• Who’s talking to (or with) whom? | Doc Searls
  How are customers doing when it comes to having conversations with their key companies?
  (tags: vrm cluetrain)

Hey, I’d like to send this song out to all the folks who’ve been kicked off and reinstated on Facebook today. (For people who have lives, Shel Israel provides an executive summary of what this is about.) I personally think one should be able to export contact information from those who have voluntarily (via something akin to what used to be called a “double opt-in” system) “friended” you, but apparently some typically intelligent individuals I know disagree. And, I’m sure that if you are violating a terms of usage agreement by using bots that scrape data — all of which sound excruciatingly painful — you perhaps should have your hand slapped. One good thing: Because of this 12-hour tempest in a blog cup, I encountered for the first time the term affordance (the quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform action) via a post (actually, a Twitter tweet about a post) by Kevin Marks. I’ll admit I’m still not 100% sure what affordance means, but that won’t stop me from dropping it randomly into future conversations and blog posts. Thanks, Kevin.

P.S. I guess this song can also be dedicated to those who lose tonight in the Iowa caucuses.

Actually, these are more like un-guesses, than un-predictions:

1. Sometime early in January, say January 3rd, a big traditional business media company will get into the business of unconferences.

2. By February 28, every event and business-media company in the country will have an “un-conference” division.

3. In June, IDG will announce that the 2009 Macworld Expo is being renamed Macworld UnExpo.

4. In July, Apple’s lawyers will sue several hundred people for using the words pod and camp in the same sentence.

5. In August, there will be a big controversy involving how corporate sponsors have taken over unconferences and how great things were back when unconferences really were unconferences — oh, and another thing, how come there are so few un-white-males attending them?

6. In September, 30,000 trade-show and association executives will attend the First Annual UnConferenceCon and UnTradeshow at Chicago’s McCormick Place.

7. In November, NPR will air a week-long series on the history of Unconferences and leave out Dave Winer because the producer forgets to Google the question, “What is an unconference?”

8. In December, the word “unconference” is included in words of the year and words that should be banished.