perhaps across a collection of partner blognets. See K-collector and Easy News Topics.
Realspace	Generate live meetings using information from blogspace. For example, Meetup or Evite.
Random walk	Manufacture serendipity. Sample the intranet, get a bigger picture. See also wanderlust.
Directory	So you have an employee directory, maybe even a yellow pages for services and departments. How about extending the yellow pages to people, by topic, updated automatically? For example, see blogarama, Eatonweb, Oblix.
Advertising	Text ads for internal announcements. Think of it as the new bulletin board.
Cemetery	A directory of abandoned weblogs, because of personnel actions, lack of interest, or because their focus or relationship is completed. See Fucked Weblog.
Product or object watch	Analyze weblogs for well-understood references, store and analyze the results, and notify subscribers. For example, seeing what books people mention in their weblogs. Or people. Or competitor products.
Peopleroll and social network	I'm sharing some of my friends, and friends of friends. See FOAF, Friendster, Ryze.
Reading
RSS portals	server side directories of RSS feeds, aggregation and browser presentation of those feeds
Updates	What's new? A central service that writing tools notify when a blog is updated. Sometimes called a "ping service". Like weblogs.com and blo.gs.
Blogroll & WebRing services	May be linked to enterprise directory services, the better to provide automatic maintenance of blogrolls that match the formal org chart. Of more value, giving users the ability to create their own blogrolls. This reveals informal and temporary social networks. Blogrolling.com is an example.
Blog distribution gateway	Distributes blog posts by email, SMS or other channels.
Buzz watcher	What's hot on the intranet? What's hot in my circle? Services that answer this include Blogpulse, DayPop News Burst, Popdex, and Blogdex
News Readers and Aggregators	Aggregators collect a user's selection of RSS feeds, keeping them current, formating them for reading, and making them available for users to cross-post. News readers do the same thing, except from a user's desktop. Server side aggregators have the effect of concentrating traffic (they pick an RSS feed only once, instead of each user picking it up) so publishers don't experience "slashdot effects". They also hide the level of attention from publishers, useful if the publisher is a competitor or industry insider. Syndic8 is an example.
Re-aggregation service	These services combine content from multiple sources into a more focused feed. This can be fully automated or humans may approve contributions to a feed. Moreover is an example.
Machine translation	Do you span countries? Machine translations of posts and RSS feeds helps people get the gist of what their colleagues write. Systrans is an example.
Writing
Posting Gateways	Use these services to write to your weblog using non-browser devices or software. Post from voicemail, your phone's SMS/MMS, email, calendar, or IM.
Comment Service	Manages posted comments like the blog server manages weblog posts.
Conversation Threading	Tracks the flow of conversation across weblogs using methods like trackback and link analysis.
Render Services	These convert blog posts to RSS, and to document formats like PowerPoint .ppt, Flash .swf, Adobe Acrobat .pdf, or Microsoft Word .doc.
Template Farm, Widget Library	Stores styles, templates, graphics and other ways to customize the look and feel of your blog.
Weblog Medic	Checks your blog for dead links, broken images, speed, accessibility, valid RSS and html, language encoding, etc. For example, BlogCheckup.
Blog Fodder	Actively provoke blogging by suggesting themes or topics. For example, blogfodder and The Friday Five.

I'll be updating this page for a while. "akasig"

Welcome, Governor. Learn from Dean.

Wed, 08 Oct 2003 16:49:13 GMT

I'm back from "BloggerCon".

I bet few people are prepared the first time they become California governor. The reality of the job is harrowing, demanding, and requires knowledge and skills rarely produced in the private sector. Understanding the law. Developing consensus. Managing compromise. Finding a third way. Making lose-lose choices decisively. I think Truman said to surround yourself with people smarter than yourself and who frequently disagree with your point of view. I wish our new governor wisdom and patience.

I met James Moore of Berkman on Sunday. He writes today that the Clark campaign team is constipated (my word) by inner circle control.

By contrast, the Dean campaign is open to people and ideas. It is "out of control" in the best sense of the word. Innovators such as the people of MoveOn and Meetup and DeanLink are embraced. The campaign is fresh, alive, and inviting.

Exactly.

What do you think this means after Dean becomes President?

Can you run a White House this way?

How would this affect your relationships with the Hill?

How would this kind of openness change the way the executive branch is governed?

The military is increasingly moving combat operations into rigorously decentralized control with more individuals having more information to go along with their authority. I talked with a Naval captain who said that when a battle might last 30 seconds, there's no time for running things up a chain of command. The Dean campaign staff is the only one getting it. They understand the campaign is not the staff, it's the million people on the ground talking, meeting, paying for change.

Voters come to Dean as much for the openness of his campaign as for his message and the hope to beat Bush. His campaign makes you believe you matter, you make a difference. And then they prove it. Repeatedly. When was the last time that happened in Democratic politics?

Governor, remember the California Bloggers Platform, an invitation to transparency, community, productivity, and literacy. And take Winer's saying to heart: Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet. "akasig"

skypememe: RSS to MP3 to iPod

Sun, 28 Sep 2003 21:59:59 GMT

"smlogo"As long as we're talking about sound, I want scheduled text-to-speech conversion of pre-selected RSS feeds. Speak them into an MP3 file. Automatically download them to an iPod for offline listening at the gym or during a commute. Feeds become folders, posts become files, to help with navigation.

While you're doing it, check the RSS feeds for audio enclosures. Download those too. "akasig"

Location aware business blogging: Googling spicy noodles for BloggerCon.

Sun, 28 Sep 2003 16:16:47 GMT

Post data flows through the blogosphere, originating in one blog, continuing in others. So you need two levels of geocoding:

posts (about the content) and
channels (about the publication).

Both need to flow through syndication systems (RSS) so aggregators find them and publishing systems (html) so Google does too.

Google Labs pilot Search by Location reads web pages to guess at location. How good is it?

Things I might want in Cambridge, Mass:

Pizza. Bertucci's, Angelo's, Pinocchio's.
Blogs (not enough signal for the noise)

Guide to Problematical Library Use
number20
News-le-Grand
Eastgate Systems, source of Storyspace, Tekka , and the Tinderbox cms.

Spicy Noodles. Cafe China, Changsho, Shilla, Ma Soba
Police. Harvard's, Belmont's Tuft's, the Cambridge police blotter
Shoe store. City Sports, Sola for Men.

Pretty good for general content (except for porn), but the blog results were horrible. Google seems to ignore geocoding in meta tags or in sidebars. So if I'm blogging in Knoxville about a political protest in Atlanta, Google thinks I'm in Atlanta, until I blog about someplace else. In the United States, Google is very aware of zip codes.

This becomes very important for three business blogging applications:

Customer blog networks.
Retail blog networks.
Intranet blog networks.

Customer weblog networks are where you issue a weblog for each customer. This may be a private blog ("Tell me how you feel about our working relationship without the world knowing.") or a public service blog ("You're a rocker, we're a record label, blog on!"). How was that concert last night? Is there a pattern of poor customer service near our Winetka store?

Retail blog networks are where you issue a weblog to each of your field locations instead of a boring web page. You have a chain of 500 weight loss centers. Roll out blogs to each, substituting nearby human voices and faces for your corporate polish. That's the point of retail anyway, isn't it? But customers need to find the local content and Google is their tool.

Intranet blog networks are largely invisible to Google. Again, you have two views of interest.

Looking outside. Do you leave the building? Do your blog posts contain customer, competitor, regulatory, supplier, or other external data? Geocoding may prove useful.
Looking inside. Are your operations spread out? Are you sprawling across multiple floors in an office building, buildings in a complex or campus, multiple cities or countries? How are your people reacting to a natural disaster? What are people at the plant writing about the pending merger?

Location is often proxy for other measures of connection. Organization (the Eastern Division). Language (Italian). Affinity (Go Cubs).

Moblogging may make both forms of geocoding automatic for users (GPS for each post, billing address for the blog) but the servers must also encode, store, transmit, and render geocoded weblog html and RSS/Atom feeds. "akasig"