ouroboros

All Currency is Social. So what's in YOUR wallet?

I was looking up the definition of currency on Wikipedia, when I came across this line: "modern currency...is intrinsically worthless".  I'm no economist, but the info there indicated that the dollar, euro and other currencies have no value beyond the government declaring them to have value, and markets effectively betting on their future value.

So it's kind of funny that there is a distinction between hard currency (cash) and social currency (as in "net promoter value", WOM recco, blog readership or twitter followers, etc.).  Because both are effectively social constructs (for the cash, at least, since the 'Nixon Shock' ended convertibility of US dollars for gold).

But faith in institutions, like faith in people, can be fragile. 

What the hell does that have to do with marketing?

Well...

I'll go out on a limb here.  The era of the one stop shop, or agency network, or do it alone communications company - or brand, for that matter, is dead.

No brand is an island.  No agency a one-stop shop.

Brands ask for multi-year communications plans in 2010, when in 22 months between February 2005 and November 2006, YouTube went from startup to $1.65 Billion Google acquisition.  One thing you can count on is guessing wrong on the right tactics to employ in three years' time. Many of them simply don't exist yet.

So here's where the currency/social currency comes in:

Agency and brand "currency" will be a reflection of their social portfolio strategy. 

The most successful brands and agencies will be driven by a net value comprised of actual sales of goods and services + the "stored value" of their social currency (in the form of their networks of collaborators).

The key will be how quickly and effectively they can convert stored value to real value, by unlocking the power of their collaborators to achieve mutual goals. 

DARPA's "Network Challenge" was just such a test to see test the value of networks in real world problem solving.  An MIT team used a tech-fueled "inverse pyramid" scheme to solve in nine hours a problem DARPA assumed would take significantly longer.

The trick is identifyng mutual goals.  Creating a shared vision - and shared risk.  Opportunity - and accountability.

As an agency, it's a good idea to treat partners well, and treat everyone you meet as a future collaborator.  If entire alliances are forming because you are ridiculously awful to work with, you have a serious problem.

And collaboration prevents legacy investments (or entire company acquisitions) from dictating your solutions - a dev shop full of C sharpies not so useful for your Ruby project.  A search shop with an a state-of-the-art proprietary tool yields decreasing returns once that tool gets dumped onto an overall dev list across an agency holding company.  Flash devs on iPhone/iPad?  waaa waaaa.  Or in our case, it helped to have access to the right folks when we wanted to build a robot.

Victor & Spoils promised crowdsourcing as a creative model.  Meh.  What they have done is built a seriously impressive network of freelancers.  The danger is that that network is built on unstable bonds -  bonds that consist of the promise of hard currency.  Hard currency buys you loyalty with an expiration date (the better offer). 

And while money can't buy you love, earned social currency just might.

The agencies and brands that win will build networks of shared inspiration and mutual goals.  Bonds of social currency.

Because an inspired network, a network built on passion and trust, not submission forms and "friend requests", has the power to move mountains.

Toilet Paper Users and Facebook Users

We social media wanks often earn our fear money through hyperbolic/histrionic presentations laden with "you're business model is f***ed" slides, typically including a gasp-inducing image that compares the population of users of Facebook to the population of actual countries.

But Facebook isn't really a country.  Individual users of Facebook have as much in common with each other as individual users of toilet paper. 

And come to think of it, there may be more TP than FB users for a little while yet.

(FB heatmap when they were limping along with 200MM users back on april 8th,2009, stolen from Dave Know's HardKnox life blog...and interesting to note that if in April they were "admitting" 200MM, and in December Zuckerberg claims 350MM, HOLY HOCKEYSTICK, batman.)

If FB were a country, it would be an interesting one - a preselected technological "upper" class who have sufficient material resources to at least guarantee access, so they probably aren't hurting for basic needs - food, shelter, etc. 

They'd be the world's third most populous country - 350MM+ people, all a few rungs up Maslow's ladder.

And in spite of various valuation discussions, this "country" of tech "haves" wouldn't be a G-7 or G-20 candidate.  Various estimates peg the FB "GDP" at about a billion for 2009 - with about half that coming from ad revenue, the other half from monetization of the FB platform via third party developers.  that puts them at #169 for global GDP, a few steps behind St. Lucia, and just edging out Dijibouti.

The smartest, wealthiest, tech saavy folks in the world, 350MM strong, barely edging out a win on Dijibouti?  Golly.

But there is something much more interesting and a little sad going on here.  A real country has many things that make for an engaged citizenry.  The two I think are relevant here are

1. economic/social/emotional barriers to leaving, and
2. a national mythology/narrative

Friendster, MySpace and Facebook are cheap, easy, and addictive, but their glue is driven by the critical mass of friends (network effect) and the difficulty of porting your entire life onto the NEXT BIG PLATFORM.  Facebook Connect is a brilliant way to deflect the need to re-port, but at the end of the day, FB loyalty will be proportional to its perceived utility.  Like toilet paper.  If there is a softer better cheaper toilet paper, I'll use it.

(stolen from extremefunnyhumor.com)

But none of these social nets has an embedded narrative or mythology.  they have a perceived "cool" factor, or not, but they are social tools, little more.  FB is doing its best to become the Leatherman of social nets, with a tool, port or app for every need, but I question the loyalty of its users and the longevity of its position.  Because they have no narrative.  The US Army/Marine Corps CounterInsurgency Manual (available as a pdf here - Download COIN-FM3-24) defines a "narrative" as:

"a story recounted in the form of a causally linked series of events that explains an event in the group's history and expresses the values, characters, or self-identity of the group.  Narratives are means through which ideologies are expressed and absorbed by members of a society."

There is no common purpose to FB, no shared mission, no shared narrative. 

Like Toilet Paper. 

We flush (TP) and upload (FB) our crap every day.

When will a virtual social net nourish our souls?

W+K+Schmidt+Birkett+N900+OneDotZero = fun

As part of our effort on behalf of the Nokia N900, W+K London partnered with computational designer  Karsten  Schmidt and software architect Gary Birkett in conjunction with OneDotZero to demonstrate what happens when

per Birkett:

“we are using a 3 inch display to try to control a 70 foot display”. Based on the N900’s accelerometer, the software uses an interface that takes movement data from the handset and sends it to the projection app, created by Schmidt."

Facebook Rights - and Ad Model Fail

We were having an internal debate about the Declaration of Independence today, while at the same time, voting is closing on the proposed Facebook Governance Documents. 

I know you know.  And I know you know that if Facebook were a country, its 200+MM population would make it the world's 5th largest (they just passed Brazil)

And here are the proposed "Guiding Principles" (hum "Mine eyes have seen the glory" as you read):

1. Freedom to Share and Connect

People should have the freedom to share whatever information they want, in any medium and any format, and have the right to connect online with anyone – any person, organization or service – as long as they both consent to the connection.

2. Ownership and Control of Information

People should own their information. They should have the freedom to share it with anyone they want and take it with them anywhere they want, including removing it from the Facebook Service.  People should have the freedom to decide with whom they will share their information, and to set privacy controls to protect those choices. Those controls, however, are not capable of limiting how those who have received information may use it, particularly outside the Facebook Service.

3. Free Flow of Information

People should have the freedom to access all of the information made available to them by others. People should also have practical tools that make it easy, quick, and efficient to share and access this information.

4. Fundamental Equality

Every Person – whether individual, advertiser, developer, organization, or other entity – should have representation and access to distribution and information within the Facebook Service, regardless of the Person’s primary activity. There should be a single set of principles, rights, and responsibilities that should apply to all People using the Facebook Service.

5. Social Value

People should have the freedom to build trust and reputation through their identity and connections, and should not have their presence on the Facebook Service removed for reasons other than those described in Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

6. Open Platforms and Standards

People should have programmatic interfaces for sharing and accessing the information available to them. The specifications for these interfaces should be published and made available and accessible to everyone.

7. Fundamental Service

People should be able to use Facebook for free to establish a presence, connect with others, and share information with them. Every Person should be able to use the Facebook Service regardless of his or her level of participation or contribution.

8. Common Welfare

The rights and responsibilities of Facebook and the People that use it should be described in a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which should not be inconsistent with these Principles.

9. Transparent Process

Facebook should publicly make available information about its purpose, plans, policies, and operations. Facebook should have a town hall process of notice and comment and a system of voting to encourage input and discourse on amendments to these Principles or to the Rights and Responsibilities.

10. One World

The Facebook Service should transcend geographic and national boundaries and be available to everyone in the world.

Wow.

Impressive, inspiring, thought provoking.

SO where does the "Ad Fail" part come in? 

Despite near-continuous, above the fold, high visibility FB profile page placements for the past week or so, only 536K+ members have voted.  

That's about .2%. 

And only 109K FB'ers (that's ~.05% of the total pop) have become "Fans" of the ''Facebook Governance Page', meaning they will receive updates and posts about any conversations or proposed changes to the documents. 

So in a community of 200MM+, only about a half million are participating in creating the global guiding principles.

Wow.  All they had to do was click and vote.

Twice as many people voted for the guiding principles of what has become for many an indispensable social utility, as were sacrificed for Whoppers in a single promotion.

Mobility at the Youth Ball

and this image via Adam Frucci @ Gizmodo:

 

What's the sound of one hand clapping?  Ask Barack.

\o/ FrontlineSMS Makes Us Better \o/

Ken Banks (@kiwanja on twitter) is an honest-to-goodness tech hero.  When much tech-related news and developments wallow in wonk and wank, or seem aimed at folks with more daily discretionary spending power than many global households make annually (PS3 Home launches!  Waaa waaaaah), Ken's FrontlineSMS (@frontlineSMS on twitter) is a free piece of software that enables NGO's and grassroots organizations worldwide to communicate rapidly and effectively with geographically dispersed groups using basic text-messaging (SMS) technology.  If you can get a signal, you can communicate/aggregate/congregate/advocate.  And it works in spite of the natural disasters and power outages that regularly cripple other tech solutions. 

Just how far ahead of the curve is Ken?

After a year of exhaustive research and millions spent, Larry Brilliant's Google.org announced (at TED 2008 last year) that they'd arrived at the conclusion that an SMS-enabled tool could be a good idea to invest MORE time and money to create a team to build and research and prototype and maybe, just maybe, deploy.  Net: according to Google, it would take years and millions to do, in effect, what FrontlineSMS had been doing for years.  Like announcing in 1973 that a moon trip looked "feasible".  Proof yet again that insitutional hubris and groupthink can blind even the smartiest of smartie-pants to nimble people with a passion doing a reverse windmill dunk over them.  [See "Salamis"]

Sure W+K sells soda and sneaks better than anyone, but we love passionate folks using innovative technologies to make peoples lives better.  We were honored to work with Ken on his web presence and logo - both of which had to work on low speed connections and use text characters (since many folks would interact with them only via text message).  BTW - the logo we developed with Ken is ASCII friendly and does some great stuff when you paste it into skype.  seriously. 

And it looks good on a button (see photo above).

\o/

Participatory Global Viral Video - how many more 2.0 words can you fit in and still have a failed marketing strategy?

Viral viral viral.  If you read my blog, you know I hate the term.  It isn't a term anyone agrees on, other than "viral marketing agencies" who are trying to sell it like special sauce.  For the most part, that sauce is brown, lumpy and unpredictable, like the "gravy" you get at Applebee's.  Marketers like the concept of 'viral', because to them it means "cheap media" (make a video, or app, or whatever, and distribution is FREE!), or it lets them say they "get social media" to whoever is checking off the boxes on their annual evaluation form.  But nothing is viral that PEOPLE DON'T LIKE, and figuring out WHAT PEOPLE WILL LIKE is a game everyone can play, but few play well.  Which is why most advertising SUCKS.

We've had some good hits - the Kobe jumps Aston + snakes, the FIFA Street 3 spot, etc., but it is, to a degree, a gamble.  Like a good date.

So a video folks are talking about is this one for Stride gum, found by Melissa Sconyers on the NY Nokia Search team.

It's worth a look for two reasons: (1) it shows the power of participatory community, which is actually more interesting than the concept OR the execution, and (2) it shows how jumping onto a popular video may or may not be right for a brand.  At the end of this video, do you get that this is actually a marketing vehicle for Stride gum?  I didn't.  And I knew it before I watched, then I even clicked through to Matt's site, looking for a logo or brand mention (the logo is there, at the bottom of the page, looking very Dad at the disco). 



The story of the video as Matt tells it:
He has friend shoot video of him dancing badly in Hanoi.  Stride gum sends him around the world to do the dance in a wide variety of places (normal "YouTube-viral-type-web-2.0-3.0" thing).  But AFTER that video was made and posted, people sent him their own.  And that gave him an idea.  He re-pitched Stride with a new idea.  He traveled the world again, inviting those people to join him.  Participatory viral goes global.

Read more here:
http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/about.shtml (the website is sponsored by Stride)

And please practice safe viral.

Your Collective Brand

Melissa Sconyers, W+K interactive scout, shared with us Noah Brier's (a Naked-ite) newest creation, Brand Tags.

"Brands exist in people's heads" goes his premise - and here everyone's brand-related tags are collated and rendered as a swarm, creating a graphic illustration of the brand as socially-constructed collective perception, with each perception proportionally scaled by it's importance to the group.  [Interestingly, as participation with the site has increased, Brier's noted more "noise" being introduced - profanity, brand bashing, etc.]

How does it work?  Brier's site shows you a logo, and you free-associate a word (that becomes a tag) into the handy blank field.  Then the next logo appears.  It's shockingly simple, and irritatingly addictive.  So people come to you to tell you about your brand.  Contrast this with Summize, the Twitter search tool that searches public twits/tweets for brand mentions and aggregates them, or their "sentiment"

He's cobbled together a single player Google Image Labeler, only now instead of help Google tag every image using your free labor, you can help Brands get a gut check.  And make Naked look brilliant.  Sweeet.

What I really liked was the gaming aspect of the site - Brier lets you try to guess the brand based on the swarm and see the tags posted by referral URL (so you can ferret out any domain-based swarm biases :-)

Melissa conjectures that the site coding may reveal potential Brier-based brand bias in the order in which brands were entered - Nike is #1 (ID=1), Google is #2 (ID=2), etc. - but his numbering scheme skips from #9 (H&M) and doesn't pick up again until #25 (Yahoo!).  Perhaps this has something to do with their client list?   Or maybe he's leaving room to put them in later?

Check these swarms for W+K partners:

ABC
Brand Jordan
Coca-Cola
Converse
ESPN
Nike
Nokia
Target
EA Sports
Honda
Google
Starbucks
Heineken

If Brand Tags sits at one end of the spectrum of collective brands (where people are required to go to a destination to create and experience collective perceptions), Summize sits at the other.

Summize positions itself as a provider of "conversational search", and it searchs public twitter streams for keywords.  Enter a brand, get a slew of brand-relevant tweets.  In aggregate, it's a pretty interesting snapshot of what people are saying, right now, about your brand.  You can even sift for sentiment.

Nifty.

New Year's Shreds and Wishes

Times Square New York saw two interesting 'New Year's' variations on a theme: On the one hand, prior to New Year's Eve, a shredder was set up for 'Good Riddance Day', where folks could rid themselves (via shredding) of bad things from 2007 - foreclosure notices, pink slips, letters from ex-husbands, etc. A recycling truck was on hand to cart of the residue and bad karma. No sooner had they cleaned up than TimesSquareNYC set up a website ("Wishing Wall Online") where users could enter New Year's wishes which were then printed on confetti and dropped on revelers at midnight.

Sweet.

Human Video Games

Pong:

Space Invaders

Radical Transparency

If you had any questions about the transformative power of interactive media, repressive governments no longer do -  when they want to kill or crush their people, they are learning to start by killing the internet and mobile connections.  On the heels of Ukraine's mobile powered Orange revolution, the SMS powered toppling of the government in Manila, and Uganda's recent reinstatement of SMS after contested elections were sealed up, this from the AP, re Myanmar:

...soldiers in Myanmar...Friday...went after the Internet and mobile phones that have proven so vital and powerful in documenting the dramatic confrontations.

Modern technology has become the generals' worst enemy.

Though the government has cut some phone landlines, it has had less success clamping down on mobile phones, [and] the immediacy has been vital in telling the world so it can act quickly as developments unfold

"The world doesn't know where Burma is. Now they see images about the situation and want to know more." Aung Zaw said.

"Students use cell phones to SMS each other to share information," he said, referring to text messages activists use to organize demonstrations or inform one another of the locations of soldiers. "The junta can't control the technology totally, and it's a huge difference (if you can) deliver the information fast."

Mark Deuze, Universiteit Leiden and Indiana University

Dropping knowledge bombs on the couch.  Is nice.  He like.

Mark is in town to speak at Inverge. 

Mark's fanboy story:  Xmas in Amsterdam, freezing street.  Mark and a friend are walking the streets and out of a door behind them emerges Henry Rollins.  In a t-shirt and shorts.  With a bottle of water and a loaf of bread.  A LOAF OF BREAD.  And it's cold, mind you.  And they go "Hey, Henry!" and Rollins comes over to talk.  And Mark and his friend are big Rollins fans.  Mark can tell you the story of his own tattoo, but his friend had a Black Flag album cover tattooed on his back.  So there in the street, they all strip down to show tattoos.

Henry is so cool.  And sensitive.

Mark's latest book with Polity Press is MediaWorks, a series of interviews  with media folks around the world talking about the transformation of their business.  I'm haven't read it yet, but I know I like it because it has a cover with a pipe wrench.  Not a crescent wrench.  Not a socket wrench.  A pipe wrench.  And the best way to judge a book, is, well, you know.

Upload to Download: The future of Video?

A university consortium has developed software named "Tribbler", a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing service focused on video (like Joost).  What makes this one unique is how it puts the "sharing" back in "file sharing" - you earn credit to download content by uploading your own content.  Folks can also band together to share download opportunities and to increase download speeds.  No more "leeching" and "freeloading" - the terms used to refer to folks who suck down good content and provide nothing to the network in return.

According to the New Scientist article:

"David Parkes of Harvard University believes peer-to-peer will eventually replace existing methods of distributing video, including television...the BBC's iPlayer is built on top of a peer-to-peer network. These programs often prevent leeching by forcing users to upload constantly, which can be a problem for those who may be charged extra for using extra bandwidth.

"It is clear that in the future there will be a greater variety and volume of media to consume, requiring different ways of distributing it," says David Hutchison, who works on alternative methods of media distribution at Lancaster University, UK."            

Social Networking/OpenSourcing

Social Networking is pretty buzzy right now.  Lot of amazing potential - lot of folks doing it to check boxes.  Lots of money getting pissed away. Before you burn a garbage bag of cash, ask one question:


"What CONSUMER need do we meet by engaging our brand in their space?"   

If you can't answer that, RED FLAG.   If the need you meet is your own, consider doing something else.  Didn't work for me dating in high school, doesn't work now.

Brain Morrisey notes in "Why some brands seem antisocial", "those [brand efforts at social networking] that have succeeded either tap into the existing passionate audience of a niche brand or offer some functionality that cannot be found already on popular social media sites."

Today's WSJ article "Building Buzz for Ellis Island - and Shirts", by Suzanne Vranica and Stephanie Kang warns "the last thing the Internet needs is another social network".  Baba Shetty of Hill Holiday says "the same kind of talents in judgement that we apply to other things in marketing applies to this media as well.  You do not say, 'Yep, check, we've got social networking'.  You have to think: 'How are we going to do it?'"

Walmart got justifiably trashed for "The Hub".  Finish Line will most likely end up writing off their social network.  We'll see if Disney can make Club Penguin work, or if MySpace can right itself enough to prevent its pages from making logo-bedecked NASCAR vehicles look like tastefully refined branding exercises.

Net: "social networking" needs to be part of a strategy, not a standalone tactic.  It requires sustained effort, focus and resources.  Know that the number of friends you HAVE on MySpace matters far less than what you DO with those friendships.

Take Nokia.  They created the Nokia Forums to allow you and me and Nokia engineers and developers to interact.  You can pretty much find anything - info, FAQ's, developer SDK's, etc., etc. - real projects, real info, real interaction.  3.2 MM registered members.  Hundreds of projects.  Lot of energy. 

Walmart's 'Hub', thinly disguised product shill platform aimed at tween (gag me) 'Hubsters"?  Punchline.  Click either link below.  Visit a live community.  Laugh at the smoking ruins of a dead one.

Jukka Silvennoinen, Nokia Forum Champion.

Walmart 'Hubsters'

Chocolate Rain Remix

Few terms irk me like the term "Viral".  As in, "we've got a little money left - how about we use it for something...viral?"  Or my particular favorite - the ad budget with the line item for "viral". 

C'mon people.  Word of Mouth is the original viral marketing, and it's been around a lot longer than forward-able video clips.  Viral becomes viral because there is a perceived value - social, cultural, etc. - to sharing whatever the source material is.

And that's darn hard to predict.  If it wasn't, movie studios would only release the films that do well.  There wouldn't be remaindered bins for NKOTB.  Because predicting what people like is...hard.

Case in point, 'Chocolate Rain'.  You may well be one of the 3.1 MM people who've already grooved to it.  (250,000 plays since last night at 9pm PST!).  And I'd love to see the research reports and "pre-test" analysis that would have resulted in a green light on it from the marketing suite.   But here's a treat (apologies upfront): act now and be one of the only 200K folks who've grooved to this spoof.

Or my personal favorite, "Internet Dream".  It's the riffing.  Soooooooo sweet. 

online collaborative tools

so many tools, so little time - just read about MindQuarry - anyone worked with them? trying to figure out the world's best free online collaborative tool...

Dance dance dance and I dance dance dance

Based on what I read daily, Digital has eliminated the distance between brands and the people who buy them.  Agencies, formerly the soft Oreo-cookie like creme filling between, are destined for the scrapheap as smart marketers simply open-source their branding/marketing.

This year's Superbowl saw "User-Generated" ads for Doritos, GM, the NFL, and even Alka-Seltzer asked folks to pen a jingle.

The book Wikinomics cites breathless examples of businesses that have grown exponentially by offering all comers a front seat to their internal workings/deliberations/decision-making, and describes the phenomenon of brands as, effectively, participatory theater.  After all, who knows what consumers want more than the consumers themselves?

But here's the problem: a significant portion of the user generated stuff webwide is a vast sea of chum and self-indulgent mediocrity.  Most blogs will never see a second post, let alone a visitor beyond the author.  YouTube servers are choked with mind-expanding stuff like the kitty cat dance - (full disclosure - I love the 'kitty cat dance', and play it enough that my son now sings it around the house)

And handing over your brand to consumers may not always be the brightest thing to do.  In spite of how Chevy tried to spin their "create your own video" contest.

Brands have a unique opportunity in this rapidly proliferating media landscape we call the web.  And that role may not be group hug collaborator.  When so many brands seem to be begging people to tell them what that brand should be, powerful brands, lighthouse brands have a unique, and ultimatley far more interesting role to play:

Curator.

more soon.

The Twitter-ing Continues

Twitter. 

If you haven't done it, somehow, people just know.

It's worthwhile to bone up on Twitter.  And I wouldn't have said this a few weeks back.

Twitter lets you update anyone who gives a toot up-to-the-second updates on your sad little life.  Via your phone primarily, but also by web.  As a tool, it really blew up at the Austin based geekfest "South by Southwest".  Then it was supposed to die.  But it's only gotten bigger.  Mad bigger.  I've got one word for you:  twittervision.   I watched this thing til I was bleary-eyed.

http://www.twittervision.com

Believe me when I tell you its like Mr. Pibb and red strings = crazy delicious.  See a self-involved world updating live.  Please.  Go.  Now.

Twitter's burrowed its way into the general subconscious and stuck - why?  well, first thing is they released their code to the public, so anyone can create their own twitter "mashup" or tools.  This took a pretty basic tool and actually made it intersting.  Two, its an embodiment of "reachability" - the ability for others to know where you are at all times.  Three, it a chance for celebrity - to show up on the general posts at twitter, to appear on a map mashup, etc., has value.  Fourth, It's a great tool for connecting with people on the fly, and that's how it was used at SXSW, where it became a way to leave virtual posts and set up spontaneous gatherings. 

But there is something deeper here to this phenomenon - I'd love to hear your thoughts on it!

Twitter's like digital kudzu.  Here's just a partial list of Twitter related stuff from franticindustries:

Mashups

Flussgeist - an unorthodox but interesting mashup between Twitter, Flickr, and several other services. It combines tweets with images, videos and an ambient soundtrack.
Swotter A contestant for the weirdest Twitter mashup out there, Swotter is “reading” books to Twitter. It’s essentially just sending lines of text from a book to a Twitter account. You can see it in action here: twitter.com/booktwo
Twapper - a mashup between the online calendar 30boxes and Twitter, created by the folks from 30boxes themselves. It works on both mobile and standard web browsers, and it’s useful even without a 30boxes account
TwitterEarth - similar to TwitterVision (which came first), but based on Live Maps, and works in 3D, too - at least it should, but at the time of this writing clicking on the 3D icon does nothing.
Twitterer - a Twitter/Second Life mashups, which shows updates from a certain Twitter accounts over Second Life spheres.
TwitterMaps another Twitter/Google Maps mashup, with a simple function: find out where a Twitter user is located. You can also update your current location with a special command sent to Twitter.

Mobile

 Autotwit lets you automate Twitter updates. Quite useless, unless you want to keep up an image of a man that never sleeps.
EmailTwitter - allows you to post Twitter updates and retrieve your Twitter timeline via your cellular phone or other e-mail enabled mobile device, without incurring SMS fees.
Mail2Twitter allows you to post tweets through e-mail, as well as any email-enabled mobile device.
RSS2Twitter - converts an RSS feed into Twitter tweets.
Twitter Badges: This comes straight from the developers of Twitter: Flash badges intended to be displayed on your website, showing your latest Twitter posts
TwitterBuzz is an interesting tool that turns Twitter into some sort of simple Digg. It displays a list of most popular links on Twitter. You can see all the Twitter messages mentioning the link.
TwitterFeed - a service that combines OpenID and Twitter to let you feed the entries on your blog to Twitter
Twitterholic keeps a top list of users based on how often the post, how many friends they have, and other factors.
Twitteromatic - a tool that posts all sorts of information (weather, Firefox updates) to Twitter automatically.

Widgets

Twadget - A Windows Vista widget (Microsoft calls them gadgets for no understandable reason), which shows you the latest Twitter updates and gives you the ability to post to Twitter right from your desktop.
Yourminis Twitter widget that shows tweets, and enables you to post updates to Twitter.

Wikipedia: Frontline in the War of Ideas

There is a very real battle of ideas playing out RIGHT NOW on Wikipedia. 

It is a known Wikipedia phenomenon that competing "editors" with opposing agendas are editing and re-editing each other's entries around key terms as fast as they can type, seeking to control the very meaning of words and by extension, the tenor of the debates around them.  Which goes straight at issue raised in an earlier post: how do you know whether what you are reading online is credible, when so many entries can be anonymous or can be entered under false names or aliases?

Type in "gun control" on wikipedia.org and the entry you get is topped with the following graphics:

The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page.

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message.

Hot button topics like "Abortion" have been hit so many times, Wikipedia no longer allow unregistered users to post, and the entry is topped with this message:

Editing of this article by unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled. Such users may discuss changes, request unprotection, log in, or create an account.

FranticIndustries's Stan Schroeder writes:

"Larry Sanger, one of Wikipedia’s co-founders, has decided that the Wikipedia is no good. His alternative? Citizendium - a Wiki without anonymous editing...

Citizendium is...a free, nonprofit encyclopedia...supervised by experts, with article-writing limited only to certified “contributors”, which are identified by their real name...

The question is whether [Citizendium] will ever achieve the critical mass of contributors to make it a resource comparable to Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s popularity isn’t due to its coverage of topics which can be found in standard encyclopedia; it’s due to those unbelievably detailed articles about computer game villains, Linux kernel versions, and other stuff you can’t find anywhere else. Citizendium will have more authority, but will it ever achieve such diversity?"

"Opensource' Rant - Con

"Opensourcing" (or a variant, "crowdsourcing") allows consumer participation in brands, media, R&D, etc.  MANY books, including James Surowiecki's The Wisdom of Crowds, Glenn Reynolds An Army of Davids, and Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams's Wikinomics address issues and opportunities around opensourcing. 

Brands should care, deeply, what people have to say about them - and the digital medium allows for unprecedented two-way dialogue.

But when you enshrine collective opinion as gospel, you can run into issues - as Henry Ford said, 'If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse." This line of thinking fuels Andrew Keen's new book, innocuously entitled: The Cult of the Amateur: How today's Internet is killing our culture.

Keen posits that current systems of content creation and distribution are being trashed (Music done, movies and video games coming up), but nothing is filling their place.  He asks: when you take away the economic incentive for artists to create, will they?  What happens when the newspaper reporter whose stories are quoted, reposted and annotated around the web, gets fired when his paper cuts staff due to  Craig's List sucking away the paper's classified ad revenue?  Where does original, informed content come from when the grownups leave the building?

The book raises other questions:

• How does one establish meaningful credibility in a digital sea of self-reflection, recycling, and regurgitation?
• As we trend to more niche personal experiences, how do we create opportunities for people to expand rather than narrow their thinking?
• Self-publishing tools were touted as allowing all to 'express' themselves, but are we replacing a system that is supportive of content creators with an echo-chamber of navel-gazing?
• What is the role of identity vs anonymity in digital culture and a democracy?  It takes guts and a system to present a clearly articulated view free of fears of reprisal (or digital tar-and-feathering), but when its cheap and easy to hit someone in a digital driveby, what does that do to the tenor and quality of discourse?
• UGC, micro-fragmentation and tinier and tinier self-aggregated 'belief clusters' are destroying/remaking content creation/distribution models AND messaging.  How do brands play in this space, meaningfully, relevantly, and honestly?

These are critical, timely questions and I'd love to hear your thoughts. 

The future of our business requires digital fluency.  The advent of 'digital', in its glittering, maddening, boggling array is inflicting unimaginable changes so deep and profound we've little idea their short- or long-term impact.  I believe we are well-positioned to harness the changes for ourselves and our clients.

We are in the race.  And we play to win.

 

Jonathan Feels Fine

Jonathan Harris just blew off everyone's socks @ TED with a presentation of his upcoming project "Universe".  He's an artist that works primarily digitally, and amongst other things, he develops programming systems that sample large quantities of data and express them in mindbending ways.  Here's one example:

We Feel Fine - 2006

according to his site, number27.org,

"We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion."

"Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

"The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day..."

For the full story, and more of Jonathan's projects, visit Number27.org.

enginet: addictionary.org

Think of an enginet as a self-contained, networked media ecosystem.  The basic gist - don't just make a web presence to have one - the ideal web presence meets your business objectives and people's needs and becomes self-sustaining through community engagement.

Spectrum DNA creates enginets (networked media ecosystems), and their most recent launch is addictionary.org.  The site features words created, commented and voted on by an active community.  Words that garner the most attention can be purchased on tshirts, mugs, etc.

Jim Banister, author of Word of Mouse, outlines the four key components of an enginet as follows: Code, Content, Commerce, Community.   

Addictionary.org leverages these components-

• Code - provides a robust and scalable server hardware and software platform to suppoort significant activity
• Content - people enter their favorite fake words for consideration by the community, and examples include:
  • skipish (verb) excessively arrogant and mighty; rude or insolent; Fundamentalist Christian
  • scarecity (noun) how scarcity and scare tactics are part and parcel of the same energy. How scarcity consciousness prevails by using scare tactics.
  • crapitalization (noun) Beginning words with uppercase letters in a seemingly random pattern.
  • crapitalize (verb) Capitalization with no regard to the rules or common usage. Placing capital letters at the beginning of words in a pattern that can best be described as completely random.
  • ignoranus (noun) A person who's both stupid and an asshole.
• Commerce - most popular words are available on apparel

Community - includes the ability to comment on and rate other posts, forward to friends, etc.

Other enginet examples include: ebay, second life, amazon, etc.