Global Neighbourhoods

Dell--What really burns ...

... are the flames shooting out of yet another Dell. This from Gizmodo .  Maybe, next year, instead of a Burning Man event, we could have a Burning Dell somewhere out in the desert.

I would almost feel sorry for those Dell folk until I remember all the people sitting and waiting, and waiting for help on the Dell support lines. Dell Hell has no flames.  It is actually more like limbo, where you wait and wait for the help that never comes.

This is only the second burning Dell, at least to be photographically captured. There are many more burned customers.

Do Comments Help?

Now that I have had my comments restored on this blog, I've had some very interesting back channel discussion. One corporate friend asked me if I could give any examples of comments making much of a difference for companies enterprises under assault my unhappy blog denizens.

He emphasized that the issue is comments, not links or posts.  Without it being said, my assumption is that corporation is not certain they are worth the trouble of the spam and scorn they might endure.

My answer is resoundingly yes. I cited three examples from Naked Conversations.  My retrospect is that my favorite example did not apply.

1. Guided by History.  When the Wells Fargo blog launched, the first reaction was to call it lame. A Wells Fargo spokesperson placed comments on just about every posting that came out.  He showed they were listening.  People got more polite.  Guided by history got better and has now evolved into a disaster preparedness cause blog. If the comments had not been used, Guided might not have had the chance to evolve.
2. Kryptonite.  When the story of the BIC-pickable lock first emerged, Kryptonite chose to ignore the blogosphere, thus becoming the first poster child for the foibles of ignoring the newly emerged force. Nine months later, when Robert and I wrote about Kryptonite in that manner, Donna Tocci, the company's PR person, jumped onto our4 postingf with a series of comments that passionately argued Kryptonite's case.  This resulted in a dialog that persuaded us to write a more balanced version of the incident and more important changed considerable number of minds about the little lock maker's sensitivity to customers.

These are but three examples. I'd like to hear more and so would my friend. Do you know of an example of how comments were used to help a corporation improve their position in a difficult time?

Please post them here. With a little luck Typepad will allow them to go through.

Global Neighborhoods Interview: Martin Green

Something nice happens to me every now and then as a consultant.  My client becomes my friend, and the relationship endures beyond the duration and scope of the consulting gig. This is exactly what happened with Martin Green, general manager for CNET communities who I consulted about blogging and presentation back in April-May.

Martin has not only become my friend, he has inadvertently helped me to shape Global Networks and has earned his place in it.  This Q&A will be used in part in the book.

Here just about verbatim are the results of my recent interview with him. I think parts reveal why I like and respect him so much:

1. For the benefit of our studio audience, could you tell me a bit about who you are and what you do a CNET?

I've been with CNET in various capacities since 1996.

I manage the acquisitions, operations and growth of our businesses in lifestyle areas such as food, parenting, and a bunch of areas like travel and sports through our photo sharing community Webshots.  My focus is on launching or growing social media brands for lifestyle categories.  We currently run Chow, Consumating, UrbanBaby and Webshots.  .

2. I owe you no small amount of gratitude. It was during a discussion with you that I got the concept of Global Neighborhoods. You discussed online neighborhoods with a great deal of passion and vision. Your perspective had more to do with the safety and familiarity of online neighborhoods.  Could you describe this concept and how this impacts people online?

I live in a neighborhood where I walk my dog every morning.  We drop into together to the local coffee shop where we say hi to a guy called Ismael.   The neighborhood evolves, but a social framework gives it continuity, a set of expectations and a shared human experience.   

Within cities like New York, there are many rich, vibrant neighborhoods. Each stands for something - and neighborhoods such as Williamsburg attract new people who want to participate and add to that experience.

Online, I can join neighborhoods that are about my interests - not where I live.   There are neighborhoods around cars, travel, food or almost anything else. Members are there to talk, share, learn and commune.  CNET believes branded social media properties can be built around these neighborhoods.

Many portals and start ups are not building neighborhoods - they are building platforms for everyone to use together or for people to use to connect or search based on their friends.  Their focus is on size and marketing to their user base - I think discriminating people ultimately are looking for the best experience for themselves as community members.

3. How does this neighborhood concept impact what you’re doing as CNET Communities general manager?

A lot - online neighborhoods are built by members - not the company. Lots of companies want to build communities - that's backward - it's like a planned real estate development - it feels hollow. But you can create the conditions.  We try to moderate the community to keep it on topic.  And we hire from the community so the people working full time on the brand experience are authentic and part of the community.  We are also working to blend interactive video, audio, editorial and programming with community social media.  If we are able to do that well, it's a better media experience for members and marketers.

4. Can you describe for me how the neighborhood works in Webshots?  Consummate? And Chowhound?

The central idea is that for every interest there's a place where people know they can come to hang out and share with each other around that topic.   Everything else is built on top of that. Webshots has 10 channels and thousands of topics and tags within those channels ranging from gardening, cycling and travel.  Chowhounds are passionate about food.  Consumating has attracted a group of interesting urban twenty somethings.  UrbanBaby provides a community for new moms.

5.  You’ve argued that your community concept gives everyday people a greater voice than do blogs. Can you expand upon that a bit?

People in a community are there to share. Blog services don't provide an audience - the blogger does. If I post on my blog about a restaurant I went to, you, my friend Mike, my wife and a few other people will read it - that's it. 

Publishing a restaurant review on my own blog is akin to me standing on a street corner in New York trying to attract people to listen to me for my restaurant review.  The readers of my blog aren't there for my food reviews. Aside from a handful of people like you, the vast majority of bloggers haven't got many people listening to the topics they blog about.  Communities give people a place to go to listen to and participate in an existing conversation with other people who care to converse about that hobby, sport, interest or life experience.  Communities provide a stage and audience as well as the production equipment.  Most blog tools only provide the equipment.  And a community gives you the ability to be an performer or be part of the audience at different times within a social framework that has some familiarity from day to day. 

If I post on Chowhound, I'll get many responses from people I know and respect in the context of food - and I'm sure that one of them will share back something that I didn't know.  Communities shape social altruism.
 
6. Play this forward a bit. How do communities impact online communications 3-5 years from now? How about neighborhoods?

That's a big ask. Here's a take: I think personal blogs will be used like a combo digital name card/resume/journal - and most people will join digital versions of trade shows / book clubs neighborhoods in the form of online communities - ie: they will double blog - and services will need to support that the content belongs to the members not them. 

Some blogs run by uber bloggers will look more like community sites.  If you look at the comments on posts on TechCrunch - it's starting to feel like a branded community and I think that makes TechCrunch even better.  I bet that many commenters are more read for a given TechCrunch comment than anything they've blogged about.  I suggested to Mike that he run moderated threaded message boards on TechCrunch - he could give the frequent posters a thin profile that also is a widget on their blog.  Unclear how profile pages on community sites end up working with personal blogs - however I think that widgets and APIs are starting to mean that they are profiles and blogs are being integrated by member/blogger.  I like that notion.

7.  Are all neighborhoods safe?  How does one know?

All neighborhoods are not safe - and of course you shouldn't post certain info even on the safe ones if you don't control who sees the content because it becomes part of the searchable web. Not dissimilar to real neighborhoods - you need to check them out first, see if you fit in and will be accepted, conduct yourself responsibly and be very careful putting personal info out there.   

Every neighborhood provider should educate their membership.  Earlier this year, we started a Websense campaign to educate our members to be careful on a handful of issues - like not public ally posting personally identifiable info of minors.  Neighborhood providers can also give members features to control who sees what parts of their content.   You need to provide both education and control to members.  For example, many Facebook users think their neighborhood is de facto private and therefore safe - not necessarily - Facebook needs to educate their members about that.

8. In your view, who should set neighborhood standards?

The overall tone or standards are set equally by the moderators and the members.  It's a handshake.

9. How do online neighborhoods differ from tangible ones?

The best part of online neighborhoods is the ability to "congregate" the specific.  If I'm a new mom, and I'm researching car seats and I have an C Class Mercedes, a good online global neighborhood for new moms is going to have someone with that car who can tell you that the car seat you're looking at won't fit.  Try asking that of your friends or the people down the street.

10.  Is there a danger that one can accidentally stray into a dangerous online neighborhood when they are part of such a large community?

Of course - but online you can put a big sign saying - down this street is the XYZ neighborhood - if that's sound good to you, click here. I'm a fan of community sites that have a stance on what they'll accept - say R or PG content - and publicizing and strictly enforcing that.

Comments Have Been Fixed

Well, it's Day Four and finally Comments have been finally repaired. I never figured out just went wrong or why it started or whether or not it will return.  I did manage to get attention from the good folks at Typepad, but only after a I became a wheel squeaky enough to be heard fairly high up.

Most people could not have done what I did. I happen to know some senior Six Apart players and we get along pretty well. This is unfortunate and is not the way it should be.  In the past, Six Apart response speed and quality support has been first rate, after I just filled out one of their Help tickets. I would not characterize my experience of the last four days in that manner. I hope that it was a mere speed bump for a company growing in the fast lane but I must admit the my confidence is a bit bruised.

That being said, I received about a dozen enotes from Naked readers who had tried to leave legitimate comments here only to be blocked and told they were spammers. I hope that some of you circle back and post them now.

I missed the cnversation.  I really did.

I apologize again for the frustration some of you experienced.

Give Free Advice. Win $600 Phone

My client Pat Phelan has an offer you can't refuse over at his Free Roaming blog.  Tell him what you think of his new Web page.  Give him the best advice and you'll win a $600 Nokia super duper cell phone. Personally, I think the page can use some help.

Cheap Cellular Competition: The User Wins

Jimmy Durante was a popular performer when I was a kid. One of his most frequent lines was the complaint: "Everybody's getting into the act."

I'm working with an Irish company, Roam4Free, helping Pat Phelan with his blog strategy. In the past few weeks, not one, but two other companies have made interesting launches into this same reduced-cost cellular space.  To make matters worse, both JaJah and Rebtel seem to have great products.  To make it even more ironic, I have friends in senior positions at both companies as well.

The thing is that at this point in history, Roam4Free, JaJah and Rebtel don't seem to be competing.  They are each too new.  The opportunities far too great. none knows what the future brings and two or more of them may all end up playing on the same team as well as the same field.

So who are the wins and loses, when you look at the newly crowded playing field? Well the incumbents lose, because their entire business models depend upon high rates to customers.  Then they use a portion of their revenue to support government lobbying efforts that protect them. They will remain powerful for a while, but these three companies, plus VOIP players like Skype will bypass the many incumbent-imposed barriers and get to users who greet these new cheaper, better services with open arms.

Skype and other VOIP carriers will also lose I think, because most of us really don't like to be tethered to our computers when we talk. We prefer the mobility of cell phones.

There is a huge pool of winners here, however, even if all three of these new players fall by the evolutionary wayside and that is the end user. Cheap-to-free services always benefit users as do disruptive competitive challenges.

This is nice for people in economically developed countries.  This is a huge liberation to people in developing nations.  My client Pat has blogged about his strong connection to Bangladeshis working in Ireland who miss their loved ones back home.  Very Cheap Cellular allows them to stay connected.  It allows people in these countries to have greater access to the rest of the world.

This is a good thing.

No &*&%* Comments

Well, we are now in our third day in which people trying to Comment get response that they have been blocked because they are suspected spammers.  I am still getting messages when I try to log in telling me that my access is denied because I am not authorized as an author at Naked Conversations.

This is not of my doing. It all happened while Typepad was changing the Author's view to a new look. What is really annoying is that it has now been three days and I have sent support notes twice that remain unanswered.

If you do have a comment on anything I've posted, please send it to me. I really miss the conversation.

Maggie's SunnySpot is a great Small Business Case Study

If we were writing Naked Conversations right now, Maggie Knowles SunnySpot would very likely be used as a great example of a very human small business blog. Maggie, is a residential real estate broker in Souther California, hardly a topic that gets my passion twanger clanging.

But Maggie's blog is a lot better than the brochure type delivery you might fearfully anticipate from a ReMax franchisee. But Maggie is wise enough to understand that we do business with people we know and that's because we trust people we know.

Maggie has her Remax sign well-placed in her banner, but her topics are on all sorts of things, such as global warming.  She interviews people in her industry with a definite attempt to get them to give information that is relevant to potential home buying/selling readers. She figures people with similar values to her own will seek her out.

It's too soon to call her interesting attempt a success. It only started in March. In fact, she's new to the profession having only started in January 2005. In her first year she sold nine houses, but to accomplish that, she told me she

"...spent a lot of money advertising on the radio, newspapers, with a web site, and got no return for my money. I produced a public access show about real estate and even though I was well prepared, the equipment at the cable company was very old and the interns very inexperienced.It took months to get studio time and weeks to get the show on the air.

I was looking for an inexpensive way to market myself as a real estate agent. Blogging seems to be the answer."

She gets the essential Cluetrain concept of the conversation generated through her blog

"I hope to get sellers calling me to list their house and buyers calling me to find them a house to buy. I hope to use it to meet successful people in my industry and create content for my blog via interviews with them. I hope that it will be a place that people can go and learn about me and what I value, to help me gain their trust. I hope it will help me attract clients who share similar values. I hope that I get to meet people all over the world. I hope that it will create opportunities for me to move away from the congestion of the Los Angeles area to somewhere closer to nature. Wow, I didn't realize I was hoping for so much!"

Maggie told me that on a recent day she had about 75 visitors, only one who became a prospect.  But then, the cost of acquiring the prospect was incredibly low. Someone, please remind me to circle back to Maggie in a few months to determine of she becomes an example of a measurable ROI, something that most corporate decision makers are still struggling over.

Maui Internet Cafe & Surf Shop

Since I'm going bonkers with this photo thing tonight, I thought I'd go back to that "primitive Internet Cafe" I spole about in my previous post about the changing culture of Maui. I think this photo tells you it would have taken me over a thousand words to descibe in my previous post. And then it still would not be as clear.

Jeremiah Gets me Flickring

Two posts ago, was the first time that I displayed photos that came out in a way that did not embarrass me. I am now using using the HTML code that Flickr offers you in a certain one if its many photo views.  I would not have figured out how to do this on my own very easily except for the patient and persistent help of a blogging buddy, Jeremiah Owyang.

I needed to get photos going. Without them, audio and video clips, my posts are starting to look so yesterday, but that's not the point. The point is that I could not easily figure this out by using Flickr and not asking someone to advise me. Maybe, I'm becoming an old dog, but I don't think so. If Flickr wants to realize the huge potential so many of us see in it, then it needs to make some of its most valuable functionality a LOT easier.

Is it it me or is it them?  You guys tell me.

Maui Lavender Farm. Go there even if you're a guy

For those of you who come here to learn about blogging and business, please go to the next blogger on your dance card.  This post  is about about  the Lavender Farm I visited with my wife and her mom ( in Maui last week.

I promise to be back on-topic over the next few days, but for those of you may someday find yourself in Maui, and want to experience an off -touristy paths,  you might drive about 90 minutes from the main tourist places to experience
this commercial farm primarily raising more than a dozen variations of this fragrant, medicinal, edible herb.

If there is any connection at all my usual topics, it one of entrepreneurialism.
Alii Kula, is Hawaiian born of Chinese blood. He is the son and grandson of flower raisers,  cutters and floral arrangers.  Alii worked for many years cutting and arranging flowers.  It was the same job his father had held. He decided he wanted to use the talent that was his to create something that was his. He went off on his own.

Alii went upcountry from the commercial gardeners and started buying acreas from a cattle rancher.  Alii bought the land because it was on top of Mt Haleakala where the soil is rich in iron and volcanic deposits.  Some say, you can drop a walking stick into the soil and it will sprout. It was a girlfriend, a Maui Opera falsetto who gave him his first lavender sprig.  The sprig became fruitful and multiplied. The beauty is a bonus, the farm grows the core element in dozens of products from pefume, to mosquito repellents, to medicinal cpomponents--lavender has show some positive signs in fighting early stage breast cancer, for example.

The frosting on it is that the property has one of the most breathtaking panoramic  views I’ve seen. The high-altitude farm spills over miles into an all-too-blue ocean.

You can take walking tours, as we did, and they are as informative as they are fragrant. They have breakfast of lavender-something tea and scones, lavender cooking classes, wreath-making classes, or you can just go up there and stroll about on your own for free. You can buy almost every lavender based poroduct ever conceived including an organic mosquito repellent.

I’m told that most guys come up to the mountain being dragged by the scalp of their spouses or spousal equivalents.  Lavender just doesn’t sound like a guy thing. My advice, if you are of the male persuasion is to get past it.

This place is a thing of beauty. Catch it if you can.

Are you using a blog to promote your book?

My friend Rick (RB) Levin over at PC Talk Radio is looking for people who have used a blog to promote their books.  I know there's quite a few of you, so I don't want to leave anyone out.

It you are one of them, please post what you are doing in my comments and Rick will take it from there.

An Interview with Rick Segal

Rick Segal will play a big role in my next book, based on the fact that he is providing the ways and means for me to take this world tour starting three weeks from now.  I have known him for a longf time, but I have not known him well. I thought I'd interview him as I do so many other people when preparing for a book.

A Bit of his background: He's from Connecticut, and now lives in Toronto where he is a general partner in JL Albright Venture Partners, a venture firm with a pretty diverse portfolio. He's done four-year stints in both the US Air Force and Microsoft where he was director of technical services for the Internet Customer Unit.   He also was president and CEO of Microforum and ebusiness solutions company that went public.

He has written four books on network management and software development and he sits on several boards.

As you can see by his answers to my questions, which are published below pretty much verbatim, he his not the gabby type. He is not without a sense of humor, as readers of his blog, The Post Money Value will tell you and, as he reveals in this succinct Q&A below, he is not the gabby type.

1.  When did you get the idea for this upcoming world tour?

Two years ago, I thought about going around to various places to see if all this technology and progress in North America had any trickle down effect with the rest of the world. the wandering evolved from there.

2.  What do you expect to learn or accomplish by taking this trip?

I have no idea. I'm in listen, watch, and (hopefully) learn mode. I have no pre-set ideas nor am I looking for specific investment opportunities rather I'm working on various thesis points about the world being more connected and the impact these connections will have on  business, technology and the global economy.

3. Why did you approach me to join you on this journey?

You've been around a lot and have lived in Silicon Valley for a long time. It made sense to get another set of eyes and ears to filter the results of the trip.

4.  You have admonished Silicon Valley, particularly it’s venture community for arrogance, for seemingly believing it is the center of the universe. Why is this?  Do you think that SV venture is less important than it was five years ago?

I have actually not admonished SV nor really made a big deal about the valley's center of the universe attitudes rather I've been trying to make the point that I believe there is life on other planets, so to speak. I don't think the venture capital money is less important at all, rather has a different place in the ecosystem.

5. Champions of Silicon Valley see it as the world’s best ecosystem for tech startups.  In your view, is this still true?  Was it ever true?

It is one of the better places because of the quality of schools, the number of successful people who hung around and seeded others to be successful, and other reasons. Again, I hope that other places can begin to build/grow these required ecosystems so we begin to see {more] centers of excellence springing up around the world. It will be very hard to ever 'beat' Silicon Valley, but i don't think that is required. Boston, to name one example, does pretty good.

6. How has the connected world changed the opportunities for entrepreneurs in remote locations?

In the old days, so to speak, it was very hard to get a voice or have that voice heard. That is the single greatest barrier to entry. Today, a free blog, or a good service/idea, can get noticed and can take off. This very quiet, simple and very powerful notion is the key.

7.  Has technology made geography so irrelevant that a start up ecosystem can be global, rather than local?

No. Most things start local and ecosystems most likely will start local and grow beyond physical borders.

8.  How do you see investment opportunities changing because of the connected world?

Companies have to think globally from the perspective of resources, customers, etc. This is important because with technology and a global infrastructure, making it big might mean making it big in the UK, New Zealand, and Canada for your first 10 million vs. the old days of having to have a hit in the US before even thinking about expansion.  It changes the rules.

9.  What is the best business idea you have heard in the last year?

I'm working on them right now. Shhhh...

10.  What should I have asked you, but did not?

Briefs not boxers.

Global Neighborhoods-Hawaii Notes

(NOTE: The post is writer's notebook stuff. In some refined and reorganized form, I expect it to be somewhere in Global Neighborhoods. There will be a great many more pieces like this on this blog over the next few months. Your comments on these pieces are important.  Like Naked Conversations, my way of writing is to collaborate with the blogosphere. The blogosphere helped us write a much better book and I plan to use the technique again.)

I'm sitting under a tropical flowering shade tree on a Maui Beach behind the ResortQuest condominiums. I have three choices for connection, two from wifi and one through my EVDO card.  I stayed her last year and none of these worked from the beach.  I am 12 feet from the blue and balmy Pacific and I'm emailing people in the US, Canada, Australia and Ireland.Progress has inched forward and if you are ambivalent about it's relentless leaps and crawls, I am.

I've been coming to Maui for a very long time. On one hand, the sea and mountains, the volcanos, lavendar farms, garrish shorts and bronzed beack lovers have remained the same.  We eat at mostly the same restaurants and go out on the same boats.

But on the other hand a great deal has changed.  This morning I ran on the old south highway that runs from Kaanapali Shores to Kapalua. It is no more than a city street where you can occasionally glimpse the ocean between the palatial vacation homes and timeshares of people who call other places their homes. I have jogged here many times before and I used to see more ocean because the houses were smaller and belonged to locals who are being herded by economics to inland and upland places--away from the beaches that tourists will pay inflated dollars to touch. I jogged pass a shabby and inexpensive Internet Cafe. I think last year it was a snorkle shop.

When I first came here, you saw Hawaians and Hawaiian culture everywhere.  On the southeast corner of the island, past Kehai and before Makenah Beah, you'd see the locals partying, surfing, barbecuing and guzzling all over a majestic stretch of beach and huts. That's all gone now, replaced by the new Four Seasons, a very posh Hyatt and other topnotch hotels. Now, most of the Hawaians I see are working in hotels or hawking guided tours in street kyosks, where others used to offer what they said was Maui Wowie and more often than not was dried horse manure

Before you think of me getting on a soapbox to bemoan the good old days, I am one of those tourists who call elsewhere my home.  When I have top dollars I gladly exchange them for an ocean front in a nice hotel.  While I'm aware of the intrusion of geek devices to beaches, I find it utterly cool to use them to write pieces like this.

But I cannot help but notice the irony of it all. Technology has been changing the way things were ever since the wheel and fire and for the most part the world is indeed a better place because of it.  But we all tend to bemoan the change. The ncidence abound. While bloggers held an unconference in one section of Bangalore earlier this year, rioting in protest of cultural corruption ignited fires and took lives in a more impovershed neighborhood. El Quaida's most fundamental hatred of the west seems to be an objection to the culture we spread on soil they consider to be sacred.

But the change keeps accelerating. We are now a small, fast, flat world. In a few weeks, I will begin visiting people in places I never imagined I'd see.  I'll be learning about  how the world has recently changed and how the world will change in the near term.

This is exciting. But whether the new world is brave or kind or gentle, or sterile remains to be seen. Whether there is an continuity with the ways of forgotten ancestors remans to be seen.

Scoble Finds the Answer

After all my pontification and speculation on why Naked has suddenly gone from tepid to red hot, Robert noticed something that I missed.  Under the very clever headline of "Long Tail Wags Naked" he reported that Amazon.com is co-marketing our book with The Long Tail as a "better together" package. The Long Tail is currently #2 at Amazon and we are riding on its very popular coat tails. We are up to # 318, by far, our best ranking ever.

Amazon... I always loved those guys.

Naked Conversations: A Long Tail Case Study?

Our book is ranked #575 on Amazon.com this morning. This is the highest it has ever been.  A closer look at the publisher's retail numbers over the last 90 days, shows the book is doing what our publisher tells us-- books do not usually do--come back from an oblivion trendline.

Before the direction reversal, we had experienced out first day closing at over 10,000, followed by a spot ranking at 14,000 before Naked Conversations reversed direction.

So what happened?  Scoble leaving got us some new publicity in a whole lot of places.  That certainly helped. And at the time the he was getting lauded by major magazines like the Economist and broadcast like BBC, we enjoyed a very nice spike.

But I don't think that explains, the prolonged, steady upward trend that we are experiencing.  After the ads, the 30 radio interviews, the endless speaking engagements, the podcasts, what is happening now?

I think corporate adoption is happening now much more than it was back in January when our book came out. I think that corporate folk are trying to figure out what to read and they are looking to the blogosphere where well over 200 people have spoken in praise of Naked Conversations.

Back in January, our publisher, Robert and I were hearing a phenomenal amount of praise and we thought we had hit it out of the park. In fact, we were hearing the amplification of an echo chamber that we had warned about in Naked Conversations and we had merely made it to first base.

What's happening now is that the word of mouth engine has motored past blogging's inner circle. And that is helping us tremendously. What I also think is impacting us is a Long Tail factor, a book who's strong takeoff is anything but long ail behavior.

But our appears to be a good case study for his inevitable revised Edition.

Back in January, many blogging celebrities reviewed our book. This help inflate both sales and our egos. We are getting a lot of reviews again, but most of them from bloggers I have not met.  Nor have I heard of them, until I found them through blog searching. The new reviewers and recommenders have many fewer links, perhaps an average of about 30.

But they are influencing people, that our entire effort had never directly reached. Collectively they are influencing a great many people in a great many organizations.

I'm sharing all this, while I'm in Maui and committed to family that I will not spend my five days here under this tree blogging. But along with being here and the chemistry of salt water, I am really buoyed.

Thank you Long Tail. Thank yo new purchasers.  Thank you word of mouth and thank you, whatever the Hell is causing so many people to now be buying our book.

Another Caution on Group Blogs

I find companies of all sizes struggling with the issue of individual vs. team blogs, an issue I wrote about fairly recently. I keep hearing about this one and getting asked what organizations should do.

While, I have preference and see evidence that individual blogs are more popular, I need to emphasize that this should not be a go/no go issue.  Companies should move forward with what makes them comfortable, then adjust accordingly when they get the hang of it.

I do have one additional caution: The magic of blogs is in their humanity. Readers will glom onto the people they like wherever they find them, rarely the corporate team. There are exceptions and I can see additional exceptions.  If the Car Guys started a blog it would be popular as a team, although i don't see how they could replicate their program or their Boston accents.

(1) This is not a go/no go issue and too m

Is that a Harley or a Farley, Bruce?

The setting is a shady, tree-lined road in Los Altos, an affluent corner of Silicon Valley, a hefty bearded biker is on the side of the road standing by a Harley, his biker helmet and a few assorted motorcycle parts are strewn on the ground nearby.

He's operating a handheld mobile device and talking into a Bluetooth.

What a sissified image for the ultimate macho machine of yore.

This ain't your father's Harley Davidson, Bubba.

What's in a Name?

We wrote about the importance of discoverability your blog name creates in Naked Conversations and Douglas Karr writes that he took it to heart. He changed his blog to On Influence and Automation because that's what he writes about. He's posted a little chart that dramatically depicts how the name change caused his traffic to soar.

Dell Flack Attacks Jarvis

Just when I thought Dell was beginning to understand blogging, an anonymous representative of Dell's Marketing agency, CGI, hurls this incredibly tasteless and inaccurate pile of shabby homework into Jeff's Comments and makes Dell look really awful, just when it seemed to me, to be moving in the right direction. Now, whatever direction Dell tries to go, it will be moving with each foot in a bucket.

Richard Edelman, whose agency competes with CGI, rightfully called it a "serious case of malpractice," which is pretty much on-spot, if you ask me.

As far as the anonymous comment poster, his footprints go directly back to CGI. Dude, if CGI has half a brain, you should look forward soon to a career in the restaurant service industry.

Guided By History Puts Feet on the Street

When Wells Fargo started it's Guided by History blog several months back, I was ambivalent. I had the feeling they were trying to show that their roots in San Francisco went back a long way. Since then, the blog has had evolved a good deal and most recently, it seems to me, it has gotten very, very interesting.

The blog is now focused on disaster preparedness and that makes sense for a huge company that holds mountains of paper in mortgages and business loans. They are enmeshed into most local communities in North America and then all the components are networked into the Wells fargo infrastructure.

I learned a little more this week during a couple of consulting sessions with a few of their people, this week, but it is their current coverage of the currently raging Southern California high desert fire that has grabbed my attention because it is new and different from anything else I have seen.

The bank is using its local staff to provide feet-on-the-ground coverage of a complex catastrophe as it unfolds. In one recent post, the Wells Fargo interviews a customer who's hands get scorched as she opens a barn in a desperate attempt to save her livestock.  She succeeds in letting the animals make a run for it, but loses the barn.

We know about traditional media coverage, which does a good job of providing spectacular photos and recording what official spokespeople have to say. Everyone is also familiar with the coincidental and collective power of citizen journalists, who just happen to be present when a bomb goes off in a London tube or when a hole gets bunched out of an Alaska Airlines plane in flight.

But Guided by History is different.  This is a Fortune 500 company with a network in communities all over the place.  They are using staff as correspondents or stringers with access and knowledge of their local communities.  Trad media does not have the human and data resources that they have.  Citizen Journalists, by their very nature, cannot be organized in so many communities the way Wells Fargo is.

This seems to me to be both interesting and important. I have no idea just where it is going, but I think it has very significant implications and is well worth watching.

Jupiter Yields to Diva Bloomberg

Well it seems to be a good week for blog evangelism. First Dell awkwardly inserts toe into the blogosphere, now JupiterKagan president David Schatsky posts under the headline of "Bashed by the Blogosphere writes, "obviously we didn't handle communications with interested parties as smoothly as we might have," regarding the brouhaha Toby Bloomberg stirred up when she wanted to know how Jupiter could possibly make a corporate blog projection orders of magnitude higher than previous projections or those of us on the front lines are sensing.

This is no reason to gloat, although Toby is to be commended by her persistent, level headed journalistic approach, and Schatsky is to be commended for a timely response and a reversal of position.

What is to be commended, is that a concerned public is gaining resonance in its voice and large and powerful companies are learning the importance of listening and responding.  People respond so much better if they think you are listening.

Dell & the Bloggers

Well, Dell has started one2one, a corporate blog, and response from the blogosphere has gone along predictable lines. Jarvis trashed it, Scoble told them how to improve it, Holtz was a voice of moderation and Nick Carr made his usual large sucking sounds in the presence of a corporate consulting prospect.

Personally, I think its a very good thing that Dell is blogging.  The fact that so far, it is pretty sucky, is almost irrelevant. And it isn't that we need another corporate blog, which is not true of the bar is set for mediocrity.

It's that Dell has taken a significant baby step in the direction of listening and respond.

Dell's problems are not that Jarvis and the rest of us have posted unkindly about them.  It's that, in order to win a price war, they sacrificed product reliability, then disassembled a once adequate support system to the point of shoddiness.

The anger so many of us felt toward Dell, was not the disintegration of the products we had purchased, it was that the company wasn't listening, was dismissing legitimate complaints and otherwise displaying a disdain for the problems of their customers.

I am not so concerned with what the authors of one2one have to say. That will inevitably get better over time.  I am more interested in what they hear and acknowledge.  People stop shouting when they think someone is listening.

Dell, I'm unlikely to ever go back to you.  I left you after being a customer for 15 years.  I found Lenovo where service and support continue to be superb. But I'm happy to see you at least try to listen and my advice is--really listen to what people are saying.

Then do something about it.

Welcome to the blogosphere. Seriously.

Stormhoek: Wine for the Rest of Us

I had beers a couple of nights back with Stormhoek’s Jason Korman. At first it seemed a little strange having beers with a winery owner, but on reflection it seems to me that it was entirely appropriate.

Jason is a marketing guy and much of our talk had to do with how most vineyards position their product and how different it is to the approach he’s taking with Stormhoek.

Typical wine marketing creates a perspective of elegance, sophistication and romance. A fashionably coiffed couple will clink crystal stemware as Vivaldi lufts in the background. The way it is positioned on the retail shelf portrays an even more elite image.  An authoritative old world gentleman swirls as glass, sniffs and sips.  As the liquid coats his tongue, he stares heavenwards and utters a number and that double digit rating will determine the product’s shelf position.

Jason has a word for that sort of stuff: “Bullshit.”

He told me the cost of making a premium branded wine bottle and a mass produced one is about equal. The difference is in how one is marketed over the other and whether the producer is going for high volume or price. Actually, I thing supply and demand have a great deal to do with it as well, but his point remains the same.

By contrast, beer is often marketed by depicting groups of friends having fun during special times—at beaches, in balls parks, Cheers-like taverns or backyard barbecues. If there’s background music it’s retro rock.

Jason wants Stormhoek to be the wine for the rest of us, for everyday people enjoying good times with people they care about.  He wants Stormhoek to be your beverage of choice at your next special event and as such he’s making Stormhoek a successful case study for how you can use social media and word of mouth to globally popularize a mass merchandising product.

In the last year, Stormhoek sold over 100,000 cases of wine in Europe and made serious inroads in the United States. This is not huge, but it is impressive when you realize that the product is being marketed just about exclusively through blogging and social networking. I’ll wager the company never places an ad in the industry’s luminary publication, Wine Spectator, but then again, the Stormhoek customer is more likely to be reading user generated content onscreen than top-down pontifications on slick pages.

A significant portion of this success is to Jason’s marketing partnership with Hugh McLeod whose off-center humor and marketing brilliance have been well-in-play. Hugh has pushed it through Gaping Void as well as the Stormhoek blog.  His edgy cartoons that will soon become Stormhoek labels (e.g. “Drink Stormhoek or the puppy gets it,”) Hugh is one of blogging’s most popular players.  I have heard him called many things.  No one has ever called him elite.

Nor would you describe Jason that way and both of them would be proud of it. Jason and Hugh are pushing a highly enjoyable 10-buck-a-bottle wine and their customer is simply not the black tie set.  They’d much rather project an image closer to the beer industry: Stormhoek is something to be shared with friends during good times.

To achieve this, they recently started sponsoring 100 Stormhoek events to be held on 100 consecutive nights.  It has generated incredible word-of-mouth with very diverse groups. One night in Cork, Ireland, Stormhoek was being poured at a blogger dinner where you would have expected to see Guinness. A few weeks later, it was the being poured at a cast party to bid farewell to a soon-to-be former Donald Trump apprentice. (Donald apparently couldn’t make it). 

This creates a possibility for both of us.  If you a “something special” event coming up you should email either Jason or Hugh see if you can talk them into sending you a few free cases. Tell them Shel sent you. If your event is in the Bay Area, and you score the wine, invite me.  It’s the least you can do to reward me for getting you all that free wine.

I like their wine.  I like them and I like their story even better. When an entire product category falls into imitating each other it makes a great opportunity for someone new to come along and turn them upside down.

Free Roaming from Ireland

I met Pat Phelan at the Cork Bloggers Dinner.  The next day, he presented me with a Crimson "People's Republic of Cork" T-Shirt, which drew more than a few stares this morning wen I jogged through a fairly conservative neighborhood. He also presented me with a cell phone to use, when I go on the global tour.  It will allow me to to receive calls from anywhere for free in most of the places I'll be visiting.

Pat has since contracted Tom Raftery to set him up with a blog and to educate him on using blog tools. Now, he's contracted me to work with him on a blog strategy, which very quietly started last week.  It was intentionally quiet for a couple of reasons. First, he wanted to get comfortable with blogging and to be sure he had the time to post nearly every day and second, the product, called Roam4Free won't be ready for a few months yet and he doesn't want to talk to much about it just yet. However, I have to admit the name kind of gives it away.

I advised Pat to use the next three months to let people get to know him, to decide whether or not they should trust him, to understand where he's coming from and what parts of his story ht his passion points.

And it turns that he has a Hell of a story to tell. He's up to Part 6 and I suggest you go back to Part One and read up. A few years ago, Pat was a chef in a Cork-based Thai restaurant.  He had a chance encounter at a Thai airport with a recruiter who was tapped into Bangladeshis who were willing to leave home for honest work. In Ireland, a sustained economic boom was making it hard to find Irish kitchen help, so Pat started importing Bangladeshis for the kitchen and came to respect and empathize with them.

Their biggest problem was they missed their families and the cost of calling was too expensive... .

Aw Hell.  just go read his six parts.  He tells it so much better than I do.

Ross Mayfield on Estonia

I had lunch on Friday with Ross Mayfield , one of the people who most influenced me to get involved in social media. We ate at PJ Chang's, where we had met almost four years to the date before.

We talked a while about the industry and the jockeying triumvirate of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo and how rapidly perceptions have changed.

But mostly Ross spent the time educating me about Estonia, the European Community's newest and smallest member and with a population of 1.5 million, one of the world's smallest countries overall. Ross went to Estonia for a non-profit in 1995, when the newly formed democracy was still in a formative state. Tech companies were fast-emerging and Ross became one of a great many people to start an Estonian ISP. He followed that with a Web design company that was successful enough to have Ross design one for the president, whom he eventually served as an adviser. His connections with the country remain current in part because he married a beautiful and charming Estonian.  They now live with their two children in Palo Alto. Ross is also the founder and CEO of Socialtext, a leading social media tools provider to the enterprise.

Ross took me back to the beginnings of the Estonian tech community. When the Soviet Empire broke up, the software from the not-yet-complete Soviet supercomputer project software landed in Estonia, along with its developers.  It is generally viewed as an IT oasis surrounded by a wasteland of Baltic Countries still in the shadows of the Information Age.

From the seeds of the supercomputer software came a core competency in data encryption, which partly explains why tiny Estonia is third in the world in Internet banking. It might also contribute to the company's leadership in e-gambling technology. Playtech, an online casino that recently went public is valued at $1 billion in an industry whose total value is estimated at $12 billion.

The other Estonian startup that hit outer space is of course Skype.  As Ross pointed out, legal anomalies made a situation where VOIP was the only real way a startup could push in the telecom category. This made it a logical direction for the founders of Kazaa following their devastating rebuke in courtrooms. Perhaps another factor that came in, was Estonia's proximity to Scandinavia, where the influences of Western freedom lovers was felt, as was the influence of Nokia.

Ross described Estonia to me as a socially liberal country, that tolerates all night gambling casinos, which have earned it the reputation of being "Europe's Vegas." It's people are well-educated and, like Ireland, another tiny EU country is enjoying a prolonged prosperity that is pushing its population out of its recent light manufacturing past and into an increasingly skilled, internet-expert labor force.

Ross discussed several people for us to meet and about the promise of a new generation now coming to age, who have no memory of living under the heavy hand of the former Soviet Union.

Ross will make introductions for us, if Rick can fit Estonia into our schedule.  There seems to be a surplus of interesting people to meet.

Dr. Buyster's Book Blog

You may have never heard of Dr. J. Robert Buyster, or SAIC the company he founded. I hadn't until I stumbled across this article in the San Diego Union tribune. A former nuclear scientist, he quietly built an $8 billion dollar defense contracting firm, which beame

Brian Oberkirch--Like he Matters

My pal Brian Oberkirch has resuscitated his personal blog, Like It Matters, with a new address and it's looking pretty good. I think Brian shows a sassier attitude here than he does on his better-known Weblogs Work, a team blog that he dominates. I hope he keeps going with the new effort.

Nearly Half of Dallas IABC Say They Should Ignore Nasty Bloggers.

Bulldog Reporter is a PR industry rag that hasn't much changed since I took my vow of PR celibacy back in 2001. You have to scroll down to the second story on the page to read the article. Despite warnings by an expert that we bloggers have become a "legitimate media target" for PR practitioners, a poll shows that IABC Dallas members think:

46 percent of respondents believe bloggers should be ignored, or managed by customer relations departments

42 percent say bloggers should be handled by media relations representatives

6 percent say neither of these departments should handle angry bloggers

6 percent say they don't know

I see a great future in the restaurant service industry a large percentage of those who were polled.

They have a nifty report on a poll about who should handle us nasty bloggers and who should handle us, quoting an expert who says we have become a "legitimate media outlet," because we seem to be able to spread messages quickly. You have to scroll down to the second story from the link, because they are using old technology.

There is something happening.  They don't know what it is and it really is a shame.

Pete Dawson Views the Future

In my previous post, I listed a series of questions that Global Neighborhoods will attempt to address. Toronto's Pete Dawson may have saved me and future book purchasers the time and money. He has answered my questions with remarkable vision and passion.

What will the world look like five years from now, I asked. Here's part of what Pete sees:

"...the world will be more connected. Nanogadets will be part of the clothes you clothes wear. People will be able to read text in their language of choice. A simple "translate this" button will permit a web page to be converted  (without loss of context) into the readers language of choice. People will tele immerse themselves via mobile video all over. Imagine that I can attend a video conference call, in a train via my cell phone.

Thanks, Pete. You were a big help on Naked Conversations, and here you are at the beginning of my new project. But, if it's all the same to you, I'm still going ahead with the world tour and the new book. 

But if anyone else wants to post answers to my questions on their blog, please let me know.  I am very interested in people's views on this subject.

Subtitle: How many worlds in the world are there?

I really appreciate the excellent comments that have come in regarding my proposed subtitle. With Naked Conversations, the Comments, without question, helped us write a better book.

So, my conclusion is that "How blogging & social media are changing your worlds," has not hit it out of the park, as we Americans say. I particularly appreciate Niti Bahn's challenge to my using worlds instead of world and Turbo Todd Watson's advice to emphasize making the world smaller. Niti had a few useful comments when we were writing Naked Conversations on this site nearly a year ago.

Pascal, I think your subtitle rocks.  It has a great sound to it.  But it is not my stile and when i try it on for size, it does not fit. Jeremiah, thanks for your very thoughtful remarks, but the book is not really about enabling. I think that has already been done.  It is about he impact of all this enabling and what the world will look like because of it a few years down the line.

Let me tell you a bit about my thinking on each. First, there's a quote I like from the poet TS Eliot's Preludes, "Our worlds revolve like ancient women, gathering fuel in vacant lots." When I was still knee-high to a graduate, I wrote a paper on the implications of pluralizing 'worlds.' First, the whole line would have fallen apart, but second, each of us lives in a series of different worlds. Some of us have very large worlds and some have very small. Your world may be filled with oceans and hummingbirds.  Mine may be filled with crime and poverty. 

I think Thomas Friedman has already done a great job of showing how the internet is making the world a smaller place. His views have been echoed by a great many people including me on this blog. He is one of many authors who have laid the groundwork and background for this book.  I hope to build on their fine work, but I do not plan to repeat the points they have already made.

Simultaneous to the ways the world is shrinking, it is getting larger. In the past few days, I've had conversations with people in Italy, China, Indonesia, India, England, Ireland and Canada. When I grew up in New Bedford, Mass, the state of technology allowed us to not have a party line on the phone.  I never dreamed of how big technology would let my world become.  I never thought that I would be chatting about politicians in Russia or Indonesia. I never pictured the honor of speaking at the American  Embassy in Rome, which is under discussion in the back channel.

But then, I may be juxtaposing "worlds" and "neighborhoods," as I described the latter in my previous post. If so, the "world" is better than "worlds," and apparently more popular.

I go into this project, with a great many questions. Among them:

• What will the world look like five years from today?
• What will the impact of social media be on today's global enterprise?
• What will happen to the abundance of really neat little social media companies? Will the best just get acquired by the usual shoppers and the remainder get eventually sold off for parts by the investors?
• In a world where the best things in life really are for free, how does anyone make a living?
• How will social media impact politics and government? Do the social media give people more power or is it just an illusion?
• How do economics shift? Does the connected world give entrepreneurs a shot in remote countries.  Put Bangalore and big companies in China aside for a moment, what do Thailand, Estonia, Ireland and Romania look like five years from today because of the connected world?
• If power is moving from companies and governments into communities, and the most influential people in those communities are going to just give it away, what should a company ultimately do to simultaneously profit while serving that community?

I have about 20 more of these questions.  do not pretend that Global Neighborhoods will answer them all.  But I most certainly hope to have something  worthwhile to say about some of these.

Please keep those Comments, cards and letters coming in.  They are most helpful.

A Neighborhood Lunch with Martin Green

I had lunch yesterday with Martin Green, the CNET Communities general manager who is my former client and new-found friend. In was through conversations with Martin that I got the idea and terminology for "Global Neighborhoods."

Martin's concept is that each of us dwells in multiple neighborhoods that are local, regional and global. For example, I'm a member of the San Carlos Brittan Park neighborhood where I share common concerns with the people around me about deer-eating roses, traffic and the trash pickup contractors. I feel safe in this neighborhood, and I have love for my home--but I feel little passion for the municipal issues. I also belong to a global neighborhood of bloggers. I am passionate about the neighborhood, it's preservation, it's expansion, attempts to blight it up. I find soul mates in this neighborhood, people who share my dreams. Unlike my San Carlos, Brittan park neighbors, I will never actually see all the people in this global neighborhood.

This concept is at the soul of my next book.

But yesterday, Martin took the concept further.  He divided bloggers into the few like Scoble, Arrington and Congdon who have become media properties.  They have voices that resonate across the blogosphere.  Many have a future, like Scoble, in social media networks that are now forming and have, I think, the potential to do in the next generation what ABC, CBS and NBC did in the middle of the last century.

But these new media stars are few in numbers and bloggers and blog participants are now massive in numbers, with the growth continuing at a relentless pace. Martin started a personal blog a while ago and he has only 20 links.  Can he really be heard like Scoble whose personal blog has over 12,000 links?

Of course not.

As Martin and I dined on sushi from Styrofoam boxes in the tables outside of CNET's 2nd Street offices, Martin argued that is where the sort of online communities  like Webshots and Chowhound are coming in. They are sort of amplified voices for the rest of us  as Martin sees it.

To illustrate, Martin took me in to look at Chowhound, a site that has gone through enormous improvement since I last looked at it in early May. Chowhound is a community for people who are passionate about restaurants. It is organized by physical neighborhoods, so you can search for restaurants in San Francisco's SOMA district or Boston's back Bay or anywhere else that people choose to open up.  Ad hoc "boards" of the most passionate dining people review comments to make certain contributors are on the side of the audience and not pals of the restaurant.  They are comprised of the most passionate community members.

After about a five-minute tour, Martin leaned back and reminded me of his mere 20 links on his blog. "If I write about this restaurant and post it on my blog, probably no one from my local neighborhood will see it. But if I post it on Chowhound, then the people most passionate about food and restaurants will see it.  They are the most influential people for this neighborhood and Chowhound amplifies their influence." This is a shining example of an online neighborhood.  Chowhound is well on its way to being a global community but it serves people via neighborhoods where they live and visit.

He's right, of course.  Alone, he's hollering in a hurricane of over 45 million voices and being heard is becoming increasingly a challenge. By putting his voice on Chowhound he has a neighborhood boom box playing his tune.

But Chowhound a blog,I wondered.  Martin thinks not.  In his view, it is not.  Chowhound is a walled garden, owned, managed and operated for eventual profit by CNET.  Still, I'm linking here to Chowhound, so if it is a walled garden it is a connected garden with open access. I can get recommendations without actually joining or contributing to the community. It looks like a blog and it behaves one.

In the end, it is not really important whether or not it is a blog. The community and the neighborhood is what is so important.

Global Neighborhoods Subtitle

The tagline that goes under a book title is important.  It's very often more prosaic than the title, but tells people coming across the book on a shelf or online at Amazon, just what the book is about.

That has been a problem for me, since I won't really know what the book is about until after the upcoming world tour. But I thought a subtitle might help me. So here's what I came up with:

Global Neighborhoods: How Blogging & Social Media Are Changing Your Worlds.

Please tell me what you think. For you who started visiting this site after we completed writing Naked Conversations online, we had five titles before we came up with Global Neighborhoods.  Thanks to the blogosphere, we learned why they were lame before we had the misfortune of putting any one of the others on the cover of our book.

Love it or hate it, you candor is valuable to me.

It's About Ethics, Stupid.

I am much more an optimist than a pessimist.  I am happiest when I am championing something, not attacking it. I have passionate hot buttons that make me go over the top, as someone I admire recently wrote and I have more than once recently ignored Scoble's advice to not blog when I am in a bad mood.

The result is that this blog is getting cranky and I'm not happy about it.  Naked Conversations was started to champion something, and to demonstrate the benefits of collaborating on the blogosphere.  It has succeeded wildly toward those goals. Personal fears that our intellectual property would get stolen proved not to be the case.

In all this blog has reinvigorated my faith in people and the wisdom of crowds. I began this project as a reporter.  Scoble was the visionary.  And what has happened here exceeds his vision. Blogging is bigger than what even Robert thought.  Social media is bigger than just blogging.

So why do I find myself railing these days at two categories of people. newcomers with clever ideas of how to corrupt blogging into something deceitful and companies who continue to ignore not only blogging, but the needs of their customers. To me, these two issues tie together under the umbrella of a single word:

Ethics.

I usually avoid discussion of ethics. Such talk often gets sanctimonious and also infers a smugness that mine are better than yours. My ethics have to do with what I do when no one is looking; whether I leave that juicy apple on the cart when the vendor is distracted. It's also about decisions made in backrooms about competitive pricing that requires shoddy goods where the customers cannot see them and about making the term "customer support" into an oxymoron. It's about earning trust, slowly, steadily over time.

Ethics is also not a term most people incorporate into their perceptions of marketing, PR and advertising. When I was studying Marketing 101 four score and seven years ago, we were taught that marketing is about relationships. This of course ties neatly into the concept that markets are conversations. If you can't see what those thoughts have to do with ethics, I doubt that anything I can say will help you see it.

There have been lots of questions lately from people asking  "what wrong with..." questions on ethical issues." The truth is there is nothing for me to say in response.  You either know the answer already or you don't.  If you know the difference between what's ethical and what is not, then I hope you will change your strategies.  If you do not, then I sincerely hope--for the sake of the rest of us--you will fail.

AOL. You Can Check In, but You Can Never Leave

My travel buddy-designate Rick Segal, shared this audio snippette of an imitation call to AOL support from a customer who wants to terminate the service.  From the comments it has received, I would argue that it's more like audio verity.

People have been calling AOL smarmy in its cancellation methods for well over a decade. It has lost suits in this area and not long ago said it was laying off some of the people who they were employing to make it hard for customers to cancel.

The only thing you can say in their defense is no AOL program as far as I know, ever exploded into flames during a Japanese conference.

The Indonesian Defense Blog. Did the World Change?

I met the Wall St. Journal's Jeremy Wagstaff, who is based in Indonesia, a couple of years back at the Poptech Conference in Camden, Maine.  We hit it off pretty well and vowed to keep in touch. Of course, we didn't as life and geography diverted our attention. i thought about him while preparing for my Global Neighborhoods World Tour, but the schedule doesn't bring Rick Segal and me to Indonesia, so I never contacted him.

I didn't even think of Jeremy yesterday when I posted a piece on Indonesian Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono's most interesting blog. Jeremy, I thought, mostly covers tech, and this one was off-topic for him or so I thought. I was wrong. It turns out that Jeremy knows and respects Juwono, whom he describes as well-respected and "a lovely man." But Jeremy believes I overstated the case when I said that Juwono's blog is changing the world.

He points out that there are over 200 million Indonesians who do not even have Internet access and cannot read what the forward-thinking Juwono has to say. Even if they could, most Indonesians don't read English, the language being used in the blog.

This is all true Jeremy, but I still think what is happening is a small-but significant-step in a rapidly changing world, and one for the better.

Jeremy obviously is orders of magnitude better informed than I am about Juwono, as well as Indonesian politics and culture.  But I'm watching what has happened since I posted yesterday.  The story has been picked up by Pablo Halkyard, a blogger affiliated with the World Bank who expresses shock that the Defense Minister is blogging. Ong Hoc Chuan, who wrote the Indonesian Post article that put me onto the story has picked it up in his blog, Unspun.

In the last 48 hours, I've learned a good deal about Indonesia, it's politics and its technology.  I have had conversations with people who hold different perspectives in a country where I've never been who admire a government official whom I've never met. I know more about Indonesia than I have ever known and I have spread the word about a government blogger far enough for someone in the World Bank to pick up on it. The world has become just a tad smaller and faster.

The world sometimes change because of wars and volcanoes.  Sometimes it just evolves in neat tasty spoonfuls.  Nevertheless the world is just a bit different because this conversation has started, and it will be interesting to see where it goes.

Besides that, Jeremy, it's nice to hook up with you again.

Newsgator Road Map

I'm a NewsGator user and a company fan.  This is in part because Jonathan McDougal, a support guy has twice solved some complex problems I was having, courteously, quickly and on the first try. The only other time I contacted their support, my email was answered by some guy name Greg, who turned out to be Greg Reinacker, who is the company founder and CTO. Greg is the other reason for my loyalty.  He was already a blog community star when I first started edging into the back of the room at blog-related events.  He was always gracious and encouraging to me.

I'm also a fan of the company because I believe RSS is even more important than blogging. The idea of being fed the information you want to your desktop creates an unprecedented efficiency as well as a new level of secure user autonomy.  Companies like FedEx and the New York Times have already taken RSS beyond blogs and it will go much further than it already has, making static websites more "live" and current.

Greg was recently at Gnomedex, sharing the NewsGator road map with attendees and garnering coverage from my two favorite blog news sources, TechCrunch and FacetoFace. These two sources will also get you to Greg's own blog as well as audio and video clips about what it's all about.

My summary is that Newsgator is going to make feeds simpler, and less visible as feeds themselves. They are going to give users greater choice.  They are going to make them easier and then easier still.

To me this is important. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) so far is not really that simple for non-technical people. I needed Scoble and Greg to do a great deal of explaining before I got how it works and why it matters.When I talk to folks new to blogging, it takes great effort to explain both RSS and its significance. In fact the blogosphere will be a kinder, gentler place,  when no one has to explain RSS, they can just enjoy its benefits. Most people drive cars without knowing or caring about the principals of torque or internal combustion. 

The same should be true for bloggers and RSS.

Jonathon McDougal

Indonesia Defense Minister is Blogging

Yesterday, I wrote a piece about politician blogging.  Today, I realized how very myopic that post was because I wrote only about American politicos and cited Independence Day. This came to my attention today through the Jakarta Post, where reporter Ong Hock Chuan mentions Naked Conversations in an article about Indonesia's Defense Minister Juwono Sudarsono has started a blog.

Sudarsono's most recent post deals with striking candor  of the challenges of getting bureaucrats who clicked their heals in obedience under past government dictators to move with efficacy in the new democracy. His language remains a bit formal, but the content is pretty impressive stuff.

Blogging really is changing the world. I'm happy to be reminded of how much.

The Diva Challenges JupiterMedia Numbers

It's a number I'd like to believe. Seventy percent of Fortune 500 companies will have corporate blogs by the end of 2006.  That's what the press release put out by JupiterMedia's PR firm had to say. The release also said some 34 percent of large companies already have blogs.

This would be great news.  Except that a wiki by the highly credible Ross Mayfield and Chris Anderson puts the corporate blog number at a mere 5.8 percent, which feels about right to those who spend a piece of their time evangelizing corporate blogging. One of them is Toby Bloomberg who called Peter Arnold Associates, JupiterMedia's PR Agency. She was told nicely that someone would check with the client and get back to her. Here's her first post on the story, citing the apparent discrepancy.

That's also where the story took a hairpin curve. On the callback, Toby was told they wouldn't give her anything else because her blog was a marketing blog closely associated her marketing consulting business. Other bloggers jumped into the fray including Fard Johnmar from Healthcare Vox who was told that if he wanted to know more he would have to buy the report. He coughed up $750 and got a four-page executive summary.  However, to get it, he had to sign an NDA. So he can't publish the details.  However, from his post, it is clear that he thinks the full report is thin porridge indeed.

I find this all pretty regrettable. Analysts had their reputations pretty badly tainted when the last bubble imploded and may have spent some years rebuilding their reputations. JupiterMedia has put its foot into a bucket on this one. Even if they can defend their questionable numbers, that still leaves them with having orchestrated some pretty questionable behavior.

Congrats to Toby, Fard and other bloggers who have dug into this story with hard-noses and level heads.

Will Blogging Change Politics?

Of course it will and it seems to me that this is a very good thing.

Will it make John Edwards a more transparent open candidate if he runs for president?  Was he being candid when he said he would try to be more candid? While I am curious to see how he progresses, I don't think that part of it is all that important. What I think is very important is that mainstream politicians, like mainstream corporate executives are coming to understand that their ways of marketing themselves, their products and services have become increasingly ineffective at about the same rate they have become more expensive.

I think Edwards spoke for a great many prominent people when he admitted his struggle to unlearn the years of media and presentation training that makes so many of them so adept at saying nothing with great eloquence.

I'm not really concerned about Edwards and the conversation he inspired at Gnomedex.  If you want to know more, then David Parmet's excellent executive summary may be a good link for you to follow.

What does interest me is how blogging will evolve as a factor in the political process.  We all know the Howard dean tale and that it was probably Joe Trippi and not the actual candidate who understood you could get more votes for ewer dollars by speaking with passion and knowledge on a blog. I've repeatedly heard that Republicans used an even more effective strategy in the last presidential election by using blogs at the grassroots.  In Indiana and Ohio and I assume elsewhere in the swing states and heartlands, local leaders including ministers blogged in favor of Bush, which I think was much more effective than if Bush had done it himself. There have been several candidates and elected officials who have started blogging since the last presidential election.  One of note is Tony Williams, Washington DC's mayor whose blog demonstrates occasional bursts of transparency and candor. What I find most interesting in Williams blog is not always what he says, but what his constituency says to him and his apparent willingness to let these comments stand unfiltered.

But that brings me to the other side of the equation and where blogging is going to emerge as a huge factor in future national, statewide and local elections. It's not what they say to us so much as what we can now say to them and to each other.

Yep, Blogging 101, lesson #1 clearly states that its not about the speaker but about the conversation. Now we can each speak out and actually be heard.  We can find communities of people who agree with us and we can impact and pressure public officials to act in ways we'd like and with blogging we can do it without raising millions and forming a political action committee. We can call out politicians to be responsible, t be accountable and to prove they are not as stupid, arrogant, cheesy or bland as so many often appear to be so much of the time.

The power of blogging it seems to me is not in what they say to us so much as what we say to them and about them. They can either join the conversations which are already getting louder or they can stick to their talking points and hope for the best.

In any case, I think this is a great topic to boot around over Independence Day weekend. Don't you?