My Slides from Future of Social Media

Making Marketing More Human Through Technology

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I finished speaking at *The Future of Social Media”… it was fun telling them not to join twitter if they’re just going to be marketers and not actually be human. I told them other stuff too, I think.\
I didn’t have a lot of time to talk about the future, so I didn’t get to talk about identity vs. persona and my three categories of social networks… maybe next time. I’m pretty sure I scared the hell out of them when I talked about reputation stuff.\
Some things I mentioned that either I didn’t put the URL for in the slides or didn’t have in the slides at all:

The quote from Jeremy Tanner about twitter spammers comes from his fantastic blog post – read the whole thing.
You can read The Cluetrain Manifesto online for free.
I talked a little bit about Seth Godin. His blog may be a little pat, but I’ve learned a lot about marketing and product development from his books.
My interest in reputation started with Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom. It introduces the idea of “whuffie” which captured my imagination. I hope to some day implement a real whuffie system online. I came really close once.\
I think that’s it… hopefully the people who saw it enjoyed it and got something out of it. It was a lot of fun preparing it.

Nerdy Songs

Jason posted a tweet about writing songs this afternoon and I must have been in a particularly suggestible post-nap state and instantly came up with several extremely nerdy song titles. I think almost all of these fall into to Nerd Country n’ Western, but whatever. Here they are:

I’m Semantic, But Wow, You’re Well-Formed
Since You Left, I’ve Been in Plain Old Semantic Hell
Why Do Our Tags Have to Branch?
If You Won’t Mock My Markup, I Won’t Jeer Your Scripts
What’s in a DOCTYPE?
I Sold My Soul to the W3C, and All I Got Was a Long-Sleeved Tee
Baby, It’s Not Really a Microformat!
Let’s Go Home and Append Some Child Nodes to Your DOM
If You Leave, All I’ll Have is Twitter\
I’m sorry. I really am, but you’re welcome to add to the nerdy nonsense in the comments…

Social Networking Mashups

I’m speaking today at The Social Networking Conference about social networking mashups. I decided to turn it on its head a little bit and do an introduction on portable social networking instead, because what is it but a big ol’ mashup of identity, relationships and content?\
If you’re at the conference, I’ll see you at 1:30, and I’ve updated the slides a bit since I had to turn them in for the CD, so the presentation is a wee bit bigger and more complete than the one you got in your packet. I’ve uploaded the “final” version here, and you’re welcome to download it.\
Feedback is welcome. I certainly couldn’t cover everything, because I only have about 35 minutes to cover everything (and 36 slides). I don’t touch on the Data Portability working group, or several other relevant things, because there just isn’t time. It’s very much an introduction into why it makes sense for social networks to support “good things” like OpenID, Creative Commons, microformats, providing feeds for everything, etc. Hopefully, it will lead to more technical discussions and some good questions.\
Feedback is, of course, welcome!

Happy New Year and Twitter Stats

We had a lovely time in Mississippi eating way too much fried/barbecued/fatty food (I only gained one pound, and have promptly lost three, so no worries), playing with the dog, hanging out with Jen’s parents, fishing and watching the boys ride around in the trailer behind Grandpa Brian’s lawn tractor. I’ll try to upload pictures tonight.\
I’m back at work, and having a hard time getting back into the work groove. So, I got my twitter stats instead… yeah, productive, I know (I also cleared out my inbox, remembered my kerberos password, did annual review feedback for folks, updated SVN and set up a meeting for this afternoon).\
What I found funny is the tweets per hour. Since I got the blackberry over the summer, I twitter more at night while watching TV than I do while I’m at work. I also seem to post a lot around 11AM, which is usually when I take my first break of the day. All in all, I post a lot, which doesn’t really bother me, or seem to affect my work. I love the “noise” twitter generates. After working for almost 13 years with constant interruption, if I don’t get interrupted every ten minutes or so, it feels like something’s wrong.

Also, March was my heaviest month o’ tweets, which isn’t surprising since SxSW was right smack in the middle, and that’s where I really “got it”. I’m not sure what happened in May, or why December was so high – especially considering I was at home for almost three weeks and without “real” bandwidth for a week.

I think I’ve reached a sort of twitter equilibrium. I follow about 200 people, with only about 50 sent to my phone, which keeps the noise on my phone when I’m not near the computer down to a dull roar.\
(I generated the stats with the very handy script written by Damon Cortesi)

Twitter

I don’t like Twitter.\
Yea, I said it.\
Whatchu gonna do ’bout it?

OK, Who Else Twitters Around Here?

Twitter was my only real “connection” to the online world while I was in Mississippi (no EVDO, no wi-fi, don’t like sharing other peoples’ computers unless I have to, etc), and I keep slowly finding other pals who’re on it. I like the immediacy of updates and how easy it is to turn them off when I don’t need the interruptions. I like the simplicity of the interface, and it’s just a fun way to keep up with what everyone’s doing and write really short stupid things while in between things (waiting rooms, stop lights, elevators, etc).\
So… do you Twitter? I do. What I’m really asking, if I’m not bein’ too forward, is will you be my twitter friend?

Digging the Twitter

Because I’m a big Odeo fan, I heard about Twitter through their RSS feed. I checked it out, and it seemed like a nice diversion but I didn’t really get it. Now I do. Since I have friends that have started using it (thanks Cindy and Jason), it’s become a lot more fun. I post updates all the time (well, now that I’m on vacation, what else do I have to do?), and keep the chat window open all the time.\
If you’re online all the time, and have friends who are too, it’s a fun toy. It’s not going to help you get any work done, but sometimes that’s a good thing. It’s a good way to keep track of what your friends are doing in whatever “medium” you want – IM, SMS, RSS, or on the web page.\
They even have a nice little JSON interface! If you go to the home page, and look at the bottom of the page, that’s pulled in from Twitter and shows my last three updates. Neat, huh?