Sunday, August 14, 2005
Ideabroker
Ideabroker features such visionaries as Peter Luiks, Jan Karel, Michael Pococky and others.
Tuesday, July 26, 2005
More on Blog Carnivals
If you want to learn more about blog carnivals (in the context of the future of journalism) go here. It also contains a list of all extant and extinct carnivals - there's something for everybody.
Monday, July 18, 2005
Cooperative Advertising For Bloggers
Now for those of you who know what cooperative advertising is, then you know there’s nothing new about it. From the early 1900s until just a few years ago cooperative advertising ruled when it came to advertising for small businesses and while it does still exist, overt examples are getting harder to come by.
Now, for those of you who don’t know what cooperative advertising is, please let me explain: Cooperative advertising is when two businesses-- usually one very large business and one small business split the cost of advertising by advertising together. One of the most common examples were the soft drink signs on the front of curb markets and country stores that were once quite common all over the country. Often a small business couldn’t afford a sign of their own so a soft drink company like Pepsi or Doctor Pepper would sell them a sign at less than cost, that included not only the name of the store but the name of the soft drink as well. The small business got a sign for cheap and the soft drink company got themselves a building to advertise on. Occasionally, when competition was at it’s fiercest, the drink companies would give the signs to the store owners free of charge.
Stick with me now as I’m going somewhere with this.
Cooperative advertising is found in print, radio, and television as well on the walls of buildings and on billboards. AC-Delco (a division of General Motors) has entered into hundreds, perhaps thousands of cooperative radio spots with local auto parts dealers and back in the days when department stores were locally owned and operated it wasn’t uncommon to see newspaper ads pairing manufacturers of name brand products with the local department, appliance, and hardware stores.
The most common examples of cooperative advertising still in existence today are the heating and air-conditioning advertisements that pitch a manufacturer’s brand such as Trane or Carrier with the local dealers shown at the end of television commercials.
Like I said, I’m going somewhere with this.
What about double sided business cards for bloggers and small businesses? Take me for example: I pass out 200 business cards each week advertising my websites, BloggingPoet.com and LaureatesKids.com but the back side of my cards are blank. What if a business or nonprofit decided to furnish me with business cards with my websites on one side and their website on the other side? For starters I would probably pass out more than I do now as I can’t afford to print more than I do. Secondly, that business would get some of the cheapest advertisement any business can buy. And number three is the fact that business cards are often seen by far more people than just those people they were handed to. For me that means more readers come to my website and for the business that decided to pay for my our business cards-- more sales for less money.
If you’d like to know where to mail my business cards and what to put on my side, simply send an e-mail to idleblogs (at) yahoo.com
Oh, and another cheap advertising idea I’ve used for a couple of years at one of my other domains, VegetableStalker.com, was to have my bank add my domain name to my personal checks in the lower right corner just above where my signature goes. The bank added it to my checks for free and there’s no advertising cheaper than free, right?
Got an idea for the Idea Consultants? Feel free to contact any of the Idea Consultants to discuss it and don’t forget to return to IdeaConsultants.org for more great ideas.
Now, for those of you who don’t know what cooperative advertising is, please let me explain: Cooperative advertising is when two businesses-- usually one very large business and one small business split the cost of advertising by advertising together. One of the most common examples were the soft drink signs on the front of curb markets and country stores that were once quite common all over the country. Often a small business couldn’t afford a sign of their own so a soft drink company like Pepsi or Doctor Pepper would sell them a sign at less than cost, that included not only the name of the store but the name of the soft drink as well. The small business got a sign for cheap and the soft drink company got themselves a building to advertise on. Occasionally, when competition was at it’s fiercest, the drink companies would give the signs to the store owners free of charge.
Stick with me now as I’m going somewhere with this.
Cooperative advertising is found in print, radio, and television as well on the walls of buildings and on billboards. AC-Delco (a division of General Motors) has entered into hundreds, perhaps thousands of cooperative radio spots with local auto parts dealers and back in the days when department stores were locally owned and operated it wasn’t uncommon to see newspaper ads pairing manufacturers of name brand products with the local department, appliance, and hardware stores.
The most common examples of cooperative advertising still in existence today are the heating and air-conditioning advertisements that pitch a manufacturer’s brand such as Trane or Carrier with the local dealers shown at the end of television commercials.
Like I said, I’m going somewhere with this.
What about double sided business cards for bloggers and small businesses? Take me for example: I pass out 200 business cards each week advertising my websites, BloggingPoet.com and LaureatesKids.com but the back side of my cards are blank. What if a business or nonprofit decided to furnish me with business cards with my websites on one side and their website on the other side? For starters I would probably pass out more than I do now as I can’t afford to print more than I do. Secondly, that business would get some of the cheapest advertisement any business can buy. And number three is the fact that business cards are often seen by far more people than just those people they were handed to. For me that means more readers come to my website and for the business that decided to pay for my our business cards-- more sales for less money.
If you’d like to know where to mail my business cards and what to put on my side, simply send an e-mail to idleblogs (at) yahoo.com
Oh, and another cheap advertising idea I’ve used for a couple of years at one of my other domains, VegetableStalker.com, was to have my bank add my domain name to my personal checks in the lower right corner just above where my signature goes. The bank added it to my checks for free and there’s no advertising cheaper than free, right?
Got an idea for the Idea Consultants? Feel free to contact any of the Idea Consultants to discuss it and don’t forget to return to IdeaConsultants.org for more great ideas.
Friday, July 01, 2005
Monday, June 20, 2005
The Biggest Picture Ideas
One of the great "idea consultants" of our era, IMHO, is Jared Diamond. I have read his latest book "Collapse" and posted a review here.
Monday, June 13, 2005
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
IN DASH I-POD
I've yet to run out and buy one, but have no doubt I know of the huge popularity of the Apple I-Pod-- the portable music player from Apple Computer.
Anyway, that got me to thinking: people love their I-Pods, they carry them everywhere, even wear them while they're driving, but did you know it's against the law in most states to drive while wearing headphones or earphones?
So what if someone manufactured an in-dash I-Pod holder that ran the sound through those big car audio speakers instead of those tiny earphones. You could even design it so that it charged your I-Pod's battery while you drive. Imagine listening to your favorite mixes or pod casts while you drive?
Got an idea you'd like to see someone do, an invention you'd like to be able to buy? Send it to any of the Idea Consultants here at IdeaConsultants.org and we'll tell the world about it.
Anyway, that got me to thinking: people love their I-Pods, they carry them everywhere, even wear them while they're driving, but did you know it's against the law in most states to drive while wearing headphones or earphones?
So what if someone manufactured an in-dash I-Pod holder that ran the sound through those big car audio speakers instead of those tiny earphones. You could even design it so that it charged your I-Pod's battery while you drive. Imagine listening to your favorite mixes or pod casts while you drive?
Got an idea you'd like to see someone do, an invention you'd like to be able to buy? Send it to any of the Idea Consultants here at IdeaConsultants.org and we'll tell the world about it.
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Blog Carnivals And The Future Of Journalism
What is a blog carnival?
A blog carnival is a blog-post that contains links to posts on other blogs. How does that differ from a linkfest, or for that matter from most of the stuff that early blogs (and many blogs today) routinely did? In the early days of blogs, there was no original content - blogs WERE collections of links. How are carnivals different?
Yesterday I assembled the fifth edition of the monthly Meta-Carnival, a round-up of all known blog carnivals. I have previously archived my posts about blogging in the Category Blogging and posts specifically about carnivals in the Category Blog Carnivals, though I need to, now that my computer is OK again, update these two categories. Some of the posts archived there are longish musings on the role and meaning of carnivals so I urge you to go and read them. I have added another link, a repository of Meta-Carnivals here. Some other people also collect carnivals, most notably Ferdy The Conservative Cat who has developed the Universal Carnival Submission Form. Bigwig of Silflay Hraka, the inventor of the very first carnival (as well as the term "carnival"), used to collect them but has recently decided to just link to my latest edition of the Meta-Carnival.
Rounding the carnivals up every month, in addition to frequent hosting, sending entries and linking to new editions, gave me, I think, some insights into what makes a carnival and especially what makes a succesful carnival. I'll now attempt to systematize what I think I learned. I will repeatedly use analogies to hard-copy journalism and to physical spaces.
What makes a carnival successful?
In order to succeed, a blog carnival needs to: a) have a clearly stated purpose, b) appear with predictable regularity, c) rotate editors, d) have a homepage and archives, and e) have more than one person doing heavy lifting. Let me go over these one at a time.
A) Purpose. Several carnivals, particularly the older ones (e.g., Carnival of Vanities), are all-purpose "Best of..." blog-newspapers and magazines. Nothing wrong with it, of course. NY Times is an all-purpose newspaper and Time is an all-purpose magazine. However, nobody collects NY Times as a prized collection: once read, the issue gets recycled or used for lining the bird cage. Similarly, having a post on - or even hosting - such a carnival may bring you an avalanche of hits for a few days but is highly unlikely to bring you new regular readers. If you prefer a physical analogy, it is like going downtown or to a park when the weather is nice and bumping into a lot of nice people, yet it is unlikely that you will exchange e-mail addresses with any of them, or ever see them again. This was a chance encounter.
Contrast that to more narrowly focused carnivals (e.g., Grand Rounds for medicine and Nursing Moment for nursing). They are blog equivalents of specialty magazines or even technical journals. In physical space, they are analogous to political rallies, MeetUps, seminars, or even scientific conferences. These are the places to go when you are looking for people who share a specific interest with you. You are likely to exchange a lot of e-mail addresses because you want to stay in touch with such people. Sending an entry to a specialized carnival exposes you to bloggers who are inherently interested in your writing. Hosting one makes you even more visible (like giving a plenary lecture at a meeting) and after the temporary avalanche of hits subsides, you will realize you have acquired a number of new regular readers, bloggers who put you on their blogrolls and on their RSS feeds, who keep coming back and linking to your posts. This is how a community is built.
B) Regularity. It really does not matter how often a carnival is posted as long as it is posted at regular intervals. Blog Of The Day and Funny Stuff are dailies. Most carnivals are weeklies. Some carnivals appear every two (e.g., Tangled Bank and Smarter Thank I) or every three weeks (e.g., History), or once a month (e.g., Balkans), or even quarterly (e.g., Carnivalesque and Carnival of Bad History). More narrowly focused a carnival, and more expertise it requires from the bloggers who submit their entries, less frequently the carnival can appear and still retain a decent size and a high level of quality of posts. Carnivals with unpredictable schedules tend to be neglected as unreliable. Can you imagine a newspaper that sometimes shows up on news-stands and sometimes does not? Ferdy, for instance, does not link to carnivals that have irregular schedules. Do it right, or don't do it.
C) Rotation. The first blogs in history were link-fests. Content appeared later. So, if you publish a blog-post that contains a bunch of links to other blogs, how is that a carnival? How is that different from just any other blog-post that is full of links? Even if you give it a name, and a theme and very regular schedule, it is only YOUR post. It better be a very creative and unique service to the blogging community (e.g., Friday Ark) or else nobody will come.
Most carnivals rotate hosts. Every issue is hosted by someone different. Some carnivals have definite "homes", yet the carnival makes regular trips to other blogs for guest-hosting (e.g., Carnival of Education, or Carnival of Sin). Best Of Me Symphony is always on the same blog, but the editor is always somebody else (a guest-editor), and that carnival is always done very well textually and visually and has earned a reputation over time.
Carnivals that are always hosted on the same blog, always by the same editor, and are sometimes irregular in scheduling tend to die off. Add to that linking primarily to posts chosen by the editor (e.g., Blog Tower and Carnival of Insanities) and I would not call it a carnival any more, but a vanity press. It is just a link-rich post by that person on that person's blog - something we all do at least occasionally.
D) Homepage and Archives. Whenever I assemble an issue of the Meta-Carnival, it takes me a few minutes to update carnivals with homepages and hours to update the carnivals without homepages. In a sense I am a "professional" while doing this search, but how about "amateurs"? They'll find it even harder. Imagine a new blogger who first discovers a carnival and reads an issue #23 or so, and wants to check out previous issues. If there is a homepage (or home-blog-post) that contains the archives of all previous issues, it is a breeze. If there is no such thing, the task is extremely difficult, in some cases impossible. Now imagine 50 years from now, when there is an issue #2523. Imagine the immensity of the archives and its value to historians. Start your archives now, while it is still relatively easy to have everything organized. If mainstream media hides its archives behind subscripton wall, while carnivals keep well-organized archives for free, guess who will be more relevant in the future?
E) Community Effort. On my own blog, I am the King. So are you on yours. Why should I come to your blog and submit to your iron-fist rule? One reason why carnivals hosted by a single blog/editor do not have wide readership and tend to whither away is because of a lack of a sense of ownership by a broader community. All the points above, e.g., a sense of purpose, rotation of hosts, regularity/predictability, and the existence of a central place and archives, tend to foster the sense of community. People find each other through the carnivals and keep coming back for more. They see how entering a carnival leads to an increase of regular readership, and hosting one even more so. The originator of the carnival wisely fades into the shadows and lets the carnival take a life of its own.
Carnivals as the Glue of the Blogging Community
There are two ways blogs in general and carnivals in particular can foster community. One is to introduce to each other people from all over the world who are interested in the same topic. I have written at length about this process, with a particular example of how blogging is going to change the future of science. In a sense, that is what one tends to think of first about the benefits of the Internet in general. If you have access to the Web, it does not matter who you are or where you are - you are an equal participant in the global endeavor, whatever that may be. If you like cats, you will meet other cat-lovers from all around the world at the Carnival of Cats.
The second way blogs foster community is on a local level - meeting people locally. This is particularly relevant for political organizing, and to some extent for doing business locally, but meeting local bloggers with similar hobbies and interests (or even dating!) is just around the corner. Geographically delineated carnivals help people in finding each other. So far, carnivals of Indian, Asian, Iraqi and Afghan, British, Canadian (separated into Lefty and Righty) and Balkan bloggers have been doing well. While Blogger, Google and Techorati estimate that there are about 10 million blogs worldwide, with thousands being started every day, I have heard recently that there are additional 10 million bloggers in China! I am assuming they developed their own software and are thus invisible to our search engines. However, those are still large land areas to cover. More recently, two even more narrowly local carnivals appeared (I guess a certain critical mass of bloggers needed to be attained first): North Carolina bloggers and Montana bloggers. These carnivals serve as virtual MeetUps, and often lead to real-life meetups as well as community action.
Lefty and Righty Carnivals
Why does it appear that conservative bloggers are dominating carnivals? It could be due to chance, or perhaps there is a reason, or perhaps this is just an illusion. Is it the greater connectivity of conservatives? Is it the greater individualism of liberals?
Let's look at it historically. The very first carnival, Carnival Of Vanities, was started by a conservative blogger and attracted primarily other conservative bloggers. How many liberals regularly read Silflay Hraka after all? So, this was natural.
For about a year, this was the only existing carnival. During this time, many conservatives got aquanted with the idea of a carnival and soon started a few new ones (e.g., Bonfire Of Vanities, Carnival of Capitalists, Blog Mela, and SEVERAL! Christian carnivals), while most liberals have still never heard of the concept. Another year passed. Once new carnivals got started around topics that have nothing to do with one's political persuasion, e.g., medicine (Grand Rounds), science (Tangled Bank), history, or philosophy, the liberal bloggers got gradually introduced to the concept.
Last year saw an explosion of new carnivals. Every month I have to add a few new ones to the Meta-Carnival (while also reporting on the demise of some). Is there a Liberal Carnival as an equivalent to and balance to the Carnival of Vanities? No. An early attempt was Blog Tower, but it violated all of the rules (A through E above) of successful carnivals and I doubt it will recover. A few weeks ago, the idea was broached on Crooked Timber (and a cool name - Speaker's Corner - was suggested), but nothing came out of it due to, I suspect, a conflict between the wish of Timberites to make it a Crooked-Timber-kind-of-thing, and the wish of others to have it community-run. Recently, a new (and excellent!) Carnival of Un-Capitalists was founded with an explicit purpose to counter the Carnival of Capitalists, i.e., to put together best posts about economic issues from a Progressive perspective. Canadian Liberals have the Cavalcade Of The Canucks, as a counterbalance to the Canadian Right wing's The Red Ensign.
Some recent carnivals are dominated by liberals, even though politics is not important for the topic. For instance, Carnival of the Godless, Skeptic's Circle, Carnival of Bad History and Tangled Bank tend to attract the folks from the reality-based community who are largely liberal. Carnivals of the Balkan bloggers and Montana bloggers are liberal due to chance: their founders are liberal and the first entries were naturally from other liberal blogs. Some other carnivals are pretty evenly balanced, e.g., carnivals of history, philosophy, kids, education, and Tar Heel Tavern (NC bloggers) are consciously kept politically balanced. Thus, while MSM may be perceived as liberal by the Right, and perceived as spineless sellouts to the Bush regime's propaganda machine by the Left, the carnivals, all in all, are pretty balanced. There is a complete range of opinions voiced from one extreme, through the moderate middle, to the other extreme.
I think that the New York Times of the Lefty blogosphere is DailyKos! Every year Markos Moulitzas gets irate when people nominate DailyKos for Koufax Awards in the category of "group blogs". He loudly proclaims that it is HIS blog. But, it is not. Not any more. Ever since he enabled Diaries, Kos has lost control of his blog. I personally almost never read the posts by Markos. I rarely ever go to the front page. But I go there often and read the Diaries. DailyKos has grown into the biggest and best carnival online today. It is the Carnival Of Record in a sense that NYTimes is a Newspaper of Record. Likewise, in comparison to DailyKos, Carnival of Vanities is like Washington Times: the main Righty outlet, but far from the influence of NYTimes.
Carnivals as Journalism
Blogs themselves, no matter what is written on them, are often thought of as "new journalism", a bottom-up kind of journalism that will complement (and keep on their toes) the better-funded top-down journalism of the MSM. With 10 million Chinese blogs and another 10 million blogs around the rest of the world, and the numbers rising fast, the amount of material on blogs is overwhelming. Daily news aggregators (like del.icio.us) and other blog aggregators are worthy attempts at sifting through the mass and concentrating worthy information in one place. Blog-specific search-engines, like Technorati (and the invention of Tags), is another attempt to organize the enormous amount of blog-generated information.
I have a hunch that in the future it will be the blog carnivals that will emerge as the online equivalents of hard-copy media. Carnivals organized around strong concepts, published on rigorous schedules, well-archived, and community-run will outlive their mushy competitors and become the online equivalents of not just TIME magazine, but also GQ, Vogue, Parenting, National Geographic, People, and, why not, Science and Nature.
Carnivals are still new and young. Most people are trying to be nice to each other. Hosts/editors are usually quite happy to publish links to every entry they get. However, this is already starting to change. With an increased popularity of carnivals and number of entries, the editors are starting to, well, editorialize. Recently, a host of the Carnival of Vanities, Dr.Zen, quite rightfully and forcefully slammed some shallow ideological pieces submitted to the carnival, resulting in quite a discontent in the conservative blog circles. Even more recently, an editor of Skeptic's Circle published but strongly criticized one of the entries, leading to an excellent discussion in the comments. The Modulator, host of the Friday Ark has very strict rules about what is accepted: only posts that contain photographs of extant animals. However, he still publishes the links to posts that are not accepted (e.g., fossils, drawings, plants, bacteria, etc.) in a separate "chapter" of the carnival. I have hosted nine carnivals so far an once I decided to not include and entry that was a pure piece of political propaganda, chockfull of erroneous "facts" and much misleading language. I never mentioned that I did it. It was my editorial prerogative to chose what not to include in the carnival. I assume that other hosts have done the same over time.
What I was trying to do with the previous paragraph was to illustrate that many carnivals are now in the process of leaving the initial phase of sweet-tempered grab-bags of whatever people submit, and entering a phase where editors are starting to pay attention to quality. The "rules" of submission are being tightened. Entries are being denied. Editors are starting to editorialize. The comments are not just "good job on hosting the carnival, Bob!" but actual discussions of the pieces presented in the carnival. The carnivals are now well on the road to becoming real journals, but, importantly, they will ALWAYS remain bottom-up community-run journals, and that is what is going to revolutionize the world of journalism.
(cross-posted on Science And Politics)
A blog carnival is a blog-post that contains links to posts on other blogs. How does that differ from a linkfest, or for that matter from most of the stuff that early blogs (and many blogs today) routinely did? In the early days of blogs, there was no original content - blogs WERE collections of links. How are carnivals different?
Yesterday I assembled the fifth edition of the monthly Meta-Carnival, a round-up of all known blog carnivals. I have previously archived my posts about blogging in the Category Blogging and posts specifically about carnivals in the Category Blog Carnivals, though I need to, now that my computer is OK again, update these two categories. Some of the posts archived there are longish musings on the role and meaning of carnivals so I urge you to go and read them. I have added another link, a repository of Meta-Carnivals here. Some other people also collect carnivals, most notably Ferdy The Conservative Cat who has developed the Universal Carnival Submission Form. Bigwig of Silflay Hraka, the inventor of the very first carnival (as well as the term "carnival"), used to collect them but has recently decided to just link to my latest edition of the Meta-Carnival.
Rounding the carnivals up every month, in addition to frequent hosting, sending entries and linking to new editions, gave me, I think, some insights into what makes a carnival and especially what makes a succesful carnival. I'll now attempt to systematize what I think I learned. I will repeatedly use analogies to hard-copy journalism and to physical spaces.
What makes a carnival successful?
In order to succeed, a blog carnival needs to: a) have a clearly stated purpose, b) appear with predictable regularity, c) rotate editors, d) have a homepage and archives, and e) have more than one person doing heavy lifting. Let me go over these one at a time.
A) Purpose. Several carnivals, particularly the older ones (e.g., Carnival of Vanities), are all-purpose "Best of..." blog-newspapers and magazines. Nothing wrong with it, of course. NY Times is an all-purpose newspaper and Time is an all-purpose magazine. However, nobody collects NY Times as a prized collection: once read, the issue gets recycled or used for lining the bird cage. Similarly, having a post on - or even hosting - such a carnival may bring you an avalanche of hits for a few days but is highly unlikely to bring you new regular readers. If you prefer a physical analogy, it is like going downtown or to a park when the weather is nice and bumping into a lot of nice people, yet it is unlikely that you will exchange e-mail addresses with any of them, or ever see them again. This was a chance encounter.
Contrast that to more narrowly focused carnivals (e.g., Grand Rounds for medicine and Nursing Moment for nursing). They are blog equivalents of specialty magazines or even technical journals. In physical space, they are analogous to political rallies, MeetUps, seminars, or even scientific conferences. These are the places to go when you are looking for people who share a specific interest with you. You are likely to exchange a lot of e-mail addresses because you want to stay in touch with such people. Sending an entry to a specialized carnival exposes you to bloggers who are inherently interested in your writing. Hosting one makes you even more visible (like giving a plenary lecture at a meeting) and after the temporary avalanche of hits subsides, you will realize you have acquired a number of new regular readers, bloggers who put you on their blogrolls and on their RSS feeds, who keep coming back and linking to your posts. This is how a community is built.
B) Regularity. It really does not matter how often a carnival is posted as long as it is posted at regular intervals. Blog Of The Day and Funny Stuff are dailies. Most carnivals are weeklies. Some carnivals appear every two (e.g., Tangled Bank and Smarter Thank I) or every three weeks (e.g., History), or once a month (e.g., Balkans), or even quarterly (e.g., Carnivalesque and Carnival of Bad History). More narrowly focused a carnival, and more expertise it requires from the bloggers who submit their entries, less frequently the carnival can appear and still retain a decent size and a high level of quality of posts. Carnivals with unpredictable schedules tend to be neglected as unreliable. Can you imagine a newspaper that sometimes shows up on news-stands and sometimes does not? Ferdy, for instance, does not link to carnivals that have irregular schedules. Do it right, or don't do it.
C) Rotation. The first blogs in history were link-fests. Content appeared later. So, if you publish a blog-post that contains a bunch of links to other blogs, how is that a carnival? How is that different from just any other blog-post that is full of links? Even if you give it a name, and a theme and very regular schedule, it is only YOUR post. It better be a very creative and unique service to the blogging community (e.g., Friday Ark) or else nobody will come.
Most carnivals rotate hosts. Every issue is hosted by someone different. Some carnivals have definite "homes", yet the carnival makes regular trips to other blogs for guest-hosting (e.g., Carnival of Education, or Carnival of Sin). Best Of Me Symphony is always on the same blog, but the editor is always somebody else (a guest-editor), and that carnival is always done very well textually and visually and has earned a reputation over time.
Carnivals that are always hosted on the same blog, always by the same editor, and are sometimes irregular in scheduling tend to die off. Add to that linking primarily to posts chosen by the editor (e.g., Blog Tower and Carnival of Insanities) and I would not call it a carnival any more, but a vanity press. It is just a link-rich post by that person on that person's blog - something we all do at least occasionally.
D) Homepage and Archives. Whenever I assemble an issue of the Meta-Carnival, it takes me a few minutes to update carnivals with homepages and hours to update the carnivals without homepages. In a sense I am a "professional" while doing this search, but how about "amateurs"? They'll find it even harder. Imagine a new blogger who first discovers a carnival and reads an issue #23 or so, and wants to check out previous issues. If there is a homepage (or home-blog-post) that contains the archives of all previous issues, it is a breeze. If there is no such thing, the task is extremely difficult, in some cases impossible. Now imagine 50 years from now, when there is an issue #2523. Imagine the immensity of the archives and its value to historians. Start your archives now, while it is still relatively easy to have everything organized. If mainstream media hides its archives behind subscripton wall, while carnivals keep well-organized archives for free, guess who will be more relevant in the future?
E) Community Effort. On my own blog, I am the King. So are you on yours. Why should I come to your blog and submit to your iron-fist rule? One reason why carnivals hosted by a single blog/editor do not have wide readership and tend to whither away is because of a lack of a sense of ownership by a broader community. All the points above, e.g., a sense of purpose, rotation of hosts, regularity/predictability, and the existence of a central place and archives, tend to foster the sense of community. People find each other through the carnivals and keep coming back for more. They see how entering a carnival leads to an increase of regular readership, and hosting one even more so. The originator of the carnival wisely fades into the shadows and lets the carnival take a life of its own.
Carnivals as the Glue of the Blogging Community
There are two ways blogs in general and carnivals in particular can foster community. One is to introduce to each other people from all over the world who are interested in the same topic. I have written at length about this process, with a particular example of how blogging is going to change the future of science. In a sense, that is what one tends to think of first about the benefits of the Internet in general. If you have access to the Web, it does not matter who you are or where you are - you are an equal participant in the global endeavor, whatever that may be. If you like cats, you will meet other cat-lovers from all around the world at the Carnival of Cats.
The second way blogs foster community is on a local level - meeting people locally. This is particularly relevant for political organizing, and to some extent for doing business locally, but meeting local bloggers with similar hobbies and interests (or even dating!) is just around the corner. Geographically delineated carnivals help people in finding each other. So far, carnivals of Indian, Asian, Iraqi and Afghan, British, Canadian (separated into Lefty and Righty) and Balkan bloggers have been doing well. While Blogger, Google and Techorati estimate that there are about 10 million blogs worldwide, with thousands being started every day, I have heard recently that there are additional 10 million bloggers in China! I am assuming they developed their own software and are thus invisible to our search engines. However, those are still large land areas to cover. More recently, two even more narrowly local carnivals appeared (I guess a certain critical mass of bloggers needed to be attained first): North Carolina bloggers and Montana bloggers. These carnivals serve as virtual MeetUps, and often lead to real-life meetups as well as community action.
Lefty and Righty Carnivals
Why does it appear that conservative bloggers are dominating carnivals? It could be due to chance, or perhaps there is a reason, or perhaps this is just an illusion. Is it the greater connectivity of conservatives? Is it the greater individualism of liberals?
Let's look at it historically. The very first carnival, Carnival Of Vanities, was started by a conservative blogger and attracted primarily other conservative bloggers. How many liberals regularly read Silflay Hraka after all? So, this was natural.
For about a year, this was the only existing carnival. During this time, many conservatives got aquanted with the idea of a carnival and soon started a few new ones (e.g., Bonfire Of Vanities, Carnival of Capitalists, Blog Mela, and SEVERAL! Christian carnivals), while most liberals have still never heard of the concept. Another year passed. Once new carnivals got started around topics that have nothing to do with one's political persuasion, e.g., medicine (Grand Rounds), science (Tangled Bank), history, or philosophy, the liberal bloggers got gradually introduced to the concept.
Last year saw an explosion of new carnivals. Every month I have to add a few new ones to the Meta-Carnival (while also reporting on the demise of some). Is there a Liberal Carnival as an equivalent to and balance to the Carnival of Vanities? No. An early attempt was Blog Tower, but it violated all of the rules (A through E above) of successful carnivals and I doubt it will recover. A few weeks ago, the idea was broached on Crooked Timber (and a cool name - Speaker's Corner - was suggested), but nothing came out of it due to, I suspect, a conflict between the wish of Timberites to make it a Crooked-Timber-kind-of-thing, and the wish of others to have it community-run. Recently, a new (and excellent!) Carnival of Un-Capitalists was founded with an explicit purpose to counter the Carnival of Capitalists, i.e., to put together best posts about economic issues from a Progressive perspective. Canadian Liberals have the Cavalcade Of The Canucks, as a counterbalance to the Canadian Right wing's The Red Ensign.
Some recent carnivals are dominated by liberals, even though politics is not important for the topic. For instance, Carnival of the Godless, Skeptic's Circle, Carnival of Bad History and Tangled Bank tend to attract the folks from the reality-based community who are largely liberal. Carnivals of the Balkan bloggers and Montana bloggers are liberal due to chance: their founders are liberal and the first entries were naturally from other liberal blogs. Some other carnivals are pretty evenly balanced, e.g., carnivals of history, philosophy, kids, education, and Tar Heel Tavern (NC bloggers) are consciously kept politically balanced. Thus, while MSM may be perceived as liberal by the Right, and perceived as spineless sellouts to the Bush regime's propaganda machine by the Left, the carnivals, all in all, are pretty balanced. There is a complete range of opinions voiced from one extreme, through the moderate middle, to the other extreme.
I think that the New York Times of the Lefty blogosphere is DailyKos! Every year Markos Moulitzas gets irate when people nominate DailyKos for Koufax Awards in the category of "group blogs". He loudly proclaims that it is HIS blog. But, it is not. Not any more. Ever since he enabled Diaries, Kos has lost control of his blog. I personally almost never read the posts by Markos. I rarely ever go to the front page. But I go there often and read the Diaries. DailyKos has grown into the biggest and best carnival online today. It is the Carnival Of Record in a sense that NYTimes is a Newspaper of Record. Likewise, in comparison to DailyKos, Carnival of Vanities is like Washington Times: the main Righty outlet, but far from the influence of NYTimes.
Carnivals as Journalism
Blogs themselves, no matter what is written on them, are often thought of as "new journalism", a bottom-up kind of journalism that will complement (and keep on their toes) the better-funded top-down journalism of the MSM. With 10 million Chinese blogs and another 10 million blogs around the rest of the world, and the numbers rising fast, the amount of material on blogs is overwhelming. Daily news aggregators (like del.icio.us) and other blog aggregators are worthy attempts at sifting through the mass and concentrating worthy information in one place. Blog-specific search-engines, like Technorati (and the invention of Tags), is another attempt to organize the enormous amount of blog-generated information.
I have a hunch that in the future it will be the blog carnivals that will emerge as the online equivalents of hard-copy media. Carnivals organized around strong concepts, published on rigorous schedules, well-archived, and community-run will outlive their mushy competitors and become the online equivalents of not just TIME magazine, but also GQ, Vogue, Parenting, National Geographic, People, and, why not, Science and Nature.
Carnivals are still new and young. Most people are trying to be nice to each other. Hosts/editors are usually quite happy to publish links to every entry they get. However, this is already starting to change. With an increased popularity of carnivals and number of entries, the editors are starting to, well, editorialize. Recently, a host of the Carnival of Vanities, Dr.Zen, quite rightfully and forcefully slammed some shallow ideological pieces submitted to the carnival, resulting in quite a discontent in the conservative blog circles. Even more recently, an editor of Skeptic's Circle published but strongly criticized one of the entries, leading to an excellent discussion in the comments. The Modulator, host of the Friday Ark has very strict rules about what is accepted: only posts that contain photographs of extant animals. However, he still publishes the links to posts that are not accepted (e.g., fossils, drawings, plants, bacteria, etc.) in a separate "chapter" of the carnival. I have hosted nine carnivals so far an once I decided to not include and entry that was a pure piece of political propaganda, chockfull of erroneous "facts" and much misleading language. I never mentioned that I did it. It was my editorial prerogative to chose what not to include in the carnival. I assume that other hosts have done the same over time.
What I was trying to do with the previous paragraph was to illustrate that many carnivals are now in the process of leaving the initial phase of sweet-tempered grab-bags of whatever people submit, and entering a phase where editors are starting to pay attention to quality. The "rules" of submission are being tightened. Entries are being denied. Editors are starting to editorialize. The comments are not just "good job on hosting the carnival, Bob!" but actual discussions of the pieces presented in the carnival. The carnivals are now well on the road to becoming real journals, but, importantly, they will ALWAYS remain bottom-up community-run journals, and that is what is going to revolutionize the world of journalism.
(cross-posted on Science And Politics)
Monday, May 30, 2005
Making Money On Your Blog
I just posted at my own site a story on making money on your blog. I didn't want the idea to be posted twice, so here's the link. I felt it needed to be shared and is a different angle on making money blogging.
Wednesday, May 25, 2005
Sticky Content= More Business
“What’s sticky content?” you ask.
Sticky content is something you publish for free that others are allowed to place on their websites in order to drive more traffic to their website as well as yours. Sticky content is sometimes used in print media as well.
Let’s say you own an automobile repair shop and need more business. You could advertise in your local newspaper but ads cost money and you’re broke so what do you do? Well it just so happens that many newspapers (especially the free weeklies) need content but don’t have enough cash to pay writers. Why not write an entertaining column each week about cars and car repair and offer your column to the local paper for free? Just make sure you get a byline that reads something like, “Monkey Wrench is the owner of Clunker Auto Repair on 4th and Main Streets in downtown Clunkersville.”
Same thing works for other businesses as well.
You see, each column you write for free ends with a short advertisement (byline) for your garage. In a matter of weeks or months you’ll have customers lined-up to get their cars repaired just like those Click and Clack Brothers on NPR.
If you own a website or write a blog there’s already lots of sticky content available, everything from joke of the day features, cartoons, this day in history, and lots more. Most require that you add a bit of .html or java code but once added they update themselves automatically. For some sticky content you’ll have to pay, but most of it is free as the code you install on your site includes a link back to the site where it originates. Some providers of sticky content will even link back to those persons who use their sticky content.
I have several pages of sticky content at BloggingPoet.com and if I find something I really like I wouldn’t object to adding more. (Any ideas?) Not only does it keep my readers coming back each day, but it’s great for driving search engine traffic to your website or blog. You see, search engines love sites with lots of constantly updated pages of content that changes from day to day. The more often you update your website the more often the robots spider your site and the more often they spider your site the higher your ranking gets. Google now spiders my blog on a daily basis.
If you’re able to create sticky content for others to use then I’d suggest you do that as well. If I understood coding I’d be doing it already. An example of sticky content found right here at IdeaConsultants.org is the Scripting News RSS reader on the right. Scripting News provides us with sticky content via RSS and we gain readership due to increased search engine placement and Scripting News gains readers via the links back to their blog.
By the way: Group blogging and guest blogging are a sort of sticky content as well.
Sticky content is something you publish for free that others are allowed to place on their websites in order to drive more traffic to their website as well as yours. Sticky content is sometimes used in print media as well.
Let’s say you own an automobile repair shop and need more business. You could advertise in your local newspaper but ads cost money and you’re broke so what do you do? Well it just so happens that many newspapers (especially the free weeklies) need content but don’t have enough cash to pay writers. Why not write an entertaining column each week about cars and car repair and offer your column to the local paper for free? Just make sure you get a byline that reads something like, “Monkey Wrench is the owner of Clunker Auto Repair on 4th and Main Streets in downtown Clunkersville.”
Same thing works for other businesses as well.
You see, each column you write for free ends with a short advertisement (byline) for your garage. In a matter of weeks or months you’ll have customers lined-up to get their cars repaired just like those Click and Clack Brothers on NPR.
If you own a website or write a blog there’s already lots of sticky content available, everything from joke of the day features, cartoons, this day in history, and lots more. Most require that you add a bit of .html or java code but once added they update themselves automatically. For some sticky content you’ll have to pay, but most of it is free as the code you install on your site includes a link back to the site where it originates. Some providers of sticky content will even link back to those persons who use their sticky content.
I have several pages of sticky content at BloggingPoet.com and if I find something I really like I wouldn’t object to adding more. (Any ideas?) Not only does it keep my readers coming back each day, but it’s great for driving search engine traffic to your website or blog. You see, search engines love sites with lots of constantly updated pages of content that changes from day to day. The more often you update your website the more often the robots spider your site and the more often they spider your site the higher your ranking gets. Google now spiders my blog on a daily basis.
If you’re able to create sticky content for others to use then I’d suggest you do that as well. If I understood coding I’d be doing it already. An example of sticky content found right here at IdeaConsultants.org is the Scripting News RSS reader on the right. Scripting News provides us with sticky content via RSS and we gain readership due to increased search engine placement and Scripting News gains readers via the links back to their blog.
By the way: Group blogging and guest blogging are a sort of sticky content as well.
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
The Evolutionary Origins of the Weblog
The weblog -- far from being a mere fad -- is a technological expression of our evolutionary heritage.
“Blogs haven't displaced media, US study finds”, reads the latest Reuters headline about blogs. This headline is part of a sudden blog-bashing trend which I predicted would occur two weeks ago[1]. The article’s headline reeks of typical MSM anti-blog bias. Even the word, “displaced”, means literally: “to remove from the usual or proper place.” As expected, the actual truth is buried in the middle of the article:
“The study dispels the notion that blogs are replacing traditional media as the public's primary source of information, said Michael Cornfield, a senior research consultant at Pew.”
The refuted notion, of course, was not held by any credible observer of the media&blogosphere. Nevertheless, Reuters set the record straight: Anyone who claims, "blogs have replaced radio, TV, and print as the public’s primary source of information" is a liar. Personally, I don't really call that newsworthy -- that is unless you're a reporter for The Villiage of Idiots Dispatch.
Now, what is newsworthy is the recent decision of a few news organizations([cough]…the NYTimes) to voluntarily fade into irrelevence. Through out history, its always been like this: some adopt the new, others bury themselves with the old. Whether the established media likes it, or not, it’s a forgone conclusion that blogs are a highly disruptive development. However, lately some members of the press have showed a newfound love of writing them off both foolishly, and with ironic confidence. For example, the notion that blogs are a “fad”, the new “pet rock” as one dinosaur put it. I refuse to give their arguments (if that's what you call them) much attention. If they bothered to think, they might realize that the forces fueling the rise of the weblog are anything but fashion trends.
The nourishing roots of the blogosphere are older than the very cave paintings which signified the birth of media. Our expanding web of conversations, and connections is providing a large and constantly growing percentage of our population with something that humans have always sought: knowledge of our world and environment; to be heard; to converse… To say that the blog is a fad is to say that conversations and the formation of communities is a fad.
The blogosphere’s size and influence is expanding rapidly. The ever so self-centered MSM attributes the success of weblogs to Dean, Rathergate, and mob that lynched Eason Jordon. The shortsightedness of their explanation is consistent with their world view. MSM’s motivation is primarily economic and profit driven. It is difficult for them to move past questions such as, “how do bloggers make money”, or delusions such as “we still have most of the audience(read ad revenue), so blogs are dead; we survived”. This narrow view misses the true force that is driving the rise of the blogosphere.
The MSM is sustained through legal safeguards, readers and watchers who have no where else to turn, and revenue from ads. In contrast, the blogosphere’s growth is sustained by our natural desire for social belonging; to find meaning through cooperation towards common goals. Look at those two models again. Which is more likely to outlive the other?
Human beings emerged 150,000 years ago as a physically weak, and fragile species; just one of many bi-pedal monkeys with big heads. Yet we survived, and flourished by evolving a unique set of common social algorithms based on cooperation, community, and communication. As humanity begins the 21st century, it faces unprecedented peril. Overpopulation, global warming, disappearing resources, plagues, nuclear weapons, and natural disasters all threaten the foundations of our fragile, so-called “global civilization.” Our governments, religious institutions, and traditional sources of information are incapable of averting the impending nightmares of the late 21st century.
But there is hope for us, and perhaps it is hidden in this beautiful thought: The blog -- far from a technological fad -- is in fact a technological expression of our evolutionary heritage.
If that is too outlandish of a thought for your seasoned mind, than be my guest and accept MSM’s version: Blogs get you fired, they are not credible, and MSM is still in charge. Go back to bed little blogger, rest well baby audience member, we’ve got everything taken care of. The couch is your friend.
Monday, May 16, 2005
Dave Beckwith's "Idea Management" comes of age
Information Week and more on "Idea Management"
A few years ago, Information Week called me on the phone and asked me to tell him about Idea Management, since they had ascertained that I have coined the term, and had the first website on the topic. I told him I really hadn't done much with it other than create the website, which wasn't what he wanted to hear. So sorry Charlie!
Here is an article they wrote about it. Not sure if it was the one I was to be involved in.
It is amusing to see how it has grown, and now I think I will take up the reins and get back into it. First I want to see what others are doing with it.
In May, 1998...seven years ago this month, this article surfaced:
A Proposal for Web Idea Management
by Alexei Falaleev
in which the author has the following couple of paragraphs:
It's mine! It's mine I tell you! And I want it back, as well as all of the profits made from it!
Gimme gimme!
Aw...what the heck. Keep your money. I have enough.
Looking over the old site, which I haven't touched in years, I notice that the original Idea Consultants site is linked...although it no longer works, since I turned over Charlotte Internet to Mr. Scott Huffman, the president of Webkorner Internet Services, and good friend. Since he is an ISP, I figured a domain named Charlotte Internet would better serve his ends than mine...although I used it, and still use parts of it, as a place to hold certain things, such as the Morningside website.
Here is the original Idea Consultants website's projects page, as found on the Wayback Machine. You will notice a number of very good domains, all of which we owned...we being me, Darryl, and Woody. Arcturus, however was not ours, but a friend in Hawaii.
These, however, were ours:
Birdfinger, GeniusSearch, INeedSpeed,
CharlotteInternet, Enviropress, EarMusic,
TradeStreetJournal, Brainchild Press, iBMW,
IdeaManagement, SeersCatalog, ShadeWear, GrowLife,
TheHomeLoaner, MajorAdvances, SexyJets, FloodMoney,
UpperClassifieds, GreenModerate, HighTextiles, WritersCafe,
YouthInternational, HDcableTV, OutreLimits, FutureGoods,
TheFirstTrillionaire, People'sEmpire, VirtualBohemia,PeaceGoods,
UnitedStatesOfEarth, eBiz Incubator, GiftEconomy, GreenWitchVillage,
TofuChicken, FreeSouth, 4-MD, LoanLow,
RVking, GoToDo, PeaceFutures, Sharevenue,
InfoMinutes, CharityBrokers, a1Eats, and BandwidthRX.
Most have now lapsed, and one I was offered 750,000 dollars for...and turned it down. Stupid is as stupid does.
A few years ago, Information Week called me on the phone and asked me to tell him about Idea Management, since they had ascertained that I have coined the term, and had the first website on the topic. I told him I really hadn't done much with it other than create the website, which wasn't what he wanted to hear. So sorry Charlie!
Here is an article they wrote about it. Not sure if it was the one I was to be involved in.
It is amusing to see how it has grown, and now I think I will take up the reins and get back into it. First I want to see what others are doing with it.
In May, 1998...seven years ago this month, this article surfaced:
A Proposal for Web Idea Management
by Alexei Falaleev
in which the author has the following couple of paragraphs:
The term "idea management" is a little idea itself, as well as a unique word pattern that is searchable after the idea of the term appeared. I tried Altavista to check whether I was first to find it, and alas, I found that "Idea Management is a term that was coined ... by Dave Beckwith". I spent just a minute for the checking. That is the way it should be for a huge amount of little and large ideas identifiable by word patterns.
The first idea banks and idea searching tools have already appeared on the Web. They are easily searchable, so I am not going to describe them here just to show my competence. As a start point for surfing, I could recommend Idea Management.
It's mine! It's mine I tell you! And I want it back, as well as all of the profits made from it!
Gimme gimme!
Aw...what the heck. Keep your money. I have enough.
Looking over the old site, which I haven't touched in years, I notice that the original Idea Consultants site is linked...although it no longer works, since I turned over Charlotte Internet to Mr. Scott Huffman, the president of Webkorner Internet Services, and good friend. Since he is an ISP, I figured a domain named Charlotte Internet would better serve his ends than mine...although I used it, and still use parts of it, as a place to hold certain things, such as the Morningside website.
Here is the original Idea Consultants website's projects page, as found on the Wayback Machine. You will notice a number of very good domains, all of which we owned...we being me, Darryl, and Woody. Arcturus, however was not ours, but a friend in Hawaii.
These, however, were ours:
Birdfinger, GeniusSearch, INeedSpeed,
CharlotteInternet, Enviropress, EarMusic,
TradeStreetJournal, Brainchild Press, iBMW,
IdeaManagement, SeersCatalog, ShadeWear, GrowLife,
TheHomeLoaner, MajorAdvances, SexyJets, FloodMoney,
UpperClassifieds, GreenModerate, HighTextiles, WritersCafe,
YouthInternational, HDcableTV, OutreLimits, FutureGoods,
TheFirstTrillionaire, People'sEmpire, VirtualBohemia,PeaceGoods,
UnitedStatesOfEarth, eBiz Incubator, GiftEconomy, GreenWitchVillage,
TofuChicken, FreeSouth, 4-MD, LoanLow,
RVking, GoToDo, PeaceFutures, Sharevenue,
InfoMinutes, CharityBrokers, a1Eats, and BandwidthRX.
Most have now lapsed, and one I was offered 750,000 dollars for...and turned it down. Stupid is as stupid does.
Idea Management Resource Center
InnovationTools - Idea Management Resource Center
Idea management is the practice of gathering and evaluating ideas in a structured fashion, with a goal of selecting the best ideas with the greatest bottom-line potential for implementation.
This Idea Management Resource Center will help you to learn more about idea management -- what it is, how it can benefit your company, and the amazing new idea management systems that can help your organization to cost-effectively leverage the creative ideas of all of your employees.
Idea management is the practice of gathering and evaluating ideas in a structured fashion, with a goal of selecting the best ideas with the greatest bottom-line potential for implementation.
This Idea Management Resource Center will help you to learn more about idea management -- what it is, how it can benefit your company, and the amazing new idea management systems that can help your organization to cost-effectively leverage the creative ideas of all of your employees.
Sunday, May 15, 2005
How to act like a millionaire
I often chuckle at the young professionals going around driving leased BMWs, talking on their three hundred dollar cell phones and their five hundred dollar suits. They often have to have the late trendy fad and run out to purchase it at top dollar thinking that every millionaire out there acts similarly.
They flash clothing with brand names plastered all over them thinking that's the way of the money. Little do they know:
Via LifeHacker
They flash clothing with brand names plastered all over them thinking that's the way of the money. Little do they know:
Little something that my father told me long ago. People that have money, dress in clothing that don't have the labels on the outside. People that don't, have it plastered to act like they have money. Interesting isn't it.
Turns out millionaires save their money instead of spend it, focus on their goals, and take calculated risks. (Interesting tidbit regarding the risk part: “a majority of male millionaire entrepreneurs had been in trouble with school authorities or the police during their adolescence.”)
Via LifeHacker
Saturday, May 14, 2005
The Next Killer App
An article in Smithsonian Magazine last year on the invention of the photocopier and the affect it had on offices around the world got me thinking about what truly new inventions or gadgets have had that kind of impact on the white collar workplace since I entered the workforce in 1982. One might think about the personal computer, but frankly there's little being done on PCs today (productive work, at least) that wasn't being done or couldn't be done on a mainframe or midrange server from a dumb terminal. Certainly e-mail in and of itself has created revolutionary changes in how people do their jobs in day-to-day business and if PCs in general have created more of an evolutionary rather than revolutionary change, the mobility revolution of laptops, cellphones, Blackberries, PDAs and wireless technology have in fact created massive changes in where we work and when we work (and unfortunately shrunk dramatically the time that we DON'T work).
But there's another technology out there that has quietly become one of the most used tools in office life, one that has the potential to become the next "killer app" yet one that seems to get little acknowledgement and is provided mostly for free. That, my friends, is instant messaging. In the global workplace that I'm a part of, IM systems have become an essential tool in getting work done. E-mails are great for long messages, for creating a virtual paper trail, for sending attachments - we can't live without it. Phone calls and voice mail are vital as well, but during a normal business day, I'm successful in actually completing a call only about 20-25% of the time - usually the person I want to talk to is on a conference call or on the phone to someone else or they're not answering the phone because they're trying to wrap up that memo they've been working on for 45 minutes and they know an interruption will cause them to lose their train of thought when they're almost, almost done. But instant messaging is somewhere in between - you get a message that pops up like a telephone ring, but it'll sit there patiently until you finish your memo and unlike a ringing telephone, it won't care if you're already having two or three or four other IM conversations. It's a multi-taskers dream! I rarely call someone anymore without "pinging" them first on IM to see if they're available. (I may have to follow up this post with one on the origin of the term "ping" and its implication that we're turning into little network droids instead of people, but I digress.) And it's not just the IT outsourcing company that I work for - I've seen the same in every customer of ours that I've dealt with as well as every vendor and partner that we deal with.
So the industry should be making a killing on this, right? Right? /* crickets chirping */
Kids, most of us are using this service for absolutely nothing. We're using AOL Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger or Yahoo or some other service and we're paying nada for it. This is a tool that was basically developed as far as I can tell as an attractant to get young people interested in whatever Internet service was offering it and has now been adopted (not without some reservations) by the office world. I suspect the providers are struggling with finding a way to differentiate between consumer users and corporate users in order to charge the one and not the other, but I suspect that's difficult to do. I believe they do offer to put servers in-house for a fee to keep data secure inside a company's firewall (Lotus Sametime is usually implemented this way and I know we pay for it, but it only helps with internal communications), but that only really works if you have little or no contact with companies outside yours and that happens more and more infrequently these days. What's it going to take for someone to really make money at this?
Maybe looking at a couple of the drawbacks would help. First of all, there are too damn many of them. Between messaging my co-workers and messaging my customers, I am usually logged in to AIM, MSN Mess and Lotus Sametime. I should probably be logged into Yahoo as well. Truth be told, I can look at those three systems and find most people I work with on at least a weekly basis show up in at least 2 of the 3. Sure there are clients like Trillian and Miranda that try to support some or all of the different systems, but it is in the best interest of the AOLs and Microsofts to make that difficult and they do - I've found none of those products satisfactory. Another problem that seems to generate little thought but scares the heck out of me is the fact that companies are using these tools more and more to get decision-making information in real time to the right people at the right time. Nothing wrong with that - one of the real benefits of the tools, as a matter of fact. But it means that the quick message from a sales guy to the person back at the home office of "did we quote $300K or $3M to ACME?" is answered across the Internet with only the security provided by the service provider on a system that was really set up to allow teenage girls to chat about how cute that new boy in their history class is. Or at least I think that's the case and that itself is maybe a little bit of a problem as well - I understand the secure and insecure aspects of the computer networks I use at work and of e-mail and of wireless. I'm not so sure I do understand those same aspects of a technology that I not only use every day - I depend on it.
So, there ya go, smart guys. Here's a technology that we're not only using for free - we're coming to absolutely depend on it. I think there's enormous potential for someone to develop a product that allows for secure controlled IMing across companies - gimme something with the security of an in-house-run Sametime, the functionality of an AIM or MSN Messenger and a universal interface that will talk to the other major IM systems and I'm betting that it'll sell. Big.
But there's another technology out there that has quietly become one of the most used tools in office life, one that has the potential to become the next "killer app" yet one that seems to get little acknowledgement and is provided mostly for free. That, my friends, is instant messaging. In the global workplace that I'm a part of, IM systems have become an essential tool in getting work done. E-mails are great for long messages, for creating a virtual paper trail, for sending attachments - we can't live without it. Phone calls and voice mail are vital as well, but during a normal business day, I'm successful in actually completing a call only about 20-25% of the time - usually the person I want to talk to is on a conference call or on the phone to someone else or they're not answering the phone because they're trying to wrap up that memo they've been working on for 45 minutes and they know an interruption will cause them to lose their train of thought when they're almost, almost done. But instant messaging is somewhere in between - you get a message that pops up like a telephone ring, but it'll sit there patiently until you finish your memo and unlike a ringing telephone, it won't care if you're already having two or three or four other IM conversations. It's a multi-taskers dream! I rarely call someone anymore without "pinging" them first on IM to see if they're available. (I may have to follow up this post with one on the origin of the term "ping" and its implication that we're turning into little network droids instead of people, but I digress.) And it's not just the IT outsourcing company that I work for - I've seen the same in every customer of ours that I've dealt with as well as every vendor and partner that we deal with.
So the industry should be making a killing on this, right? Right? /* crickets chirping */
Kids, most of us are using this service for absolutely nothing. We're using AOL Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger or Yahoo or some other service and we're paying nada for it. This is a tool that was basically developed as far as I can tell as an attractant to get young people interested in whatever Internet service was offering it and has now been adopted (not without some reservations) by the office world. I suspect the providers are struggling with finding a way to differentiate between consumer users and corporate users in order to charge the one and not the other, but I suspect that's difficult to do. I believe they do offer to put servers in-house for a fee to keep data secure inside a company's firewall (Lotus Sametime is usually implemented this way and I know we pay for it, but it only helps with internal communications), but that only really works if you have little or no contact with companies outside yours and that happens more and more infrequently these days. What's it going to take for someone to really make money at this?
Maybe looking at a couple of the drawbacks would help. First of all, there are too damn many of them. Between messaging my co-workers and messaging my customers, I am usually logged in to AIM, MSN Mess and Lotus Sametime. I should probably be logged into Yahoo as well. Truth be told, I can look at those three systems and find most people I work with on at least a weekly basis show up in at least 2 of the 3. Sure there are clients like Trillian and Miranda that try to support some or all of the different systems, but it is in the best interest of the AOLs and Microsofts to make that difficult and they do - I've found none of those products satisfactory. Another problem that seems to generate little thought but scares the heck out of me is the fact that companies are using these tools more and more to get decision-making information in real time to the right people at the right time. Nothing wrong with that - one of the real benefits of the tools, as a matter of fact. But it means that the quick message from a sales guy to the person back at the home office of "did we quote $300K or $3M to ACME?" is answered across the Internet with only the security provided by the service provider on a system that was really set up to allow teenage girls to chat about how cute that new boy in their history class is. Or at least I think that's the case and that itself is maybe a little bit of a problem as well - I understand the secure and insecure aspects of the computer networks I use at work and of e-mail and of wireless. I'm not so sure I do understand those same aspects of a technology that I not only use every day - I depend on it.
So, there ya go, smart guys. Here's a technology that we're not only using for free - we're coming to absolutely depend on it. I think there's enormous potential for someone to develop a product that allows for secure controlled IMing across companies - gimme something with the security of an in-house-run Sametime, the functionality of an AIM or MSN Messenger and a universal interface that will talk to the other major IM systems and I'm betting that it'll sell. Big.
Thursday, May 12, 2005
Not Just an Alliance, An Organization
There are a lot of bloggers forming groups on the net. Alliances, so to speak. The foremost question I still here is about our credibility and our responsibility. Lets look into this and then I'll pose a challenge to the blogisphere.
Are bloggers credible? Are bloggers responsible? Well, a major part of the blogisphere is. Of course, there is always the "I stubbed my toe today, let me know what you think" guy out there. I feel the majority of bloggers are trying to convey the truth about what there topic is. The mainstream media is covering blogs. We are on CNN, MSNBC, the local papers and local TV reports. We are getting White House press passes, and I'm not speaking of Jeff Gannon. We are a self-policing community, that is quick to strike down fallacies and falsehoods. "We will fact check your ass", I have heard time and again. There are times when we too get bad info. There is always the opportunity to correct our work and right a wrong, and that usually happens quickly in our community. After all, if you were to publish incorrect facts, that deface an individual or their integrity and caused them damage of any sort, you are just as liable as the New York Times. That's right folks, you are responsible for liable and slander. Credible, depends on the material. Responsible, you have to be. I like to follow the ethics guidelines supplied by Journalism.org. I highly recommend them to all. A bloggers credibility is based on their material. If it is credible, factual and offers insight into a specific subject, then by all means yes. If it is OP-ED stuff then that's what it is.
Here is my idea and challenge to the blogisphere: Enough alliances. The Associated Press is a news force. Reuters is a news force. Why can't we have a similar news force. The Associated Bloggers Press? I challenge us to start one. We are credible and responsible. If we are supplying content to the mainstream media, we should be compensated. Shouldn't we? Yes, it requires money and connections. Most of all it requires that we all band together as a community and start valuing what we do.
Are bloggers credible? Are bloggers responsible? Well, a major part of the blogisphere is. Of course, there is always the "I stubbed my toe today, let me know what you think" guy out there. I feel the majority of bloggers are trying to convey the truth about what there topic is. The mainstream media is covering blogs. We are on CNN, MSNBC, the local papers and local TV reports. We are getting White House press passes, and I'm not speaking of Jeff Gannon. We are a self-policing community, that is quick to strike down fallacies and falsehoods. "We will fact check your ass", I have heard time and again. There are times when we too get bad info. There is always the opportunity to correct our work and right a wrong, and that usually happens quickly in our community. After all, if you were to publish incorrect facts, that deface an individual or their integrity and caused them damage of any sort, you are just as liable as the New York Times. That's right folks, you are responsible for liable and slander. Credible, depends on the material. Responsible, you have to be. I like to follow the ethics guidelines supplied by Journalism.org. I highly recommend them to all. A bloggers credibility is based on their material. If it is credible, factual and offers insight into a specific subject, then by all means yes. If it is OP-ED stuff then that's what it is.
Here is my idea and challenge to the blogisphere: Enough alliances. The Associated Press is a news force. Reuters is a news force. Why can't we have a similar news force. The Associated Bloggers Press? I challenge us to start one. We are credible and responsible. If we are supplying content to the mainstream media, we should be compensated. Shouldn't we? Yes, it requires money and connections. Most of all it requires that we all band together as a community and start valuing what we do.
Monday, May 09, 2005
Okay, So I'm Showing My Taste In Music, So What?
A boom away, a boom away, a boom away, a boom a way, a boom away, a boom away, a boom a way, a boom away. In the jungle, the concrete jungle, the boom box roars tonight. In the village, the quiet village, the boom box brings us fright. A boom away, a boom away, a boom...
Okay, so my parody of In The Jungle will probably never be a hit song, but if you spend your days and nights being awaken, annoyed, or otherwise disturbed by jerks playing their music way too loud then the Boom Away just might be an invention you’d love to see made available to the public. If you lived where I live then I'm sure you'd understand how annoying it is when your computer monitor starts shaking its way off the top of your desk.
Of course, what I’m talking about is an electronic device that would temporarily disable the radios of people who play them too loudly. Imagine not being awaken at 2AM by the sound of a car stereo going boom, boom, boom, and rattling every window in your house. Think how nice it would be if your car radio was the only car radio you could hear while waiting for the traffic light to turn green.
Maybe it could be something like the TV B Gone-- the device that turns off almost any television anywhere. Hey, maybe we should tell the TV B Gone folks about it? Naw, let them read it at IdeaConsultants.org just like everyone else.
Hey, maybe you could use my song parody in the advertising campaign? I’m sure we can work out a deal. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll go update my BMI membership ASCAP.
Want us to feature your idea at IdeaConsultants.org? Or maybe you’ve built it and want IdeaConsultants.org to tell the world about it first? Maybe you’re working on an idea and would like to find someone to collaborate with you? Send it to anyone on the Idea Consultants team and we’ll consider it. And if you’ve got a blog or website we’ll link back when we post your idea to the world.
IdeaConsultants.org-- bringing ideas to the world as quickly as our stubby little fingers can type.
Okay, so my parody of In The Jungle will probably never be a hit song, but if you spend your days and nights being awaken, annoyed, or otherwise disturbed by jerks playing their music way too loud then the Boom Away just might be an invention you’d love to see made available to the public. If you lived where I live then I'm sure you'd understand how annoying it is when your computer monitor starts shaking its way off the top of your desk.
Of course, what I’m talking about is an electronic device that would temporarily disable the radios of people who play them too loudly. Imagine not being awaken at 2AM by the sound of a car stereo going boom, boom, boom, and rattling every window in your house. Think how nice it would be if your car radio was the only car radio you could hear while waiting for the traffic light to turn green.
Maybe it could be something like the TV B Gone-- the device that turns off almost any television anywhere. Hey, maybe we should tell the TV B Gone folks about it? Naw, let them read it at IdeaConsultants.org just like everyone else.
Hey, maybe you could use my song parody in the advertising campaign? I’m sure we can work out a deal. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll go update my BMI membership ASCAP.
Want us to feature your idea at IdeaConsultants.org? Or maybe you’ve built it and want IdeaConsultants.org to tell the world about it first? Maybe you’re working on an idea and would like to find someone to collaborate with you? Send it to anyone on the Idea Consultants team and we’ll consider it. And if you’ve got a blog or website we’ll link back when we post your idea to the world.
IdeaConsultants.org-- bringing ideas to the world as quickly as our stubby little fingers can type.
CSS Examples
Play with CSS on this site, which allows you to see changes as you make them. Not a bad learning tool for those interested in CSS.
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