Global Neighbourhoods

Back into the Sandbox

It has been a little over three weeks since I finished proofing Twitterville and sent it off to my publisher for the last time before I see the thing in hard cover.

Since then, I have been kicking back more than I usually do, playing in my garden, with my wife, dog, cat and a few friends who I've missed during the reclusive process I require to write a book. It's nice to get out.

It's also scary, when I wrap up a project that took so much time and attention. There is a feeling that I have touched the top of a mountain and have stepped into a vacuum, a bubble where my work and focus have been excluded.

But I have a great number activities coming up. And for a three-week rest period, there has been a lot of planning and thing and doing.

First, I am going to do everything I can, and go everywhere that time and budget allows me to promote Twitterville. I feel good about the book. I think the stories I've told about the incredible people I've met in Twitterville are stories worth telling and sharing.

I'm planning a big party sometime in August. I have begun to invite people who are my close friends and people who are in the book. My friend Tatyana Kanzaveli has agreed to produce it for me and we are currently raising sponsorship, which we of course need before we can open the floodgates to the public. So far, Network Solutions and Intuit have kicked in, so we are well on our way. I'll tell you more about that when I have more to tell and I hope that will be soon.

Next, I am thrilled, THRILLED to announce that BurrellesLuce, the media planning, monitoring and measurement service for social media, online and print has signed up to sponsor this blogsite starting July 15, and I have agreed to pst at least once weekly--thus the title of this post.

This bog has served me as a sandbox, I play in it, try things out and watch how they develop.  I allow myself to stray and wander to cover whatever interests me.

Since 2005, the core focus for me in this sandbox has been social media and how it is changing the lives of people and the structures of institutions. Essentially, what I do is I talk to people about how social media changes their work, play and cultures.

Over these past few years I have interviewed more than 400 people in 38 countries about how they use social media. A majority of these interviews have been in the section called the Social Media Global Report. Projects that start there have resulted in two hardcover books, Naked Conversations, Twitterville; The Conversational Conversations, a Dow Jones, eBook and contributions to BusinessWeek.com, as well as FastCompany.TV.

For a while, I'm going to play in the sandbox, interviewing people about social media. I am looking for interesting and useful stories. I am happy to hear any that you think are useful and interesting.  am particularly interested in hearing those that are unique; that stretch the boundaries of social media. I am more interested in the human element, but I remain primarily a business writer. Please email me or leave a comment hear if you know someone or something you think I should cover.

I'm a sucker for a good story, so please tell me one.

At some point, a subject will come along that may lead to my next book. I certainly hope so and I am always searching for my next book. I will pursue a subject for a while and see if it fits for that topic, then either leap into it or move away.

For the past several months I have been talking to my friend Tom Stitt about a subject that has his passion and which invokes great interest on my part--the role of social media in healthcare. It's a great subject, and there are more than enough stories about cool people in healthcare who are changing the medical practice, respecting patient choices. There are also people like ePatientDave and Drew Olanoff who are using social media to share ideas and information and support.

But ultimately, I realized that a book we were going to call Conversational Healthcare, was not one I should help write. This subject greatly interests me, and I will write about healthcare and social media many times in the coming months. But it does not grab my passion as does another subject. Tom is continuing with the project and I have agreed to write the forward to his book which nw has a new working title.

What did grab my attention and my passion over the past few weeks is the role that Twitter has played in shedding light on the dark awfulness that has followed the Iran Election and I have little doubt that the hours I have spent following that story will be part of  my next book.

If it had not been for Twitter, Flickr and YouTube the world would not know and probably not care about what as happened there. Social media let people everywhere hear and see what has been happening to a people who were fooled into thinking they were part of a democracy when they were not. People bypassed governments and traditional media to inform each other. Truth in Iran keeps bypassing those who would suppress it via handheld devices and it is a fundamental change in how people connect.

This story has my passion. Iran itself may not be my next book, but it is likely to be a component. It seems a direct descendant of stories I covered in Twitterville including Mumbai, Israeli-Gaza, Janis Krums and US Air 1549 on the Hudson.

At this point, the likely focus of my new book will be an extension of what I call "Braided Journalism," the title of my favorite Twitterville Chapter. It is the idea that news requires both the efforts of traditional news-gathering organizations as well as the feet on the streets of the world being covered by people with connected devices in their hands.

I am in no great hurry to start the next book. There is still a great deal of time and effort needed in support of Twitterville. But for a while, much of my focus will be directed at the points where traditional and citizen journalism converge and intertwine to make something entirely new and perhaps, better.

It's nice to be playing in the sandbox again.

SAP Global Survey Office 2.0 Talking Points

I'm hosting a star-studded panel on social computing at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco this Thursday.  In my opening comments, I will have a mere five minutes to address the SAP Global Survey, which has taken a good portion of my attention over the past two months. Here are my preliminary talking points, but I may need to do some speed-speaking to get it all in.

• In June, SAP asked me to do some traditional research on social media to help them be a thought leader on the subject. I suggested that because social media involves adhering to cult of generosity, I should conduct interviews, like I did for Naked conversations—transparently on my blog.  Less than a week later, SAP VP Mike Prosceno sent me the following email: “It’s a go.”

• In two months, I’ve interviewed over 40 people in more than 15 countries. I’ve posted more than 40,000 words on subject. Spoke with world famous bloggers, high school kids, Cambodian NGO workers, and Ukranian Citizen Journalists.

• Survey took on a life of its own illustrating the community powers of social media. In the beginning I was structured. I sent email questions that people were supposed to send back. Instead, they posted the answers on their own blogs. People I did not interview, rolled their own questions and posted or sent them back. Joe Thornley sent a video clip. Others started asking my questions on my behalf on Facebook and sending me answers. Some folk thought I asked stupid questions and changed them, then answered. It has become an open source survey in every way.

• Too early for conclusions.  But here are some early findings.

• Social media is active and growing on all continents and most major islands of the world.
• As innovators start looking past blogs, blogs are taking off in the enterprise.
• All social media tools get adopted first by non-corporate users, then seem to catch on in the enterprise two years later. Video is hot now among consumers. Watch for massive corporate adoption in 2009-10.
• Social media tends to start with kids. Think of what that means to your enterprise moving forward.

• The universal tool worldwide is the social network. It is being adopted by consumers and businesses everywhere in both localized and global forms.

That brings us to today’s panel. Introduce:

• Anil Dash, Vice President, Evangelism, Six Apart
• John McCrea, Vice President of Marketing, Plaxo
• Adam Nash, Senior Director, Product, LinkedIn
• Shiv Singh, Enterprise Solutions Director, Avenue A | Razorfish
• Athena von Oech, Director of Advocacy & Support, Ning

Blogging and my Global Neighborhood

I have a great many reasons to be grateful for what blogging has done for me. Not the least of them is that my circle of friends has geographically expanded and sometimes this allows me to get together with people I've met either through blogging or because of it.

[Marco Palombi.  Photos by Shel]

Yesterday, I took some time off and walked on the beach with Marco Palombi, founder of Splinder and one of Italy's most successful entrepreneurs. He is planning to move to Silicon Valley and study artificial intelligence and the Semantic Web issues. We talked about the difference in Italian and California cultures and he reminded me of how valuable the tech culture is where I live.

A couple of weeks ago I had dinner with Loic LeMeur and his lovely wife Geraldine. They too are moving to this area. The leMeurs have bought a house in San Francisco and Loic plans to start a technology Joost Channel of online TV. Loic and I healed an old personal wound and remembered how much we enjoy each other. I'm glad he's coming and that we now share a passion for the coming video dominated web.

[Ignacio Escribano, Argentine Citizen Journalist]

Also two weeks ago, I enjoyed a fabulous four-hour lunch with Ignacio Escribano and Eduardo Lomanto, from Buenos Aires, Argentina, both of La Nacion, the national newspaper. They were here to learn more about social media because Ignacio has started a Citizen Journalism site for the paper. It was a first meeting but the relationship is ongoing. I plan to interview Ignacio for the SAP Global Survey. He's a true Renaissance Man, a Boston-educated doctor, former traditional journalist, recorded vocalist who has lived in five countries.

Then there was Allan Martinson, an Estonian VC, who was my host-guide to Estonia last October.  It was Allan who introduced me to the Estonian President, the former prime minister, some social networking entrepreneurs and the top guy at Skype headquarters.  Allan and I had lunch in July and discussed business in Russia the Baltics and the US, where he pointed out there are far greater opportunities than everywhere else.

[Pat Phelan, roaming freely]

Next month, my good friend Pat Phelan, founder of Roam4Free who will be over here from Cork, Ire. I coached Pat on blogging when he first started and I am excited about the possibilities of his Roam4Free startup which should make it easy and extremely cheap to talk by phone without the carriers sucking money out of our pockets by the minute.

I just love all this. As Marco and I discussed while walking on the beach yesterday.  I am from a small industrial city in Massachusetts.  I knew the world was bigger than where I lived and I was restless by age 10 to go beyond it.

It is a great pleasure to meet and talk with so many people from so many places who share my passion for technology and bring so many cultural perspectives to my awareness.

Facebook. Is it my global neighbourhood?

I'm sitting at  Chicago's O'Hare with a couple of hours to spare. It is the first time in a while I've had to reflect on some big issues, at least ones that are big to me.

It been a few months since I announced the postponement Global Neighbourhoods, what I hope will e my next book. The primary reason, as I stated, was that I make more money consulting than I do writing books and speaking about them. I had strayed to far to the fame side of the fame/fortune continuum.

But there were other reasons for tabling Global.  One was I could describe a situation that every business thinker needs to consider, but I could not get far enough ahead of the relentless changes in the world of social media far enough to write a book thjat could remain relevant for at least a couple of years. There I was thinking about what a flat world meant for non-American startups, when YouTube became part of Google, when young people stared slipping out of the vast walled city of MySpace; when people started Twittering and then Powncing as they realized their First Life was better than the second.

You just can't write a hard cover book on a constantly changing situation.

Things, I had written became generic and common knowledge.  My core concept was that the social media sites were not the key relevance, but the way people self organized along topical rather than geographic lines was. That we and no more than 200 online friends would bop from one site to another finding each other time after time after time.

I was among the first to note that the importance of social media to business rested not in ourselves but in our children who would soon replace us at the prime movers in the workplace and in the market.

I got lots of encouragement for these and a few other ideas. But I couldn't quite figure out where it was going, and what part of this thinking would endure for a couple of years, rather than become blatantly obvious.

I was never quite satisfied with our Naked Conversations ending.  We declared the beginning of a new Conversational Era, replace the Broadcast Era.By the time you read the book, that was quite obvious, I would wager. For Global Neighborhoods, I wanted to paint a bigger picture with broader strokes, and I couldn't quite see where all this was going.

Then Facebook opened it's APIs. Two months later, there are 2000 approved 3rd-party applications and 10,000 or so, waiting to be approved. Students continue to do what they have always done on Facebook, not noticing that millions of business users are stampeding into Facebook, that most social media organizations are enjoying bursts of popuarity by using Facebook as a distribution platform. 

People are self organizing on Facebook.  The are building their own small groups of friends who share common interests. They are bopping around from one group to another, sharing thoughts, watching video clips, watching pictures, organizing face-to-face events, meeting new people based on mutual friends or interests.

Facebook comes closer to being the Global Neighborhood than I had imagined something could.

Maybe I should just write a book on Facebook. Maybe I should write it, notion my blog but on Facebook.

What do you think?

Google Analytics. It tells me where you're at.

It's not the numbers it's the geography.  If the truth be told, my range is pretty constant.  If I blog a lot, I have about 25,000 visitors a month.  If I'm sparser in posting, I drop to about 17,000.  At the peak of Naked Conversations, we were hitting 30,000 a month and when Robert and I got into a virtual barroom brawl with Amazon's CTO, we had our only 50,000 visitor month ever. I don't really need to look to know what's going on there. The signals I get from Technorati, Typepad and Analytics all reinforce the accuracy of each other.  They come closer all the time.

What fascinates me, and the reason I spend time every day on Google Analytics  is the map overlay of where people are sitting when they visit this blog. If you look at it by continent, country and city many stories get told. I am more popular by far in cities where I've made public appearances than not. About 40 percent of my readership comes from outside the US. Per total population, I am more widely read in Canada than in the US.

I am more popular in Dublin than anywhere else on Earth. I assume Analytics includes in includes Cork, where I have visited twice and enjoy a few ongoing friendships and conversations with people there.  Toronto and London are usually in my top five or six cities and they are also places where I maintain friendships and have spoken. I'm bigger in Tallinn, Estonia than in Moscow and that is no surprise.  When I wrote about Russia being a cyberbully to their little neighbor, my Tallinn readership swelled by over 500%. Actually, it was the first time I saw noticeable readership in Moscow as well and it is nice to know that even when I'm shouting, someone seems to be listening.

Mentions help. When my friend KD Paine spoke in Dubai, she mentioned me. My readership there shot from 2 to about 90.  Now a month later, I have an average of 35 visits a day from Dubai, and that residual impact is greatly appreciated.

The diversity is amazing. I have been visited in the past month by people on all continents, residing in 2,234 communities. I had a regular reader in Rwanda, but he seems to have disappeared.Overall, I have nearly 300 African visitors daily.  I have 11 readers in the Palestinian territories and as many readers in Arab states as I have in Israel. Someone in a place called Petah Tiqua seems to read me daily. More than 500 people read me in the happy isles of Oceana.

To my knowledge, there has never been a day when my readership from any city on Earth has exceeded four percent of my total. This pleases me because it indicates that this blog is sort of a global neighborhood onto itself. Speaking of which, Global Neighborhoods is not spiked as a couple of fictitious blog characters have written.  It is postponed.  I needed to get my consultng business going again and it is coming along nicely. But there will be a book and my return to serious work on it is not all that far away.

We are now Global Neighbourhoods.net

I have often quipped that I have a master's degree in blog typos. It seems this carried over to my filling out the form to register my domain with GoDaddy.com several months ago.

I registered Global Neighourhoods.com, not Global Neighborhoods.  The GoDaddy folk then redirected Global Neighborhoods to my core blog url of RedCouch.typepad.com. Are you with me so far?

Then nearly a year goes by until today.  When somebody--actually a new business prospect--tells me that when she types in my url she gets directed to a link farm. Crisply, I tell her she forgot the "u" and send her back.  She goes back and then tells me there was no typo.
Quickly I post the previous warning. The I dial up GoDaddy, preparing to use my most assertive voice in the key of shriek. As happens whenever I call GoDaddy, I reach a real human in support in a very short time, perhaps two minutes. As usual, he's brief and sharp in confirming that I am me. I relate the problem. He asks me to hold and comes back to tell me that I had typoed my domain name.

The way Link Farms work is simple and nasty. They use computers to find available URLs and they register them. Then they use the redirected traffic to sell advertising and to sell URLs to people who want to use them for legitimate business. When I tried to buy Global Neighborhoods.com at the beginning of this journey, they asking price was $10,000.  I countered with a$1 offer and the deal was never consummated.

"Don't feel badly," my GoDaddy guy tells me. "This mistake has been made by thousands of people,"he tells me. Yeah, but hw many people does GoDaddy register?

"Quite a few million," he tells me, which puts me in that one percentile club that I didn't want to join.

So, I register http://globalneighbourhoods.net and put a forward on it, which should kick in sometime in the next 24 hours. As residual winner here is Hugh Macleod
because now I have to buy a few thousand new Street cards from him with the .net replacing .com.

We now return to our regularly scheduled day.

Shelving My New Book for a While

I had a great time last night at the blog dinner honoring the illustrative Hugh MacLeod, except people kept asking me how the new book is coming and the short answer is that for right now it isn't.

I want very much to immerse myself. I love the concept and I love nothing more than writing particularly, books.  I think the concept of Global Neighborhoods and of what the world looks like when our kids replace us in the marketplace are interesting and important to a great many people. I have amassed great stories from people all over the Western world.

But I need to face up to bread and butter issues.  Being an author is not as lucrative as many people might think. Nor are the speaking engagements. In fact, on the fame-and-fortune continuum, I have been way over on the fame side and need to move closer to the fortune side, at least to the mortgage-covering side.

I don't think I'll have much trouble increasing my consulting practice, but just so you know, I have immediate openings for new clients.  To learn more, email me here.

Topix: The Global Local Blog Newspaper

Long before Naked Conversations was even a glimmer in anyone's eye, I had an idea for a global local newspaper.  I got passionate about it, event putting together a small business plan. My issue was that it was not a small concept.

The essential concept was that every event of interest to anyone could e locally covered. My "global, local blog newspaper," as I called it, would cover the local Little League sports teams, would let citizens file stories on pot holes in their town's rats in slumlord buildings.  They would write and take pictures and maybe someday, video record events everywhere. Their may be regional editors who reviewed these stories, but more important, the blogosphere would be the fact checker the way ysers were becoming the fact checker on a new phenomenon called Wikipedia.

There was a monetization concept and it was tied to local advertising.  The local girl's soccer team coverage might be sponsored by local merchants, national events by major brands.  All payment would be based on a buck-a-click charge to advertisers. My global-local-blog-newspaper would then split the ad revenues with its global legions of citizen journalists.

I actually peddled the idea.  i thought I found my partners who had money and were interested in the ad model. except a closer look at them revealed they were direct marketing wolves in social media clothing.  I then pitched the idea to a couple of "online media" folk at Knight Ridder, who used that kindly pedantic attitude that essentially said they did not believe for a minute this idea would every work.

It was too big and too complicated for me to start up on my own, so I put it aside as something I would get back to someday.  As the song goes, someday never came.

So when I started reading some of the enthusiasm for the new, improved Topix among bloggers, I respect, I decided to take a long hard look. I had met Topix CEO Rich Skrenta at a conference a few months back and like what he had to say about community focus.  I also found it amazing that as we sat on a panel in Miami, I discovered that we both lived less than a mile apart in San Carlos, CA. In his talk he had been hinting along the lines of my old dusty project, and we talked about getting together once we were back in the hood. We never did.

I spent a couple of hours kicking around the new Topix this morning and I cannot say that it has fulfilled the vision I had back in 2003.  But I do think it has built out the essential framework and has the potential to build out the entire concept of the Global-local-blog newspaper.

I hope so. I'll keep watching.

Kathy Sierra and the Death Threats

Years ago, when my blog was still ItSeemstoMe, I wrote a piece cause-based ice cream brands. It was a fairly light essay, but it invoked a vitriolic, anti-Semetic comment from someone who demonstrated he or she knew where I lived, knew my wife's name and owned a gun. It scared me and for a long while I stopped mentioning Paula's name and that I live in San Carlos, CA. As it turned out, I never wrote about gun control again and I cannot tell you whether it is coincidence or not.

Kathy Sierra has suffered a great deal more than that, and apparently a good number of women have also suffered disturbing and outrageous offenses. I feel for her and I am saddened that what has occurred has done so.  The fact that it occurred on the blogosphere is not a key point to this story.  It just makes it more personal for me because the Blogosphere is one of my global neighborhoods.

It is the same as learning that something violent or criminal or ugly happened in my physical neighborhood, or that some women I knew in college was sexually assaulted. Maybe it shouldn't be this way.  Maybe we should all focus on the more massive ugliness that takes place every day in places like Darfur.

But we don't. We ignite when something bad happens close to home, or to someone we know or knew.

I say all in response to the lead story in today's  San Francisco Chronicle by Dan Forst entitled "Bad behavior in the blogosphere."

Forst, conducted some decent journalistic legwork, getting good quotes and providing a very clear chronology of the events leading up to this controversy. But what bothered me is that the useful and informative stuff was buried, after the story jumped inside the paper. The Page One sections seems to me dominated by Tabloid type inferences that exaggerate a serious and complicated issue.For example:

"The incident and its aftermath have drawn back the curtain on a computer
culture in which the more outrageous the comment, the more attention it gets.
It's a world that many women in particular see as still dominated by men and
where personal attacks often are defended on grounds of free speech.

In addition, many of the newest tools of the Internet are coming into
play. Blogs and online communities were supposed to herald an era in which "the
wisdom of crowds" guided online behavior to a higher plane. Instead, instances
of mob rule appear to be leading the discussion into the sewer."

The Blogosphere is a pretty transparent place with very few curtains except maybe in Amanda Chapel's cross-dressing room. The more "outrageous comments" are regularly taken down by most bloggers and therefore they get no attention.  Women have legitimate complaints about their treatment by some men in general.  This is not unique to the blogosphere. Personal attacks are defended by free speech in general.  it's a Constitutional thing.  Personal threats is another story.  They are illegal online or off and should be.

I wish people would actually read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, which i considered a brilliant book. But a few comments on a blog, or a few hundred comments on Digg doth not a wise crowd make.What Surrowiecki is talking about is that a largecrowd--an electorate, or visitors to a county fair, very often comes out with a more accurate answer than does a panel of so-called experts.


My point is this: What has happened to Kathy Sierra is a bad thing.  It is not a BAD BLOGOSPHERE thing.  It shows that their is ugliness in our neighborhood. If Dan forst wants to see a high incident of neighborhood, violence, threats, female abuse and ugliness, he only needs to walk out the doors of the San Francisco Chronicle building in San Francisco and walk one block in any direction.







Technorati Tags: kathysierra, SFchronicle, danforst

Google working on Instant Global Translations

According to Reuters, Google is working on a whole news approach to translating from one language into another.  To me this is extremely important because the largest single barrier I see to my vision of Global Neighborhoods is language.

As it stands now, computer translations, such as you get from Babblefish and Google translate are rarely close to accurate and often a bit goofy. The new approach, called "statistical machine translations" may still be a bit awkward and will still contain a few literal errors, but comes a whole lot closer to providing computer translations that come a whole lot closer to what human translators would give you.

Right now, I have conversations quite often with people all over the world, I like to say.  But in fact, they are only people who speak English, the only language in which I have any proficiency. With the right translation technology  could speak every day with people whose primary language was Chinese or Japanese, Russian, Farsi or whatever.

So could everybody.

If you think about it, the implications are really huge. People could everwhere could speak to people everywhere else.  We would not have the filtering of third-party organizations deciding on what gets translated and how that translation will be nuanced.